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| Backblog—Paul Marshall |
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http://justhardwork.blogspot.com
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Paul Marshall has over 15 years experience in a senior finance capacity at high-growth technology businesses. He is currently responsible for leading finance, administration and human resources at Ivara Corp in Burlington, Ontario. Paul is a certified management accountant and prior to joining Ivara, held senior finance positions at Open Text Corp, Salumatics and Capital Environmental. Paul has experience in all aspects of strategic planning, controllership, governance, business finance, operations, budgeting, forecasting, accounting, human resources, mergers, acquisitions, equity raises, credit raises and day-to-day business growth; and has successfully led change and process improvement that drives profitability and provides key information for imperative business decisions.
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Follow up to 'Delight' post
More and more you are starting to see super exciting roles for "Community Manager's" at exciting young tech companies. In most cases I view these roles as the Chief Delightment Officer at a company who engages with, support and befriends the community and makes the product, brand and company real to users. As my prior post mentioned the responsibility for delighting customers lies with everyone but making someone accountable for care and feeding of the community in the early days is a great move. A great example of how this can work is Melanie Baker at AideRSS. She is a great cheerleader, access point to development, PR person, etc that people who are engaging with AideRSS can interact with to reinforce the product experience. Great product + great human interface = successful brand building and customer engagement.
There is no shortage of debate on this topic with an article being written by ReadWriteWeb , commentary about online community at the WSJ and new positions opening up with much more regularity than ever before.
I am all for this role and believe that managing your online brand, marrying the human experience with the product experience and Delighting your customers is critical to a startup.
Delight your way to success
I have been spending much time lately reading and thinking about customer engagement and experience and the importance of it in all businesses. Having a truly passionate customer base is not just for intimate startup companies, as Apple and the recent lines we all witnessed clearly illustrate. Having your customers so delighted with their experience that they will tell their friends and Twitter about their experience and proudly show/tell everyone they know is the most powerful (and inexpensive...sorry Finance guy in me coming out) marketing program any company can achieve. For a startup company positive word of mouth, press and chat is even more important as it can be the difference between success and failure. There are two sides of this experience that I'd like to cover, the product experience and the human experience that in my opinion are equally important.
PRODUCT EXPERIENCE
Building product that is focussed on solving a specific problem that a target audience has or providing them with a new experience they will value is obviously table stakes. Truly delighted customers are looking for much more:
- Make product consistent and reliable
- Save time or improve the quality of time for the customer
- Ease of use will increase adoption and stickiness
- A slick, well thought out user interface is a game changer
- Flexibility in design (because your customer is going to try to use you product in ways you probably hadn't imagined...and you want them to)
- The WOW factor...can't really describe it but you know it when you see it
- There can be many others depending on the application, audience, etc
You are not beside your customer when they use your product for the first time, make sure you nail form, function and WOW.
HUMAN EXPERIENCE
EVERY interaction you have with a customer is an opportunity to delight a customer and build your brand. Really folks, this is not hard. Every person in the organization, whether there are 3 or 3,000 is in marketing and sales. I posted earlier on a simple experience at Dairy Queen (sadly no freeby's have arrived at my door) which demonstrates the difference every person in your company can make.
Everytime someone calls in for support on your product - delight them
Everytime someone calls to complain - delight them
Everytime someone asks you where you work - delight them
Attitude is everything, be excited and passionate about what you do. If you aren't how do you expect them to be so moved they will tell their friends and wear your shirt. Always ask them for feedback and suggestions, engage them in making things better. Hiring, retaining and maintaining engaged employees is a seperate post I'll cover later.
RECOMMENDATION
My call to action that I think goes a long way to help at a startup: When people download things (product, trials, etc) from your site make it mandatory to enter an email address AND a phone number (don't worry if they have come to your site and are interested enough to download a trial, they will). Now, don't just email your customers call them. Have everyone in your company call at least one person a day to interact and ask some set questions to collect data. This is your chance to delight them on the phone and make a personal connection that will solidify your relationship. At the end of every day, huddle as a group for 5-10 minutes NO more and run through what you found out.
Several major accomplishments occur with this process:
- Employees stay engaged with the solution and are always in sales mode every day which creates positive energy and momentum and allows they to get better and more comfortable with it.
- The customer experience is enhanced and over time you will build a loyal following of delighted customers.
- You will accumulate data, critical intelligence, on your company/product and share it every day which will allow you to spot trends, isolate problems, share wins and drive product and the company forward in lock step with your user community.
Try it and let me know how it works.
Paul Marshall
Finance and Business Execution in Tech Small Companies
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