Category: General

SaaS Companies: Stop Putting Support in a Silo

I get it – you’re busy. I’m busy. We’re all busy. We can all spend too much time praying at the altar of hustle. 

Here’s a quick tip from me to you: take ten minutes, stop reading the top stories on Hacker News or Growth Hackers. Stop scrolling through Quora questions. They’re all going to tell you the same thing:

Listen to your customers.

This message might come in different shapes and flavors:

“Find product market fit.”

“Conduct customer interviews.”

“Get out of the office.”

It all boils down to one simple necessity for any software company – but especially for recurring revenue Saas companies.  That necessity is this: gaining and maintaining a deep understanding of your customers, their problems in the world, and their problems with your product.

Don’t hire a consultant to do this for you.

You already have this understanding in your company, and it is entirely likely that you’re sitting on a gold mine of potential information. What’s blocking you from that information, that almost-guaranteed revenue boost, is not financial or technological.

It’s cultural.

When was the last time one of your Product folks sat down and asked your support team about their work?

You have an entire team of people who talk with your customers all day, every day.

It doesn’t have to be a formal process. It doesn’t have to be some sort of support veteran embedded in your Product teams  – although I’d recommend that.

Just go talk to them. Go ask them what customers are struggling with. They won’t necessarily be able to solve your problems, but I promise you they’re going to reveal to you points of friction, trouble areas, and parts of your product that aren’t even on your radar as costing you customers.

Because the fact of the matter is, if you have a large enough customer base, and you’re relying on them for recurring revenue, even small problems, small sticking points, semi-irritating workarounds, these are going to cause churn. Maybe not a lot of churn – but some. Imagine eliminating all of those tiny pain points. They add up.

First, you have to find them.

The good news is, someone in your company already has. Go ask them about it.

 

Use the Data You Have: Presenting and Persuading

You’ve arrived at the third and final Post in this series (Use the Data You Have, following my presentation at SupConf 2016) – if you’re just starting now you may want to check out the previous few Posts, covering the importance of data in being a successful support professional, asking the right questions, and one way to approach answering those questions.

We’re arriving now at the crux of my talk – how to use the answers you’ve found to persuade others within your organization to add value for you, your customers, and your organization’s bottom line.

I could talk a lot about the importance of data visualization in persuasion and digital charisma – and likely there are many Posts in the future on that topic – but for now let’s focus more on the bigger approach, and less on whether to use a histogram or a pie chart.

(Not to belabor the point, but use a histogram.)

Many folks rush to the more sexy idea of visualization before they ask the bigger questions, and building the right foundations. It doesn’t matter how pretty your animated d3.js donut charts are if the underlying data is not something your audience cares about.

At this point in this series, you’ve considered your biggest beliefs as a support professional in your organization, you’ve converted those beliefs into hypotheses, and you’ve confirmed or denied those hypotheses using your company’s existing data, be it through Google Analytics or Mixpanel or whatever.

Now, as a data driven support professional, you’ve arrived at the hard part, at the part that I can only guide you through in a general way, because I lack the tribal or communal understandings of your workplace.

You need to find a way to explain this data to the folks who can enable change in a way that is motivating to them. This means setting your own ego and possibly your own perspective aside in the pursuit of being persuasive – folks in your organization are going to have problems and motivations that may be alien to you, but in presenting an argument, sharing a victory for both of you is far more important than being 100% true to your own perspective.

Sometimes this means going back to the drawing board – sometimes you need to do some more digging to find information that will speak to different parties. This is OK. Better to do more research than not enough – at least in this situation.

(There are times when enough is enough, for now, I’ll trust you all to know when you’re in an unproductive research rabbit hole.)

Ask yourself: what is most important to this decision maker today?

Then, figure out how to show them that the issue you’re championing can have a direct impact on what matters to them.

Are you in a high-growth startup, where moving the Monthly Active Users needle is the very most important thing? If so, you need to see how your issue can impact that needle; what does Active mean? Do Active users tend to experience this problem? If so, how can you reduce it? If not, is this issue the blocker for more Active users?

Are you in a mature company, struggling with turbulent retention rates? Show how this issue is related to or not related to customers retention.

The name of this short series is Use the Data You Have, and the importance of this cannot be understated: if you need to run a test or an experiment to verify that something needs to be solved or addressed, then you’re approaching it the wrong way. Big problems, problems that deeply need solving, are problems because they manifest in some way.

Go into your archives. Dig into your analytics suite. Find that manifestation and use it to enact positive change. Good support teams answer customers. Great support teams solve problems, and in so doing, build value for the customer and for the company.

