The Two Hires You Must Make in Customer Success

Many companies view customer support as a cost center, but increasingly subscription based startups understand the leverage in customer success, which lacks the exponential potential of marketing but has the advantage of building a moat around your customer base.

If you’re hiring for CS this year, consider these two types first:

First Hire: a former customer

The first hire you need is a former customer. This person will say something like “I was so happy with your product that I had to join your company and help others use it.”

When I worked at Domino’s we had a fantastic chart that showed the happiness of customers throughout the lifecycle of the order. They would hit peak happiness when they ordered food, satisfied that they would soon have pizza, but then hit a trough while they waited for the delivery, to be resolved only when they received the food.

This matched my own experiences: if I got lost (this was pre-GPS) and couldn’t deliver as expected, customers would become irate and beligerant. But the moment they received their food, even before they had eaten, they were happy again.

In software we have the same pattern but on a longer timeframe. The period between purchase and successful implementation is one of dread for your buyers: not only have they not received their “pizza”, but they don’t have permission to buy another “pizza”. The longer this continues, the more they feel pain.

When they meet your former customer, who now works for your company, two cool things happen: first, they feel at ease because here is a witness to a successful implementation. Second, there is the hidden optimism that they too can join your rocket ship in the future. Put together they can relax a bit and focus on the process to success.

Second Hire: a former innovator

The second hire you need is someone who has innovated around the same problem space. This person will say something like “I wish I had your product five years ago, instead I improvised by doing _____.”

This hire especially matters when your product represents a new paradigm. Often startups fixate on one feature of their product but miss other use cases where it can succeed.

When I developed a product to find and retain customer alumni, I quickly discovered a bottleneck: customers didn’t know how to communicate to this new segment. Not wanting to sell services, I resisted offering guidance until finally I gave in and helped a client with their emails. The result was a $4M increase in pipeline in two weeks because they now had my product and an approach to use it.

Most software products are like this: by the time you identify a process to encode, there are dozens of people out there already improvising an internal version of this. When you hire that innovator to implement your product, you potentially gain years of experience using your paradigm — even if your product is only months old.

Customers love this person because they remind them of life before your product, something like the “when I was your age I had to walk nine miles in snow” but more realistic.

Without these hires, your CS team will probably remain a cost center. Get these right and their work will pay for itself.