How to Build Customer Success That Drives Real Results (Not Just Support)

Welcome to Building Better Developers, the Developer podcast, where we work on getting better step by step, professionally and personally. Let's get started. Hola and welcome back to Building Better Developers, the Developer podcast. We are back with another episode in our season where we are with AI. We are taking a couple of seasons back, taking the topics and literally just running those topics through again, the titles, through AI, see what it gives us and see what we can learn from what AI does and things like that. There are definitely some things that we've come across that are some, I guess, traits of AI. It's interesting that what we're giving it, what we're asking for is not actually specifics. So that's where you get pretty safe. You know, AI can give you recommendations and stuff all day long. And whether it's right or wrong, it's just recommendations and different from like code or things like that. But I digress. Let me go ahead and introduce myself. My name is Rob Brodhead. I am one of the founders of development. We're also the founder of RV Consulting, where we help you work with technology, whether you're a little company or a big company, whatever it is. We are here to help you use technology better through simplification, integration, automation, innovation. We sit down with you. We walk through what your business is. We help you just by talking to us. A lot of times have that conversation about what your business is, what your goals are. And then we sit down and create a technology roadmap and we can either help you execute on it or not. And the thing that we bring to the tables, we've got all this experience, all these different lines of business. We're going to help you think outside of the box as well as help you see the box full of goodies that is technology. Yes, it's goodies. It's not a junk drawer. It's not technology sprawl. Or maybe it is, depending on where you're at. Good thing and bad thing. So this is again, like I've had a rough, it's July, end of July right now, and it has been a rough July. My latest good thing, bad thing that I will throw out there is that I talked a little bit about my son had had a car accident. We had a lot of issues. We've been traveling a lot. We're back. They ended up totaling his car, which is pretty much a bad thing because he didn't have a car. And so that meant we have to go buy a car and fairly quickly because the rental that he has runs out in a small number of days. And so and he doesn't have a ton of money. Basically, what we've got is not a lot of money from insurance. And so we're using that as the starting point to go buy another car, which means they use this car in this case, at least, you know, probably 10, 15 years old. Finding a car that age that still works is in itself a little bit fun. We went on a lot. I will give you a quick digression. We went on a car lot where they had a bunch of these things and one, almost every car that we trusted, the engine light came on immediately. And two, every one of them had listed as is no returns. And because of the way it was set up, you could not take it for a drive outside of the lot. So you can't take it on the open road. I was like, no, that's hard. No, we're not going to sit there and not actually even test drive a car. And then already has lights blinking all over that says, don't buy me and buy that car. That was a bad thing. The good thing was we found a car that was used. It was actually a little bit. There had been a guy that loves to just rebuild cars, but when it was the same model, like two years older than my son's car, but actually literally in better shape. It was a better car. So as far as we can tell, knocking on wood or something, you know, some reasonable facsimile of wood right now, we're able to get his car replaced with a little bit better car with almost exactly the amount of money that we got from insurance out of the whole thing. So it was like big win there. Another big win is we are back for another episode and I get to toss this over to Michael so he can introduce himself. Hey, everyone, my name is Michael Mollage. I'm one of the co-founders of Develop a Nerve, Build a Better Developers. I'm also the owner of Envision QA, where we help startups and growing companies build better software faster with fewer problems. Our services cover software development, quality assurance, test automation and relief support. Similar to what Rob does with assessments, we go into businesses and help you really figure out what it is that you need for software. You know, companies come to us when they want to avoid delays, reduce bugs and launch with confidence. Whether you're building your first MVP or scaling a live product, we make sure the software is reliable, efficient and ready to grow. You can learn more at EnvisionQA.com. Good thing, bad thing. So similar situation. I would say about three or four weeks ago, my wife was mowing and all of a sudden a belt broke and the mower is dead. We had to tow it down and send it to the shop. They said three to four days. It's been about four weeks. Our grass is so high that we can't even find our two smallest dogs. They go out to pee, they go pee on the sidewalk because they don't want to walk into the jungle that is our yard. Good thing is we did get the mower back. We got that back Monday or Tuesday. But the problem is we're also in the middle of a heat wave. So my wife gets some more back. It's like, great, I'm going to go mow three hours in. Maybe a third of the yard is done and it is so hot. She's like, no, I'm not. So it's a similar situation, but at least we got a mower and the dogs can now get out to the yard. So lots of good things there. That is so I was just talking to somebody yesterday that he is he works in HVAC systems. He's got a guy that it's very hot right now. He's got a guy that lost his HVAC. They've got to go. It's under warranty. They've got to ship the parts supposed to be seven to 10 days. I think he said it's now like day 28. And this guy is living in a house that's like 95 degrees inside. It's just like it's miserable and it's just parts are still a pain in the butt. What's not a pain