The Startup Playbook, 2nd Edition

Chapter 24Making Your Customer Successful

At Innoveda, we developed complex CAD products for electrical engineering. When we founded the company, we created new technologies but also acquired existing ones from several other companies. While each individual product was solid, the combined group of them was a mess. Users couldn't make their way through them. They were confused, our support levels shot through the roof, and worst of all, customer satisfaction plummeted.

I (Will) was pulling my hair out. We were spending a lot of time and money holding it all together. Instead of investing in moving forward, we were doing everything we could just to tread water and not get sucked beneath the waves. We tried to stay close to the users by preemptively contacting them and when one would go silent, we began to really worry. Our view was that as long as people were complaining, they actually cared. When they stopped talking to us, they were likely talking to others about their bad experience with us.

Obviously, we had to make some changes. We knew that ultimately, the products would have to be adapted to work more seamlessly, but we needed to invest our resources and energy into providing as much training, support, and handholding immediately.

We rolled out startup guides, new documentation, and courses. We enhanced phone and email support, expanded it to 24/7, and visited customers physically when it made sense. We also kept a database of customer interactions so we knew who we were ...