What is the low hanging fruit when implementing or evaluating a customer success program? Can you deliver value to difficult customers without extraordinary effort or expense?

Some customers are very engaged. They provide constructive feedback to improve your features. They love hand-holding. They fully use your support capabilities and maintain continuous communication with your support desk. A few of these customers are your best friends. These advocates swear by your product and recommend it to their networks. You are fortunate to have customers like these.

Some customers are difficult. They dread logging into your product and believe it is the root cause of their daily strife. They troll away on social media and talk to your competitors. They won’t try to learn your product, while discouraging new users on their account. Some disenchanted customers partner with each other and make your life difficult at trade shows and meetups.

Whether your customers are advocates or detractors, they need the following basics. This is the low-hanging fruit based on experience.

1. Provide a simple online training guide. This turn-by-turn playbook can be culled from your knowledgebase. A good example is what Freshdesk rolled out for its customers: Freshdesk onboarding
2. Establish Weekly or Monthly Office Hours with your support engineers. Two or three hours every week can be blocked away:  this could be a meetup, webinar or a scheduled call. Here’s an example hosted by MongoDB: Sample Office hours
3. New user training webinar – Recurring training sessions could be introduced at the account-level (enterprise customers) or for SMB customers who haven’t paid for customized training or professional services.
4. Develop a Webinar series to cover new features, best practices, reseller onboarding, etc. Salesforce has a robust series: Salesforce webinars
5. Public product roadmap – Customers are eager to align their business goals with upcoming feature releases. It’s great to provide this transparency to your product teams. Front App has a good example:  Public roadmap

It’s not too difficult to implement these 5 steps, especially if you are in the SaaS world. Low-hanging fruit should be made available to customers.

Feel free to ping me if you have questions.

(from Dilbert cartoon)