in butt is our topic. So we're going to dive right in because we've already gone all over the place. So this episode, what we did is we're going back to a prior episode that was called customer success, delivering value on a budget. And so this is one that I threw out there and we're going to dive right in. It was I've got a slightly different engine than I used last time around, and it gave me slightly different. It did not give me the you know, that's an awesome topic. It just like goes right into it. Here's some suggested topics and content ideas. Bonus, if you want to go back and check us out on the YouTube channel, if you're not right now, then you can hear what we actually typed in and see how that goes. What's interesting is I bet if you type it, you will get something different because AI is like that. So episode focus, how developers, product teams and technical founders can build and maintain customer success programs that truly add value, even with limited time, money and people. So here's the suggested structure and segments. Introduction, why customer success matters for developers. We should know that like that's we don't know. We've talked about this one, but we should all agree that. So the bullet points define customer success versus customer support. Importance in SaaS software as a structure, as a service, startups, consulting and indie product projects, how early stage teams can't afford to ignore customer outcomes. And they got a quote, even if you're bootstrapping or solo building, customer success is not optional. It's how you grow sustainably. This. This it is frustrating because this is business 101. And there are a lot of developers that I don't think understand this. I think there's a lot I've actually run into customers and entrepreneurs that don't understand this, that at some point you have to actually have a customer that will sign a check or hand over cash or send you Bitcoin or something so that you can generate revenue. Businesses consume money. That means businesses have to find money so they have something to eat or else they die a horrible starvation debt. Now. I can see as a developer that there is that and I'm going to talk about the only focus on the one that's a divine customer success versus customer support. Customer success is we're building something to make our customer better. Now we talk all the time about about the why, about what is the problem we're solving. But this gets into a little bit like, why are we solving that problem? Because if we're just solving it to just solve the problem, that doesn't help them. That's not going to move the ball forward and help them generate money. And otherwise the goal is that whatever we're solving, it is helping it. And it doesn't mean it directly impacts their revenue or adds to the revenue, but it could be things like it reduces time to produce a product, to provide a service, to get the back office stuff done. What we do at RB Consulting is that kind of stuff where we say we want to take these things off of your plate that is the working in your business so you can work on your business. Those kinds of things are software that and problems and work that you're doing as a developer that is actually helping your customer with to be more successful. Customer support is really they're coming to you. They're saying, hey, I've got a problem. I need you to fix it and let's move forward. And usually the fix it is a bandaid is something along the lines of they're really struggling through things. And every so often they're going to come to you and say, hey, I can't solve this problem. Can you solve it? Sure. I solve this problem. They go back to doing what they're doing. Eventually they're going to come back and they're going to have to deal with you. Ideally, what you want to do is not get into customer support. Yes, there there's going to be support on the products you create. But if your model is customer support, then basically you are a cost center. If you are not finding ways to reduce the time, the money and the effort involved in solving their problems and getting their their job done, basically getting their company to work, then you are actually a cost and not essentially we'll call it an investment. That's where you want to be. If you come in as a developer, if you come in as a consultant, if you come in as a software product and people look at it as, yes, I'm going to spend X dollars, I'm going to spend a hundred dollars, but this is going to help me generate a thousand dollars. Then the math becomes really easy. It becomes how fast can I get that software? That is important. And it's it's whether you are independent, whether you are doing a side hustle, whether you work for a big organization, because I guarantee you as much as everybody will throw shade at Microsoft, if people didn't find value in their products, they would not exist. There is no such thing as a company that can exist with developers just going, I'm doing all kinds of random stuff and think that that's going to be last for very long. Either you're going to get fired or your company is going to take. And there is a long history of companies that have done that, where they've been along the lines of we're going to do what we want to do. Screw the customer. They'll come and they'll figure it out and they'll eventually come and give us money. And you know what? They almost never show up to give you money. If they do, give me a call, because we would love to be a part of that, whatever that happens to be. Thoughts on this? There's a lot to unpack with that. So customer success versus support. Typically. You're muted. There we go. We're going to edit that. Yes, I can edit that. So you basically provide a lot of information. So there's a big impact there, but let's go with customer service with support. Let's start with support. So typically with support, you want to help someone, someone's coming to you with the problem. You want to help them. You want to solve the problem for them. The trick there is be careful not to just fall into bandaid fixes for the customer. Yes, get them, you know, if they're down, get them back up, but help them find a way to get stable quickly, the faster they can get