3 Assumptions Most People Make in Customer Success (And How You Can Avoid Them)
(4-min read)
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Today at a glance
- 3 Assumptions Most People Make in Customer Success
- One book
- One podcast
- CS Café Hiring zone
- About you!
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#14 The Customer Success Café – 3 Assumptions Most People Make in Customer Success (And How You Can Avoid Them)
Assumptions are dangerous.
It lets you build a story that often doesn’t reflect reality.
Moreover, it’s a lazy and toxic behavior that often gets you to the wrong conclusions.
This is why the most effective people base their judgment on actual facts. They ask further questions to understand and investigate deeper while staying objective in every single decision they make.
And here are 3 common assumptions most people make and how you can avoid them:
1) Customers can use your products out of the box
It’s the d-day.
Your product is ready to be launched with all the improvements and bugs fixed based on the many customer interviews you’ve made earlier and the feedback you collected so far.
You’ve included the latest features your most valuable customers asked for and tested every single new functionality.
All is running perfectly and you release the product assuming it’s intuitive enough for your customers to use it immediately.
But after a while, you realize the new functionalities you’ve pushed for are not being used as frequently as you expected. Moreover, you started getting calls as your customers are stuck with using the new tools.
Sounds familiar?
The mistake here is the assumption you made that customers can use your product as it is.
You thought it was easy for the customer to figure out how your product works.
You even started blaming the users themselves for not being aware of the most basic actions they can take within the product.
But the truth is the issue is never with the end-user.
It’s your job as a company to ensure your product is easy enough for the customer to use it with the least friction possible.
It’s therefore key for you to first deliver a stellar onboarding process with the fundamentals of using your products or services. You need to literally show your customers even the most basic actions they can take.
So, don’t just assume they can use your products out of the box.
Keep on educating your customers at every single interaction and touchpoint.
This will help you remove the overload your customer-facing teams will start getting otherwise!
2) Customers will contact you for any issues
This is one of the biggest threats to successful renewals and account expansion.
While most of your key contacts will reach out to report a challenge they are facing, not all of them are engaged enough with your products to report back or log issues with your support teams.
Most users will prefer going silent rather than finding out how to report an incident if the process is too much of a burden.
In practice, you should reach out and talk to your customers as much as you can to identify any uncovered concerns.
But overall, you need to ensure it’s super easy and fast for your customers to provide feedback so you can act on it quickly.
The reason for that is simple.
For example: do you remember the last time when you wanted to unsubscribe from a mailing list but never managed to do so?
At some point, people will just give up as they will lose confidence in your ability to assist. This has such a negative impact on the company brand that you may even start losing customers earlier than expected.
So it’s critical for you to ensure your customers can reach out to your teams and get their concerns resolved as easily and directly as possible.
Even if you don’t get any issues being reported, don’t just assume everything is OK. There might still be some uncovered reasons which could lead you to wrongful considerations.
3) A happy customer is also successful
Actually, it’s not about making your customers happy, but having happy customers as a result.
The difference is subtle but fundamental.
“Making customers happy” suggests you need to transform current ones into happy customers. But in reality, they should already be so from day one!
The main goal should rather be to “produce” happy customers as an outcome of the contributions from everyone within the company, not just Customer Success Managers or any other function in particular.
Even if your customer is happy with a specific feature of your products or services, don’t just assume they are necessarily successful on the path to achieving their most critical business goals.
And that’s it.
These are 3 assumptions you should avoid making at all times:
- customers can use your product out of the box.
- customers will contact you if they have an issue.
- a happy customer is also successful
So, simply said: don’t assume.
Always ask questions, listen actively, go deeper into your conversations and watch all these great opportunities opening up for you!
Agree?
Hit the thumbs up below and let me know what you think.
One Book
- Mindset, Carol Dweck
Assumptions are typical traits of people with a fixed mindset. In her book, Carole Dweck guides you toward adopting a growth mindset under all circumstances! It’s one of my top favorite books which I can’t recommend to you enough to read. Absolutely life-changing, I guarantee it!
One Podcast
Personal Growth with Nabeeda Bakali – Women in Customer Success Podcast
From blogging to Customer Success, listen to Nabeeda’s interesting career path along with great tips about writing online.
CS Café Hiring Zone
I’m personally curating the most unique jobs I’ve come across or have been made aware of this week in Customer Success.
Today’s Featured Opportunities
UK
- Customer Success Manager, Tessian (UK London, Office)
- Customer Success Manager, Precursive (UK, Remote)
Ireland
- CS Team Manager, HubSpot (Dublin, Remote)
India
- Customer Success Manager, Dynatrace (Mumbai, Remote)
Australia
- Enterprise CSM, Smartsheet (Sydney, Remote)
US
- Customer Success Manager, Tessian (US, Boston, Remote)
- Director of Customer Success, Aeries (US, Remote)
- Manager of Customer Success, Jellyfish (US, Boston, Remote)
Check them out!
About You!
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Thank you and have a great week ahead!
And until next Sunday, take care friends!
Hakan.
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Hakan Ozturk
Founder, theCScafe.com, #1 Weekly Customer Success Newsletter
Hakan Ozturk is a Paris-based Customer Success leader with over 15 years of experience in the computer software industry. Passionate about driving growth and delivering value to strategic customers, Hakan has established himself as a trusted industry expert. As the Founder of The Customer Success Café Newsletter and TopCSjobs.com, Hakan provides valuable industry insights and daily-updated job opportunities worldwide in the field of Customer Success. Connect with Hakan to boost your career in CS and your company’s potential for massive growth.
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