Do’s and Don’ts of a Customer Success Pro: Jeff Vincent of Wistia

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As part of our customer success series, Jeff Vincent from Wistia shared with us how he and his team handle customer success and his recipe to delighting his customers.

Read the first episode here, featuring Greg Lefort, CEO of Azendoo_._

Jeff is in charge of the Customer Happiness team at Wistia, a very cool startup that provides smart video hosting for B2Bs.

Since the very beginning, the company has always been 120% dedicated to providing the best experience and value to its customers. Wistia’s CEO Chris Savage instilled a customer-centric culture in the whole company, by implementing “all-hand support”: everyone had to deal with customer support. As the company scaled up, Customer Success operations passed into the fold of Jeff Vincent, without losing sights of driving value to the customers.

Do: Put yourself in your customers’ shoes

First things first, to really understand our customers and their pain points: we use our own product. We love making videos to share our company culture. Videos are part of who we are.

Don’t: Throw Tech Jargon at Your Customers

To be really efficient, a customer success team needs to fully understand the product and its tricks, and communicate it to the users based on his or her level of understanding. Our product is rather techie, thus our customer success team is composed of tech-minded people, who are able to to connect to the tech level of the customer and to answer his or her questions directly, or figure out when to escalate.

Do: Show that you care

Your users are human beings just like you and me. Either a paying customer or a “free trialer”, they are still using your product and deserve to do it right.

However, caring takes time, hence the following corollary.

Don’t: Answer to everyone, anytime and anywhere

We figured out that most of our support happens during office hours EST. Yes, we could offer 24×7 support to everyone, but it would imply either harsh constraints on our customer success team or outsourcing it for nights and weekends. And that doesn’t fit with our culture.

We settled in for a compromise: we do have a 24×7 emergency email address, but for all demands that don’t fall under this category, we will reply by the next business day. And actually, we get less than 2% of our emails through this emergency channel, which is very reasonable.

Do: Pre-emptive support

In the customer success team, our goal is to help our customers get 10 times the value they’re paying, even before they seek support. Thus, we do our best to improve clarity on what our product is for, and we built an important knowledge base to offer self-training to all our users.

Don’t: lose yourself in the noise of feedbacks

Don’t get me wrong, we love getting feedbacks and understanding what matters to our users and how we can improve our service. However, if you take each and every feedback for granted, you will get lost in the way. In the end, you are the one who knows the product and its long term strategy. If some feedbacks don’t fall in the overall picture, you don’t have to follow them.

Extra: Find a fun way to share your customers’ voice with all the teams

We’re doing an internal series called “Customer story time” to help spread the voice of the customers throughout the company and keep our customer centric culture.

Thanks again Jeff for sharing your thoughts and best pieces of advice. And readers, feel free to add yours in the comment section!

Read more Customer Success stories on our blog:

Customer Success Do’s and Don’ts – part 1

Published on May 27, 2015.