stable or you can show them, Hey, here is what you need to do to fix this problem long term. And then show them the cost benefit of that. Like, Hey, to fix this right now. Well, here, let me give you a little bit of a summary of what you can do. Right now. Well, here, let me give you a real world example of this. I had a customer for a decade for the first four years. I went into this customer's office every weekend and it took me literally a full weekend to update three computers in their office, doing system updates, uh, software updates, cleaning up the machines, antivirus, all that five years in, they finally replaced their computers. So we went from three days to literally four hours. The time it costs for me to spend three days there was the equivalent of buying a computer. So after three quarters of doing this, they could have replaced all three computers and gone to a four hour window, which is, was essentially like one 16th of the time it took to do the maintenance. And this is just general maintenance that you need to do for the machines anyway. So it's like changing the oil in your car. It's something that you have to do, but it's something that shouldn't be that painful and that costly. So when you are helping your customer support, supporting them, and if they come to you with a problem, this is where you want to look at customer success. How can you make them be successful on a budget? How can you save them money and still solve their problem and still make money yourself? You know, you have to make money. You are a business, but you want to provide value. Like we talked about, you know, that why, what is that? Why? So when you're working with the customer, you know, why customer success matters? Because if you keep them in business and you keep them happy, they're going to keep coming back to you for help or support. Now in an ideal world, hopefully you can solve their problem indefinitely and they won't need to call you again. But you know, like a car, things do break with computers. That is a, that actually is a good lead into the next point. So I'm just going to dive into it from there. So the next one is the budget challenge. Common myths. Customer success is for big companies. Hidden costs of ignoring customer success. Churn, bad reviews, high support loads. Framing customer set success as an ROI multiplier, not an expense. And now this is really what this goes to what Michael just provided. As an example is particularly when we get into, and this feels a little self-serving, but we can get into things like simplification, automation, and even integration. There's those things, even innovation, the things that we're looking at, the tasks that we're doing, the values that we're bringing in, the value we're bringing in is that we're taking something that takes time, takes money, costs resources in some way, form or fashion and reducing that. And it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it sometimes is very, very direct. Like what, you know, what Michael said, it's like, you can say it takes 10 hours to do this thing at, you know, a dollar an hour. So it takes 10 bucks, but you can go buy this product for five bucks. And then go get it done. And now you don't have to, or maybe it only takes an hour. So now it's six, you know, you, you have an investment, but now you're cutting that down every time those kinds of things are going to come back to. That's it is more of a, that's more of a hard physical product. That's not necessarily customer success, but this is what we need to be looking for is the success is not that they bought our product. Success is not that they are using our product. Success is not that they love our product. Customer success is that they use our product, honestly, whether they like it or not, and it is helping their business that it is reducing the resources required to get things done, or it is allowing them to get to a new area expansion that they weren't able to otherwise. That is why the easy ones, everybody owns. I'll give you a good email. If you build it, like email is so much faster than getting on a phone. It's so much easier than jumping in a plane and going to talk to somebody. Similar to that is what we're on right now. We're on a Zoom and video conferencing because now you don't have to go all these, but you don't have to spend time on the road and all that other stuff. So it makes sense, especially if you're like, even if you're across town from your team, it probably makes sense to invest in Zoom and not use the free version. So you get cut off after 40 minutes. Use some of this that you can do it. You can record it. You can actually have a lot of value come out of those meetings and you can even see the meeting. Those kinds of things are investments, but the payback is, maybe it's not a hard payback. It's not something you can say, okay, I just generated a thousand dollars more, but sometimes you can. Customer success is about that. As Michael said, we are also a business, so we have to generate revenue. We have to be successful, but I guarantee you, if your customers are successful, you will be successful. If your customers are making money on what you do, then it is an easy math for them to go use you more often. Thoughts on this one? So I have another kind of hitting cost, but I'm going to start with a different one here. So this one is, you know, budget challenges with your customer. One of the biggest things as software developers, we like to solve problems. We like to build code. We like to automate. Like Rob said, we want to simplify. We want to automate. If you are building an application and you, or a customer has an application and it comes to you and it takes them four clicks to do something that should be done in one click, get rid of those three clicks and make it a single click right there. You probably have saved them about 15 minutes a week, just from all the clicking to get to the page loads that they need to get to, to do their work. Look for things to simplify their tasks, especially if you are building software. Now I'm going to flip back over to the hitting costs real quick is from a business perspective. I've done a couple of different startups over the years. And