 

 

Use the Data You Have: Answer Your Questions

As discussed in the Previous Post in this series (Ask the Right Questions), before you set foot in your Analytics suite, you need to have some idea of the questions that you want to answer.

Eventually, when you’re a superstar with your analytics toolbox, you’ll be able to do some exploratory analysis  – jumping in without a hypothesis or a ready understanding of what you’re looking for. For your first steps as a data driven support professional, I’d recommend having your question (or questions) ready to go.

For the purposes of this series, we’ll do a (very) brief overview of navigating through Google Analytics, and a tiny bit on Mixpanel. It’s important that you become a confident and competent practitioner of your particular toolset. If it’s Google Analytics, get certified.

(Here’s mine!)

Let’s consider the hypothesis from our last Post;

If it is true that our customers want plugins for their site, we would expect that “plugins” would be a top search term in our knowledge base. It would also be a top tag in our chat transcripts. It would also come up more frequently than other support topics in our public forums.

Knowing the way that things are arranged at WordPress.com, I can verify or deny each of these pieces with different tools. Tag transcripts I could find from our live chat software provider. I could search the Forum, or do a big text scrape. For the knowledge base piece, I can use Google Analytics, since our documentation is all recorded there.

For the best argument, you’ll want to use all of your opportunities to verify – that way you can be as certain as possible that you’re making the right call.

Let’s open Google Analytics. Once you’re in your site or app’s Dashboard, you’re going to see a LOT of information. On the left hand sidebar you’ll see a number of tabs like this:

Screen Shot 2016-05-18 at 8.20.23 PM.png

For most of the work you’ll be doing, the Behavior tab is your friend – much of the rest of the Analytics suite can be useful for support, but would require maybe more digging than we’re ready for, or possibly would require committing additional code in order to track more nuanced behavior.

Since our question is about customers being interested in plugins, one way for us to check our hypothesis would be to see how traffic our support documentation on plugins compares to other support documentation. We know the URL for that document ( https://en.support.wordpress.com/plugins/ ) , so we want to expand Behavior and head into our Site Content > All Pages

Screen Shot 2016-05-18 at 8.25.35 PM.png

From here we’ll get a top ten listing of our most-visited locations, as well as a breakdown of Pageviews, Unique Pageviews, etc. Like so:

WPCOMGA1

 

OK! Now we’re getting somewhere – I’ve obscured the actual data here, but you can take my word for it that the /plugins/ page is not our most commonly visited support document, with less than 1% of our overall traffic. It is in the top ten, however.

I will note though, that the /com-vs-org/ doc (which describes the offerings of WordPress.com versus self hosted alternative) is highly popular, and for many customers, the difference between WordPress.com and self hosted sites boils down to one thing: access to plugins.

When we take these two documents together, they represent more traffic than every document except /stats/ – but people do so love their Stats. That /plugins/ and /com-vs-org/ taken  together represent the second most visited support document is meaningful, for sure.

We do want to verify that these two documents are in fact related, and what we’re observing here is in fact noteworthy – we can do this in Google Analytics by selecting the Navigation Summary tab at the top, and selecting the /com-vs-org/ page:

WPCOMGA2

Now we’re getting somewhere – in comparing the flow, I see that one of the most common pages folks visit before /com-vs-org/ is /plugins/ – and it’s also one of the most common pages folks visit immediately afterward. I’d take this as sufficient evidence that our hypothesis is supported.WPCOMGA3
It’s highly important that you are careful not to overstate your case – what we can see here is traffic and its flow – we can’t be sure that this is positive or negative, or what impression customers are getting from these documents. It’s clear that there documents are related, and popular, but not necessarily what that means. 

This is why checking several sources and doing a second-level check is important – seeing not only where the traffic totals are, but also how the traffic flows between different pages or stages.

Representing this accurately and researching it thoroughly will help you to state your case accurately. Consider this example, a Mixpanel report of Failed Logins (on the top, in blue) vs. Signed In (successful logins):

Screen Shot 2016-05-18 at 8.40.22 PM.png

Holy moly, we have nearly twice as many failed logins as we do successful ones?! Somebody call the head office, this is a huge problem!

Approach it with curiosity and a desire for verification – imagine, if you fail to logon to an app or service, what’s the first thing you do? You try to log on again, right? Look how this chart changes when we go from “Total” to “Uniques:”

Screen Shot 2016-05-18 at 8.42.10 PM.png

The two have swapped places – yes, 6500 failed logins a day is not great, but it tells a much more measured story, and probably more accurate to your interests.

