How to handle a very disgruntled customer situation
How to handle a very disgruntled customer situation
A VPEs perspective on these testing situations
In the early days of a startup, your customers are typically innovators or early adopters. These are customers who have a larger risk appetite and are willing to use products from early stage startups. They are also more forgiving than most when it comes to your product’s shortcomings. As you start scaling - and crossing the chasm - you will start encountering different customer segments, which I will collectively call enterprise customers. Moore (Crossing the Chasm) breaks this segment down into two distinct ones, but collectively lumping them into one enterprise segment will suffice for this article.
Winning over these enterprise customers is often a sign of a maturing product and startup. It is most definitely a major milestone for the startup. However, this customer segment has very different expectations than the earlier adopters. And every so often, they encounter issues with your product that makes them extremely dissatisfied. In this post, I will address this particular scenario. More specifically how a VPE should address a product escalation from an enterprise customer. The framework that I will describe here applies to any dissatisfied customer and not just to enterprise ones.
Context is key
First, you need to understand the context of the dissatisfaction: what happened, why and when. You should collect this information from various internal stakeholders first before engaging with the customer. The best sources of this information tend to be the following teams: Support, Customer Success, Sales and Engineering. The latter is critical if the customer had a product related incident (e.g. an outage). This information gives you a baseline, helping you understand what happened, when and how it impacted the customer.
Second, you must get the customer’s perspective and do it directly without relying on any intermediaries. Your role when getting the customer’s perspective is simple: listen. You want to understand how this incident affected the customer, how it impacted her team, her business and so on. Do not be defensive. And more importantly do not default to “problem solving”. You are still at the gathering facts stage here. You should almost always end the customer fact finding phase by setting up a future time for you to present next steps to the customer. I suggest that you do not take more than 48 hours to get back to the customer.
Decision time…
Armed with this context, both from your own perspective and the customer’s you can decide on next steps. The decision you now have to make is whether you will invest product development resources to address this source of dissatisfaction. This decision is a function of two variables: cost and whether or not you want to keep the customer. The former is obvious and captures the effort required from product development to address the source of dissatisfaction. The latter is more nuanced and often-times never considered, but sometimes it is in the best interest of both parties to discontinue the relationship. This can arise if the customer has misaligned expectations regarding your product. You grow and sell oranges and the customer wants aubergines. This was never meant to be a fruitful engagement.
I’ve often used this simple 2x2 as a triaging tool. The cost function is in turn dependent on whether the issue is a bug or a feature gap. I always err on the side of fixing bugs - it’s just good habits, although there are expectations especially if the bug is extremely rare and extremely difficult to resolve. But, I default to fixing bugs 🙂
The product gap decision is a bit more nuanced than what the table suggests it to be. If you want to keep the customer, then you have little choice but to address her concern. The question is whether you do so immediately, at the risk of stopping what you are working on, or down the road. The answer depends on the severity of the issue and how timely the customer needs the gap addressed. Similarly, for customers that you might not wish to keep, you might want to invest if the feature is aligned with your product roadmap. You should not divert resources to address the gap now, though. The best you can offer is investing in this feature in the future. The customer might wait, or they might decide that they want to move on.
Sharing your decision with the customer
The last step in this process is sharing your decision with the customer. I strongly recommend you do that in person. In person works best, especially with tense situations like these.
If you’re going to be investing in resolving the customer’s issue you should share rough timelines. I always err on the side of sharing rough estimates; software can be very tricky to estimate! One tactic I have often used to mitigate the risk of delays - they will happen - is offering to have a biweekly update with the customer. This gives the customers visibility into the work and helps gain her confidence in our ability to deliver. I almost always try to default to incremental delivery too, meaning decompose the work into smaller and iterable chunks. Again, all in an attempt to de-risk the situation and increase the customer’s confidence in our ability to deliver without being beholden to a strict date.
On the other hand if your decision is to not invest, meaning you are inclined to part ways, you should explain why you reached that outcome. If you are leaning towards parting ways, be sure to involve your sales team and the CEO. The decision to part ways with a customer is not yours to make.
I’ve had customers shout at me, threaten to “throw my product out” and ones who expressed deep regret in buying my products. These experiences, as hard as they are, are an incredible opportunity for the company to step up and meet the customers’ expectations. They are a growth opportunity for the company. I have never lost a customer or parted ways with one, quite the opposite. Every time one of these situations arises, the ability to rally and remedy it can be the catalyst to create a long lasting and very productive relationship with the customer.
Things I am reading, watching or listening to
The World Cup, obviously! Can France be the first back-to-back champions since Pele’s 1962 Brazil?
I am a big fan of Contrary Research. This week’s edition had two articles that I found extremely relevant. The first addresses the Cybersecurity market and the second offers a deep dive on the endpoint security space.
The market down turn is forcing companies larger and small to cut costs. This article offers a sober yet realistic perspective on the harsh medicine most must endure
ChatGPT3 dominated the tech world this week. This article by Noah offers a glimpse into the future world of AI + humans
Great stuff as always, Karim. You touch briefly on it but over-communicating with the customer during CSAT situations makes a big difference in managing the "heat". The customer is frequently getting pressure from their stakeholders to get the problem fixed and provide internal updates. You cannot allow their update to their higher ups to be "We are waiting to hear back from them" Even if the update is"we are still working on a repro and will provide another update in 12 hours", then let them know. In my experience, most customers will give you some time as long as they believe you are taking their problem seriously and are working urgently to come to a resolution.