one of the biggest things that I am very cheap about is my website costs, hosting costs, and every black Friday, I will go sign up every year for a new deal with a new vendor, host Gator, Bluehost, whoever, and I will get the cheapest one possible that meets my minimal needs. And I move all my websites over once a year and I will pay the very minimal cost. AWS, I do come for you once in a while. If I have a new email address, cause you get the free year tier, but if you can eliminate hundreds of dollars and keep your backend and your servers running for the equivalent of about 50 bucks a year, that's a huge cost savings. So look at things that the customer needs and your business needs and revisit them at least once a quarter or at least semi-annually to make sure that you're not overpaying for keeping your business. I agree. I think though there is a, uh, it's a guy years ago that said, you know, people would, um, leap over a dollar to gather a dime. And I think that's what sometimes happens is that we get into, and we have to have that mentality of like, sometimes you do need to, you know, you need to buy something a little, but you have to, you're going to get what you pay for. A good example I'm going to use, and this is, you know, people can hate on me or whatever. I used to buy windows laptops. I would get Dell, gateway, Toshiba. They were all, they're all varying levels of good. The best ones lasted me 18 months, maybe two years before they were pretty much, you know, not very useful. They were slow. They were pondrous. They were pain in the butt to deal with. And so I would go again, this is even after I would wipe the whole machine and rebuild it and still not terribly fast. So, you know, they were, they were cheap 15, you know, at that time, I guess 1500, two grand of ops, something like that. So I'm spending that roughly every other year. Flash forward. And I said, I went, I went into the Mac world. I took a bite out of the apple. Apples were going to cost me double basically across the board. I'm typically spending three to four grand for an Apple machine, whether it's a laptop or if I do an iMac or something, because I get, granted I do get high end, but I was getting high end windows too, not maybe the top, but I was getting pretty high end machines. Apples last me typically five to six years. So if I spend $4,000 every six years versus let's say $1,500 every two years, then I'm still $4,500 with windows machines, not including all of the costs of like having to reinstall this, all the software, get everything configured again, move everything over. There is a lot that goes there. I don't want to get this too much into budgeties. So I do want to jump into the last question or the last point real quick. Lean tactics for customer success, some powerful budget friendly strategies. These are some of the things that I think we need to be thinking about and talking to customers on all the time. And I'm not, I haven't even looked at them yet, but I'm going to assume that that's where this is going to go. Automated onboarding, videos, walkthroughs, in-app tips, measure what matters, NPS, churn, feature usage, support logs, create feedback loops, Slack groups, surveys, founder calls, build a help hub, facts, FAQs, searchable docs, GitHub discussions. Email was gold. They heard my email thing. Trigger-based life cycle emails, mail coach, postmark, et cetera, which I'd include like MailChimp, Mailgun, all those kinds of things that are. Like if you don't know what a drip campaign is for email, then go like, look that up, because if you're in a business, it is very useful to have those kinds of things, particularly how a lot of these tools will allow you to do it. They can be very, very impactful and they don't necessarily, I mean, they're going to, people know that it's essentially sort of a form email of some extent, but you can put enough stuff there that it makes it a valuable, a form of email. That goes back to automated onboarding. If it takes your customer weeks to get started with the product, then there is a problem, then you need to find ways to speed that up. Now, maybe you have a very complicated product, but if your product isn't like learn how to code in Python or Java, Java or something like that, or, you know, learn how to be a financial whiz. It should not take them that long to use the product. If it does, then you probably have a mismatch. And the best way to do that is things like, it's like videos. Like I said, they're so easy to do. We've got those. So you can go out to develop an org.com and see tons and tons of videos. They're basically walkthrough to get you started on X, whatever X is. We're not magicians. I mean, maybe we are, but no, we're not. You can do that as well. And you don't have to obviously, you don't have to look good. You don't have to have like incredibly awesome professional lighting and all that kind of stuff. Honestly, there are people out there that will do this. You know, they'll do the video editing, the audio editing, all that kind of stuff. Don't go to AI. It's going to screw stuff up, but there are people who do that. And it's not too expensive. It's definitely something that's a good investment because now you don't have to put your people through all this stuff. You can just sit somebody down in front of the computer. They can read, you know, they can watch the video and you're off and running. I will, I'll throw in feedback. The easiest way for your customers to get back to you is the one that you need to use. And it depends on where they're at. They may be, you know, young and they're on phones. So maybe it's going to be like a DM through whatever an app, you know, it could be through Instagram or Facebook or X or whatever it is, or it could be email. If it's phone, fine. It's phone, but then like, you know, make that as automated as you can get an IVR and things like that. Find ways to make it easy to get feedback from your customers and then act on it. When you get feedback, put it in your, put it in the hopper, put it in the backlog and make sure that they feel heard and that they actually see that their suggestions and even their complaints made a difference. Thoughts on that one. So I'm