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In the world of SaaS (Software as a Service) industry, customer-centricity is crucial since it has a direct impact on the success, growth, and sustainability of SaaS businesses. With the industry being highly competitive, retaining clients is equally important as acquiring new ones.
At Databox, our mission is to offer a business analytics platform that makes it as easy as possible for everyone in a company to monitor, analyze, benchmark, and improve performance in one spot on any device. Being focused on the customer facilitates continuous improvement and ensures our product evolves in line with customer requirements. We have, therefore, created habits and practices that allow us to put customer impact at the forefront of all we do.
Furthermore, understanding customer pain points and preferences has an impact on the development of our product through invaluable customer insights and feedback, helping us prioritize features and improvements that align with our customer’s needs. In our case, this leads to higher customer satisfaction and helps drive product innovation and overall business success.
Making the customer feel valued and understood is paramount, so one of our six company values is Prioritizing Customer Impact.
The impact we have on our customers and partners drives our decisions and actions. However, the teams that are in constant contact with our clients, such as Customer Support or Sales, are not the only ones that prioritize customer impact. All our teams foster a mindset of customer-first thinking, no matter their area of work.
To help put that value at the forefront of the work of our teams, we create activities and initiatives that emerge and evolve based on the needs of our customers and are identified during meetings, sharing experiences, or through various cross-team projects. Those activities are created and tailored to support a customer-centric approach. These insights are gained through interactions with customers during meetings, sharing experiences, or through various cross-team projects.
User feedback provides invaluable insights into what works, what doesn’t, and what enhancements are needed. In order to really make our product useful to clients, we give our users access to our product’s Roadmap. We give them a chance to post suggestions on product updates, features, and integrations they would like to see in the future and vote on them. Our Project Managers regularly review those suggestions and sometimes get on a call with the client who made the suggestion to understand their needs in more depth. They later use that insight to prioritize their team’s work and decide what to tackle next.
A great resource to learn more about what our customers need is support chats and calls. We use our Customer Insight initiative through which our Customer Onboarding, Account Management, and Sales Team provide customer insight and relay that info back to the Product teams. When planning and prioritizing tasks, the Product team reviews the call snippets regarding reported issues or suggestions, studies the potential technical setbacks, and assesses whether that change is in line with our mission and vision for the product. After implementing updates or making changes relating to the client suggestions, the Product team reports back to the members of the Customer Success teams so they can notify the client and get their feedback on the updates that were made, creating a feedback loop.
To keep on top of trends, the Technical Support team created a Specialist Program and assigned different areas of the product to individual team members. All technically advanced questions or issues on that topic are then routed to that team member, who can quickly offer a solution. They are also responsible for identifying trends of user questions and making improvement suggestions for our Product team to consider. Some of the topics that the members of our Specialist Program focus on include Data Source Connectivity, SQL, White Labeling, Agency Specific Functionalities, Integrating Google Sheets, etc.
Having a knowledgeable Go-To-Market team is a strategic endeavor and represents our commitment to our clients. We provide biweekly training for our GTM teams that includes product updates, data reviews, and current initiatives that are relevant to their roles. The focus is on a deep understanding of our client’s needs, pain points, and objectives to ensure that our tool, in fact, meets their expectations and needs. This empowers our teams with the knowledge and skills to keep the client at the center of every decision and drives both our product’s success and clients’ satisfaction.
Knowing how clients use our product is as important as why they use it. By tracking user behavior inside the Databox app, we are able to see how they navigate our product, which features they use most, and where they might encounter issues. That helps us identify pain points and find a way to eliminate them. We also try to identify potential improvements for features that are not used as regularly as we would like to, eliminate them, and later reassess the usage of that feature.
Team members who are in direct contact with our users and potential clients are also able to contribute suggestions on product improvements or changes. They may have gotten that idea while talking to a client or come up with it on their own. We consider team suggestions as important as the client’s and relay them back to our Product and Engineering division to include in their planning and prioritizing processes.
Metrics & Chill is a podcast hosted by Jeremiah Rizzo, our Content & Community Manager, who sits down with founders, marketers, and salespeople from a variety of industries and discuss metrics that had an important impact on their business. Besides giving our audience meaningful and insightful content, the podcast is an opportunity for us to pick the brains of our potential clients and understand what different industries need in terms of business analytics.
To optimize the podcast’s impact, we run a Podcast Club where our Playmakers engage in discussions on the latest episode’s revelations. This serves as a platform for developing business acumen and a deeper comprehension of evolving market demands.
In a world where skills and knowledge are the currency of success, it makes sense to embrace continuous learning. That is why we encourage our Playmakers to take part in our Book club and expand their skills and knowledge on topics such as effective communication, growth mindset, and accountability. This has an impact on the work that we do, especially for teams that deal with clients directly.
To reflect on their experience with customers, our Go-To-Market teams have established a practice named “Lessons Learned”. During their Quarterly Business Reviews, team members share lessons about customer success they have gained from interactions with individual customers. These involve experiences and stories that highlight what worked, what didn’t, and what insights were gained from these customer interactions. Reflecting on those experiences gives the team a better understanding of customers’ needs, motivations, and objectives.
Though some teams are in more direct contact with our customers, everyone at Databox is equally aware of the importance of prioritizing customer impact.
To highlight exceptional and customer-centric efforts, Playmakers use our Slack channel #quickwins to share positive feedback or praise from clients they have helped via chat, highlight a team member who went above and beyond in their efforts, or compliment team members on collaborating and achieving something together. Sharing little victories and good practices with the entire team helps people feel appreciated and additionally emphasizes that keeping our clients on our minds is the right thing to do at all times. It also creates a learning opportunity for the entire team and motivates individuals to do better, which additionally strengthens our client focus.
In an industry where customer satisfaction, subscription retention, and user engagement are paramount, a customer-centric mindset is not optional but rather imperative. By embracing this mentality, we choose long-term success and sustained growth.
At Databox, the ethos of customer-first thinking is not just a fancy term but a foundation that we continuously build on. Customer impact is not an incidental byproduct but the base of our growth strategy. It informs our every action and fuels our commitment to delivering a product that continuously evolves in alignment with our customers’ ever-evolving needs.
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Content writer at Databox
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