Customers aren't lazy. They're busy.When you let that paradigm shift shine down through the ranks of everyone in your company, you will see lasting, positive results in terms of retention and lifetime value.If the feedback you get from your customer success agents, sales reps, and customer service Department includes the word 'Lazy' — treat it as a red flag.Find out exactly where customers "get lazy," because that's likely where your user experience (Ux) is failing.

SaaS Customers Aren’t Lazy — They’re Busy

Often when we say customers are lazy, we’re really saying ‘our product is hard to use but that’s the customer’s fault,’ or something similar.

An astute customer success agent recently asked me why I wanted them to make good on their 30-day money back guarantee. The answer I gave included the words: “I’ve come to peace with the fact that…

Stashed ideas

<ul><li>Having difficult-to-achieve capabilities</li><li>Having a community</li><li>Having the Dream team </li><li>Having exclusive access to a segment of customers</li><li>Sterling reputation</li><li>Experience & insider knowledge</li></ul>Once you’ve identified your unfair advantage, you’ve taken the first step towards building a company that may be copied but will never be matched.

Samples of Unfair Advantages

<ol><li>Use it in your unique value proposition.</li><li>Include it in your supporting copy.</li><li>Add it to the “About Us” section (with a "benefits-focus" on the customer, of course!).</li><li>Let it inspire your social media strategy.</li><li>Let it be the leading voice in your content, positioning you and your company as a thought-leader in your industry.</li></ol>

5 things to do with your differentiator

If you've made something, someone else can and will copy it. However, what they can't copy is YOU. So here are some things that you can do to set yourself apart:<ol><li>Give your brand a face</li><li>When you consider what truly sets you apart can be knowledge, personal authority, or having an established presence in the community</li><li>Be the first, no one can take that away. </li></ol>Remember, differentiators can be taken as "unfair advantages" because a real unfair advantage is one that cannot easily be copied or bought.

What Sets You Apart From the Rest

I hate to shoot them down, because they’re all really proud of what they’ve accomplished. Their products are, in fact, excellent at what they do. But here’s the problem with using features as…

What sets you apart? It’s probably not what you think.

Product managers are the Linchpins of their organizations. They Orchestrate the exchange of ideas, conduct collaborative Brainstorming sessions, and ensure that vital data reaches its destination. As PM, you’re the one building a shared understanding of what’s going on. Product is the connective glue. They literally fill the cracks of everything, says Pichler, a prolific product management writer and consultant. Pichler's diagram scratches the surface of the many responsibilities often assigned to

Product Managers: Survival Guide

Engineering needs the details of a customer interview collated and summarized. Marketing needs to know when to Reshoot the Screenshots for their collateral. Ux needs the test Login credentials so they can run a usability test. Can you jump on a call as well?

Filling the cracks of everything: Product Management communication x1000

Meet the Stakeholders and build a shared understanding by bringing a cadence to meetings. And share Metrics regularly — versus constantly putting out fires — that can save your sanity as a PM. No more panicked ‘ I need Metrics for the board deck! ’.

Product Managers: Get Regular

Transparency with data is a huge trend in business right now. Companies like radar use notion to create public Dashboards anyone in the company can check at any time. If you can tear down the data silos, you might just eliminate the need for holding meetings. When live data is available to everyone, fewer people will require you to provide updates — they’re all right there. If you can tear down the data silos, you might just eliminate the need for holding meetings "just to get

Tear down data silos — if you can

Product vision is the Overarching goal, the reason for creating the product in the first place. You can’t afford to have marketing and sales get hung up on the details, when what they really need to know are the benefits and Differentiators of your product or update. To deliver the kinds of information everyone needs, the first step is to develop Aliving document that defines the vision in broad strokes. State your vision, define your target audience, list the needs they have that you’re solving,

Communicate Product Vision More Clearly — to Everyone

Zapier is another extremely useful tool PMS can use to automate tasks between Apps like Basecamp, slack, Google docs, Trello, and Gmail. Keeping tabs on how everyone is doing in real-time, so you can coach, Troubleshoot, and Problem-Solve efficiently is made much easier when you can see all of your team Metrics live.