going to go slightly different. So we didn't, you talked about quite a few good things. One warning I'll throw out is be careful of the tools you use. Don't spend a little time researching the tools before you go buy them. Cause once you pick a tool, chances are you're going to spend the time learning that tool and to switch tools, you're going to have a cost in relearning that retraining your employees, but things like, you know, JIRA, Confluence, Wikis are a great tool to keep your documents in a place where people can keep them up to date. Now, if you're software developers, look at Read Me's, keep things closer to the code because chances are the Wikis will get stale on you fairly quickly. But from a business perspective, having those portals where people can go for, you know, HR material, how to, to trainings and things like that, get that in a central place and make sure everyone knows where it is, it's easy to access. And hopefully as you have questions, you're updating the site with those the Q and A that your employees have or your customers have, because if you don't, you're going to rehash this again and again and again, use the tools, keep track of the communications that are going on and post what is useful and make sure that you give people an answer to a common point. Frequently asked questions are probably the number one best tool for use, not with just business, but on the internet. The other thing you've mentioned too, was like email and Slack. Again, here, pick a communication channel that your team is comfortable with. Spend a little time with each, but don't spend a lot because once you spend too much time, you're kind of set in your ways or you've already invested too much time in the tool and it's going to be hard to pivot. So if you're a Microsoft team, it's probably better to stick with Teams or with Microsoft products. If you're not Microsoft, look at some other tools like Slack, Trello, some other tools that are out there. So kind of stick to your wheelhouse. Don't go too far outside of that. And you'll probably find a tool that fits for you and is very useful and will help streamline your business. We'll follow it up by saying, occasionally go outside of your wheelhouse and just see what's out there because sometimes you're going to find something that is better. That's actually like Michael said, he goes through and he tries to do Black Friday deals every year and change stuff around. So that means he's now bounced around on a lot of different providers of that sort. And it allows you to test them out. It allows you to see what's out there every year, especially, honestly, probably every six months, you can see big changes in a lot of the products are out there. Definitely every year, actually most likely every year, but I would say definitely every other year, especially that's when you consider like big things like CRMs and things like that. Not your ERP, you're screwed basically. You're stuck with your ERP. That's just too long a cycle usually. But smaller apps, even including counting stuff, things like that, there are ways to transition. And I'd say every, probably every two, three years, depending on how big your company is, you should be looking at stuff to see if maybe I should like take a, do a big platform change. We actually recently have done this. We've stuck on the same product for almost all of the 25 years that RB consulting has been around. About a year ago, we actually had a year ago now, about six months ago, we tried to do a change and we're still deciding whether we really like it or not, because we got really used to what we were using before, but we decided, Hey, let's try something new and see how that goes for us. I recommend that every so often you do the same. You don't have to bite the bullet. You don't have to burn the lifeboats as it were, but see what else is out there and see if maybe you should adjust where your wheelhouse is. Now in this situation, you guys are our customers. And so we are very, very attuned to customer success. We want you to be successful. And you may tell from the title that we're building better developers. So if you are a developer or an entrepreneur and you're getting better at developing, whether it's writing code, creating software, creating products, building your business, because we have that developer thing is the entrepreneur side and the developer side, we want you getting better. Our goal is to provide you that. And that means we would love your feedback, including emailing us at info at developer.com and also check us out on the developer.com site. You can leave us feedback there wherever you listen to podcasts, leave us a review. We would love to hear it. Good or bad out on YouTube, leave us whatever you want to hear. You know, whatever you want to give us out there. We want to know the good, the bad recommendation, and we love to hear stories. As we talked about in the pre-show here in the green room before we jumped in, I will call it. We're also interested in doing some interviews and things like that. There's a lot of people that we've got sort of out there that we would like to, you know, sort of on our, our list. Feel free to contact us if you would like to be on that list. If you'd like to be somebody that we can talk to at some point, do an interview. If you want to see how it goes, it'll be a little different than last time, but you can go look back, I don't know, four or five seasons ago now where we had like 87 episodes, I think of interviews. So you can get a good idea for some of the people we've talked to. Not to mention, those are some incredible episodes. We talked to some really good people throughout that. So I either recommend that more importantly, I recommend that you wrap this up. Actually, I'm going to wrap this up that you get out there. You have to show up a great day, a great week, and we will talk to you next time. Thank you for listening to building better developers, the developer podcast. You can subscribe on Apple podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon, anywhere that you can find podcasts, we are there and remember just a little bit of effort every day ends up adding into great momentum and great success.