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Why Startups Suck At Customer Success
Your customers aren’t going to love your product right away
It used to be you sold someone a product, handed them a wordy and confusing manual, and then walked away.
You can’t do that anymore.
It doesn’t matter if you’re selling a suite of productivity applications or an exercise bike, the level of user complexity baked into the average product increases perpetually and exponentially. Because it can.
Moreover, today’s customer — whether it’s your grandfather with his Fitbit or an executive vice president expecting the quarterly numbers to be reported with a snap of her fingers — they want to spend less time learning how to use the product than it takes to open the box. If there’s a box.
Customer success isn’t a new science — it’s something we’ve been doing for ages. Poorly. But when done right, it’s the difference between the 20-page manual that used to come with a clock radio and the little transparent sticker with the arrow pointing to the power button on your new smartphone.
Let’s figure out how we achieve that higher level of smoothness.