Day-to-Day Project Management Communication

Product managers build a shared understanding of the what, when, who, why and how behind each product and update. The quality a PM needs most is beyond technology’s ability to achieve.

Product Management is a Tough Job, but Somebody’s Gotta Do it

Product is about saying the same thing over and over again to make sure people understand it.

The burden of communicating among teams, in between departments, and being the go-to get-it-done-guy/gal for CEOs and managers — it all tends to fall heavily on the Product Manager’s shoulders…

A Product Manager Communication Survival Guide ft. @johncutlefish

Customer service, and in particular automation, has earned such a loathsome reputation. This is why customer service, and in particular automation, has earned such a loathsome reputation. What if we could create automation that was intelligent enough to give us the answers we need. This is the future I see as Imminently possible, at least if we use automation intelligently to create more positive, relevant, and enjoyable user experiences. If we use automation intelligently to create more positive, relevant,

Use Real Emotion with Artificial Intelligence for Positive Customer Experiences

A study found that if your customer service interaction produces positive emotions, you have the power to generate positive decisions. If your customer service interaction produces positive emotions, you have the power to generate positive decisions. Don’t add to the customer’s pain by forcing them to make a decision. Don’t force them to make a decision based on a logical or emotional response to a given problem or situation.

Forget bots for a moment — let’s talk about people

Too often, customers are passed from person to person, waiting on Helplines between each representative, giving the same information to people over and over. All of this is how customer service has earned its bad reputation.

Automation done wrong (the status quo)

Automation is at its best when it works to efficiently connect people to people, responding in context and even creating some context along the way. Ideally, automation would collect pertinent information and pass it to the person best qualified to handle the issue — so the customer doesn’t have to repeat themselves five times. It might even recognize the customer and deliver even more information to the agent, creating some context and paving the way for a more proactive approach to service.

Automation done right

Freshdesk proposes a customer support model that uses real people and automation to act like a "pit crew" instead of pinging from person to person, the customer has automated answers to choose from. Additional context allows the agent to personalize the interaction and find opportunities to help the customer even more. By the end of this customer service experience, that customer will feel even closer to reaching their desired outcome.

Pit Crew Style

A Freshdesk customer reported a 60% reduction in call volumes from their App users. A Proactive approach to customer support is a lot closer to customer success. But really, isn't the best customer support the kind that leads to success? If you’re using this technology for success or support or both, the key is to understand what your users are doing and what actions typically are associated with confusion, problems, and successes.

In-App Customer Support — More Immediate, More Relevant, More Appreciated

A moderate increase in customer experience generates an average revenue increase of $823 million over three years for a company with $1 billion in annual revenues. Lifetime value (LTV) is the value a business derives over time from a single customer. Churn rate is how many customers you lose in a given period of time. If you can show a correlation between customer support and retention, that data can prove the worth of your program. If you can get data on product cost,

What All of This Has to do with Growth

Your Cheat Sheet for Effective Automation and Impressive Service <ul><li>Every problem is emotional</li><li>Decisions are also emotional</li><li>If your customer service interaction produces positive emotions, you have the power to generate positive decisions</li><li>Every customer service interaction is an opportunity to increase lifetime value, customer loyalty, referrals, upsells, cross-sells, and growth</li><li>Reducing pain points will make customers more likely to become repeat purchasers</li><li>Reduce the amount of time it takes a customer to get the right answer. Use automated information and access to qualified support agents.</li></ul>

Food for Thought

Automation is the way forward for growing companies to scale personalized service, deliver answers faster, and eliminate the most pervasive pain points associated with asking a question. But the goal of automation is much smaller, much more personal than that.

Automation In Customer Service

What if we could create automation that was intelligent enough to give us the answers we need, and send us, quickly and efficiently, to the very best human agent capable of solving our problems?