Answer your questions, but always verify.

The next and final Post in this series will be taking the answers you’ve found, and turning them into convincing arguments. See you soon!

 

 

 

 

 

Use the Data You Have: Explanation and Context

Most conference talks are the worst. We can acknowledge that, among ourselves, right?

Many folks don’t properly prepare, they don’t expend any care into their visuals, and they fail to bring anything like the kind of value that they could.

I’m not saying that people who present at conferences are the worst. By and large they’re actually the opposite – they’re some of the best and brightest and most interesting people in an industry, and that’s why they’ve been invited to speak at a conference.

(sometimes they’re even being paid to speak at the conference)

I think it’s more that socially, at least Americans, we conceive of public speaking the same way we conceive of learning mathematics. It’s like a light switch. You’ve got it or you don’t.

“I’m not a math person.”

That’s nonsense of course. But, it’s pervasive, and it unfortunately really sells us short on both ends – folks who have a ton of amazing things to say don’t use their voice because they think it’s simply the way, when it’s more a matter of work, and practice, and preparation.

The other side of the coin are the folks who think they’ve got it, that charisma, and preparation is for squares who don’t have it.

That’s nonsense, too, naturally.

This is a long way of providing context for a series of Posts I’ll be doing over the next few weeks. I’m speaking at SupConf later this month, and I am determined to provide a mountain of value to the folks who have travelled to San Francisco and trusted me with twenty minutes of their time. My talk is called Use The Data You Have. 

It’s about how customer support teams can create value within their companies and for their customers without running experiments or trying new and crazy stuff – just by using the data they already have.

One way I am assuring myself that I can provide some value is by creating the value way ahead of time, in the form of these blog posts, that will serve as a supplement to what I discuss in the talk.

(Don’t worry, they’ll be helpful in their own way as well, I’m not going to keep anything special away from folks who aren’t going to the conference, or are reading this in the future)

In some way this blog series is a way for me to hedge my bets: even if I completely mess up the presentation and look like a total buffoon, I’ll still be able to click through to my final splash slide and cry for redemption; look, look, all hope is not lost!

Plus, this series is going to be somewhat dry, with some screenshots and Google Analytics talk, which is important, but super dry and not at all suited for an in-person conference talk.

Watch this space!

 

 

Quartz, Atlas and the Y Axis

I’ve gone into a bit of a rabbit hole this weekend. One of WordPress.com VIP‘s biggest sites, Quartz, has a growing set of data visualizations, charts, graphs, etc, at their new branch, Atlas.

In poking around, I found myself at the Github repo for their visualization tool, Chartbuilder. This tool is pretty rad – if you have node on your computer you can run it locally, or you can also use their hosted version, here.

It took maybe six minutes to go from a CSV I’d never seen before (Lake Huron water levels) to a pretty nice little viz:

Lake_Huron_Water_Level_LakeHuron_chartbuilder (1).png

It offers a lot of flexibility, as well as simple ease of use. Anyone armed with a (properly formatted) CSV can go from numbers on a page to a useful visualization really quickly. I expect I’ll pick this up when I need something to go from numbers to graphic quickly, and the CSV is already nicely formatted.

I do love R and R Studio (ggplot2 for life), but sometimes I don’t want to spend much time tweaking something to be just-so, or searching Google (or Stack Exchange) for something I haven’t seen before.

One thing that’s worth bringing up, as data visualization becomes more accessible and easier for everyone to use, is this: going from a CSV to a chart can be an act of interpretation, and can create a message from the data that may skew your readers toward your perception.

(I’d argue that part of creating moral visualizations is presenting the data in a way that allows the individual to maintain positive liberty, but that’s a bigger discussion for another time)

Consider the viz above – you’d be understandably concerned about the water levels of Lake Huron – they do seem to be varying widely over the past century, and with a general downward trend.

This is a sneaky trick of the Y Axis – note that it only represents a span of eight feet. Look again, with the Y axis starting at 500:

Lake_Huron_Water_Level_LakeHuron_chartbuilder.png

 

… or, as some purists demand, with the Y axis starting at zero:

 

Lake_Huron_Water_Level_LakeHuron_chartbuilder (2).png

 

I am excited to mix Chartbuilder into my data toolbox, but remember well, dear readers: as visualization tools become easier to use and as the ideas of Big Data become stronger and stronger, there are lots and lots of ways irresponsible or malicious folks can weasel the facts.

Be vigilant out there, gang.

Also, happy Mother’s Day 🙂