On a scale of 0–10, how likely are you to recommend this product?You are asking whether they would subject their nearest and dearest to this product. And that brings out a whole other side of human character: Selflessness.An NPS survey is the single best way to get a complete report on how your audience perceives your company. The obvious reason to use NPS is to identify your promoters so you can encourage and amplify their loud, enthusiastic voices that are the real ambassadors of your brand.

It’s fiercely honest feedback, identifies promoters, and boards love it

It’s one question and an open-ended follow-up. The follow-up “Care to tell us why?” question lets customers elaborate on their score.They get to cut to the chase and tell you what is important to them in their own words. As surveys go, this is a great user experience. That’s why response rates are so much higher than the old school&nbsp;“This will only take 5 minutes of your time…”&nbsp;multi-question surveys. And, you get rich qualitative feedback out of it. So, really, the beauty of NPS is in its simplicity.

It’s easy on your customers

NPS works best within the context of a robust customer feedback &amp; listening program.For eg, <a href="https://www.wootric.com/blog/eight-principles-for-improving-customer-experience-with-nps">Melinda Gonzalez implemented salesforce.com’s first-ever NPS program</a>, and her process included:<ul><li>Using the entire customer journey as a framework against which to measure customer experience.</li><li>Designing a feedback collection strategy with audience segmentation, market segmentation, and customer maturity.</li><li>Taking action on feedback — because feedback is only as useful as its follow-through.</li><li>Responding to customers, so they know their feedback is valued.</li><li>Measuring improvement targets and adjusting as needed.</li></ul>

It’s not a miracle solution

"net promoter score" is a metric measured by most of the fortune 100. many people expect NPS to do more than is realistic. Incorporating a brand advocacy program to encourage and leverage promoters is also a good idea.

At&nbsp;<a href="http://mackcollier.com/sprint-60-of-employee-bonuses-are-tied-to-net-promoter-score/">Sprint, 20%</a>&nbsp;of employee bonuses are tied to Net Promoter Score. On the surface, that doesn’t seem like the worst idea ever. But think of it this way: Is your goal to improve a score, or to improve your customers’ experiences? They are not one and the same.Use the net promoter score as a compass to guide you to creating better customer service. Don’t treat the number as the end goal, or you’ll find people gaming the system.

When companies start paying bonuses on NPS

The key is to listen, and then Proactively deliver what customers need to achieve their desired outcomes. This requires a net promoter cycle. If you don't take action based on results, you won't magically move the needle.

When customers answer The Question, but don’t see follow-through

<ul><li>Product Development uses NPS feedback to prioritize dev resources.</li><li>Marketing uses NPS to find and ask happy clients to join their advocacy programs.</li><li>Customer Service/Support uses NPS as a signal for when clients need outreach and support.</li><li>Sales uses NPS to identify accounts primed for upsells and referrals.</li></ul>

When you put Baby in a corner (ie. NPS isn’t just a one-department thing)

The open-ended response section of the NPS survey can become a repository for everything from Venting, to How-To questions. The beauty of NPS is that it has one job — don’t make it pull Triple-Duty as the primary communication outlet. If people are asking questions via NPS survey, it might indicate that they don’t feel able to elsewhere. If you fail to close the Loop with these customers, they’ll be even more frustrated.Do you have a strong FAQ or Knowledge Base available? Is it easy to contact Support?

Contending with a firehose of feedback

I’m biased — I like the Net Promoter Score system, and I’m going to tell you why (in a minute). But, I also think we need an unbiased perspective on NPS, one that airs the dirty laundry, so to speak…

The Real Pros & Cons of Net Promoter Score ft. @Wootric

An ideal customer is someone who has a problem you are uniquely equipped to solve. They are willing, able and happy to pay for that solution. Ideal customers are not the ones who take up all of your customer service agents' time. People who are delighted to find you genuinely appreciate what you have to offer. They’ll be more inclined to become loyal customers, make repeat purchases, and recommend you to their friends, which are vital elements to any growth strategy.

Who is an ideal customer

Your product isn’t for everyone. I repeat: Your product, unless it is toilet paper, is not for everyone. This is usually the hardest hurdle for business owners to leap because you want everyone to buy your product (naturally). You think everyone could use it!But not everyone will want to use it.Limiting your scope to an ideal customer isn’t a liability, it’s an opportunity.Businesses that are able to become leaders in their niches do very, very well.

First, you need to admit a hard truth

What I really need to know to begin understanding a client’s ideal customer is this:<ul><li>The most important goals this person wants to accomplish</li><li>What is at stake if this person fails to accomplish those goals?</li><li>What drives them CRAZY on a regular basis</li><li>What are the greatest benefits your ideal customer stands to gain from your product?</li></ul>

Then, you need to ask yourself (and your current best customers) some questions

The ideal outcome is what the customer wants most from your product.Worst fears&nbsp;are incredibly valuable to know for marketing purposes they always get a response. What is the worst thing that could happen if your customer doesn’t have your product? What do they stand to lose? The greatest pain points are key to understanding how much your ideal client really needs your product. (and how effective of a solution you’re actually offering). The benefits&nbsp;question not only tells you what people love about your product but also gives you deeper insight into your customers’ ideal outcomes&nbsp;

Analyze the answers

There are two ways to go about this: customer surveys and customer interviews.A lot goes into an ideal customer profile, so you want to use customer surveys to understand four key things:<ul><li>Who they are.</li><li>The problem they came to you to solve.</li><li>Their shopping process.</li><li>Their buying process.</li></ul>

How to get these answers

Having worked with dozens of marketing, growth-hacking, and conversion companies with their clients, I can attest to this truth: Sometimes, you think you’ve identified your ideal customer, and you change your site and SEO to attract them, and you end up attracting entirely the wrong audience.

Be careful of the customer you wish for

If, after you’ve identified your ideal client and adjusted your marketing accordingly, website traffic is down, or conversions are the same or down, you may be missing something. The issue could be in your messaging, it could be that your marketing is slightly off-target, or it could be something entirely different — you can begin to form a picture using Google Analytics, but you won’t really know unless you ask.

Refining your ideal client

You ’ ll want to track how they find you, who they are, what their lifetime value (LTV) is to your business, and which characteristics correlate with greater or lesser LTV. With advanced tracking in place, you’ll be able to see which customer segments are the most profitable.

What happens when you ID your ideal customer?

There is a lot of information on defining your ideal customer, but most of it isn’t written for you. It’s written for software-as-a-service companies, or startups, or both. And while e-commerce can…

Defining Your Ideal Customer in e-Commerce ft. @ObjeqtEcomm, @shanelle_mullin, @bellastone

What we call customer experience (Cx) is the total effect of each interaction between brand and customer over the course of the entire relationship. Positive feelings= Effective Cx, whether the interaction happens in a Saas product, on a social media page, a Website, over the phone, in person, or driving on the freeway. Cx encompasses the entire experience of each customer from end-to-end, including touch points on your Website, off your Website, Offline, on mobile, and person-to-person contact.

CX is the sum total of specific, concrete, controllable occurrences.

Customer Experience Management (CXM or CEM) is a burgeoning field because CX heavily influences the likelihood of three very important actions:<ul><li>Repeat purchases</li><li>Referrals</li><li>Complaints</li></ul>Repeat purchases and referrals are growth engines, decreasing the cost of acquiring new customers, decreasing Churn, and increasing lifetime value. Studies have shown that 86% of customers are willing to pay more for better Cx. Customers who had the best past experiences spend 140% more compared to those who had the poorest past experience.

Why is CXM so important?

1. Net Promoter Score2. Customer Satisfaction3. Customer Effort Score4. First Response Time5. Problem Resolution Time6. Contact Volume by Channel7. Social Listening Stats8. Referral &amp; Review Rates

The 8 Most Important CX Metrics to Track

Net promoter score is a simple survey that asks users to rate, on a scale from 1–10, how likely they are to refer a Product/Service to a friend or colleague. Those who score 9 and 10 are your promoters — they are delighted with your work and are more likely to buy more and bring their friends. People who score below a 6 are detractors. They are not having a good experience, not at all,

1. Net Promoter Score (NPS)

A Csat survey asks a customer how satisfied they are with a recent interaction. It is most often used after an interaction with customer support. Use it as a compass to point you in the direction of where your attentions are most needed.

2. Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)

A CES survey asks the customer "how much effort did you have to expend to handle your request?" and is, perhaps, the most telling metric of how positive your customer’s experience has been. The harder it was for them to get an answer, the worse their experience, and the lower your Cx. Some say "Effortlessness" is the most relevant attribute of customer satisfaction. If I had to choose only one KPI, I would use customer effort score (CES)

3. Customer Effort Score (CES)

53% of customers find 3 minutes to be a reasonable response time while waiting for a support agent — by telephone. Email is a bit longer at 24 to 48 hours, but the best companies, like buffer, work on replying within one hour. 99% of their Churn is from customers who are not part of the slack community. The best companies, like buffer, work on replying within one hour. If it were easy, everyone would do it!

4. First Response Time

Problem resolution time measures how quickly you can solve a customer's problem. You can get the answer with a simple survey, sent after a customer support interaction is completed, asking how long it took to solve the problem. Metric serves to alert you to problems that affect the efficacy of your customer support program. Once you solve these issues, your Cx will improve drastically.

5. Problem Resolution Time

A high volume of service tickets isn't necessarily a bad sign. It means customers want to be successful with your product. Buffer checks for spikes that indicate rushes in support traffic. They also track which channels their customers use most (Emails, chat) and which questions are most frequently asked.

6. Contact Volume by Channel

Listening to the conversations happening about you via mention.com can create a Community-Like, welcoming customer experience. By monitoring your mentions in real-time, you’re creating an additional Touchpoint with your brand. The best part is: you’re doing it in public.

7. Social Listening Stats

Only tracking actual referrals and reviews will give you the genuine numbers. Referrals and reviews not only measure how successful your customer experience efforts are, they can also encourage a sense of Personalization and Interactivity. When customers love your products, enjoy working with you, feel good about asking questions (and getting prompt answers), and come out of each interaction feeling good about you and themselves, growth and profit are natural byproducts. You have to track your successes and failures, understand which Metrics have the most impact,

8. Referral & Review Rates

You know exactly when and how your customers interact with your brand, right? (No? You should — if it happens online, it’s all trackable).

8 Innovative Ways to Use CX Metrics to Create Unbeatable Customer Experience ft. @Wootric

<ul><li>Last year, there were more than 20 million apps on iOS App Store and 3.5 million on Google Play.</li><li>In 2017, the average person had 80 apps on their smartphone — but, only used half of those apps on a monthly basis.</li><li>The odds of someone becoming a long-term user are really slim. Only 29% of app users continue using any given app after 3 months.</li></ul>

Fun Facts First

In that landscape,&nbsp;<a href="https://postfunnel.com/mobile-app-retention-evolving/?utm_source=eyejaychannels&amp;utm_term=augvolthree">retention is an enormous challenge</a>. And a lot of SaaS companies are trying techniques in Nir Eyal’s Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, using push notifications and emails as “<a href="https://blog.startuppulse.net/hooks-an-intro-on-how-to-manufacture-desire-a6eb2d01b245">external triggers</a>” to get people to essentially practice going to the app and building positive associations with it.One of the ideas in Hooked is “<a href="https://www.nirandfar.com/2012/04/hooking-users-in-3-steps.html">habit testing</a>” your product. The process places a lot of emphasis on understanding “Who your devotees are,” in addition to “what part of your product is habit-forming if any” and “why those aspects of your product are habit-forming.”

Hooked

The ways in which you engage your customers should be ways that help them reach their goals. Whether those are emotional goals, practical goals, self-improvement goals, or professional goals.We can personalize in-app experiences to nudge people towards making real progress. We have that technology. And I predict that, when customers are tired of being manipulated into forming habits that may not be in their best interests, they will gravitate towards apps that are genuinely designed to help them become better versions of themselves.

Help them find their goals

In that landscape (appscape?), retention is an enormous challenge. And a lot of SaaS companies are trying techniques in Nir Eyal’s Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, using push…

“What are the best practices to optimize retention in a mobile app?” Answer by @NikkiElizDeMere

<blockquote>AI = TD + ML + HITL</blockquote><h2>Key:</h2><ul><li>TD is “training data”</li><li>ML is “machine learning”</li><li>HITL is “human in the loop”</li></ul> Training Data is the messy ocean of text, images, video, and audio of our human world.Machine Learning is the why. If training data is the inputs, machine learning generates outputs: predictions with a confidence level.Human-In-The-Loop is where humans take advantage of the confidence level (i.e., 66%). If it’s above or below a certain percentage, a human can say it fails or can choose to override

Artificial Intelligence(AI) Defined

AI is for every business. It used to require a seven or eight-figure investment, but with access to data and machine learning in the cloud today you only need “$100,000 to start AI” he said.

Myths About AI: Only For Tech Companies

…like self-driving cars or drone delivery. Rather, the truth is AI is for million-dollar existing problems, like categorizing support tickets or dealing with a torrent of online feedback. Humans can create models and categories for anything with unstructured, text-based data and an ML model can make predictions with confidence.

Myths About AI: Only For Billion Dollar Problems

To sum up the AI book, <a href="https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//pubs/archive/35179.pdf">The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data</a>, written by Google engineers Alon Halevy, Peter Norvig, and Fernando Pereira, Bordoli said, “If you had the choice to make better algorithms or get more data, get more data.”

Algorithms Vs Data

Machines are powerful at computing (i.e., calculating eigenvectors), humans are powerful at context (i.e., identifying a leopard print dress in an image). Over the next three years, business processes that are 100% human, like conversations with customers, will change: more of the work will become automated as the machines “get smarter.” But there are jobs that will always require a human in the loop. And this is what we’re discovering right now with each passing day.

Humans Vs Machines

Robin Bordoli, CEO of CrowdFlower, an AI and data science platform company, took the stage at Dreamforce this year with the intent to rectify five of the most popular misperceptions of artificial…

5 myths about A.I. that should die right now

it’s an expense, it’s money out the window, it’s a liability that hopefully receives an ROI. But there’s no guarantee and it’s not as easy as dividing their hourly rate by yours.

Cost 

Where to look? Where to start? There are a dozen freelancing sites to choose from, I have an existing network to tap into, and I have friends who could possibly fit. Then I have to write a job description tailored to my unique portfolio of work. Then I have to vet resumes, interview, negotiate, set up accounts…All of this takes ample time that I could have put into the very tasks I’m hiring them to do.

Time to hire a good one

say I find a good one at a good rate. Winning. Not so fast. Now they have to learn who is who, and what goes where, and how to do what. They’ll make mistakes, they’ll require coaching calls and emails, they’ll need to be managed more at the beginning to “ramp up” to achieve a positive level of productivity.

Time to train

have you ever gotten an email from an independent entrepreneur and it’s a virtual assistant, whether automated or human, instead? It can feel like you were brushed aside and pushed into a productivity funnel that actually overcomplicates the process more than it simplifies it.

David Garcia@davidga

SaaS Customers Aren’t Lazy — They’re Busy

SaaS Customers Aren’t Lazy — They’re Busy

Samples of Unfair Advantages

What sets you apart? It’s probably not what you think.

Product Managers: Survival Guide

A Product Manager Communication Survival Guide ft. @johncutlefish

Use Real Emotion with Artificial Intelligence for Positive Customer Experiences

Use Real Emotion with Artificial Intelligence for Positive Customer Experiences

It’s fiercely honest feedback, identifies promoters, and boards love it

The Real Pros & Cons of Net Promoter Score ft. @Wootric

David Garcia
@davidga