Feb 25, 2025 | 6 minute read
written by Bryan House
The best time to learn about a company’s customer service is when things go wrong. Years ago, my wife and I booked a stay in a hotel in Kansas City for a wedding. Even though we made a reservation, the hotel was overbooked. The wedding was the next day at 2pm, so we explained to the front desk clerk that “getting walked” to a different hotel wasn’t ideal. She took our feedback to heart, listened to our concerns about being able to prepare, and ultimately created a standout experience for us. She moved us back to the original hotel the next morning and treated us to a plush suite — along with complementary champagne and chocolates. We were first-time guests, not big points members. But she treated us like VIPs.
It would have been easy for the hotel clerk to simply leave us in the other hotel or book us in a standard room, hiding behind a policy or an algorithm rather than taking accountability for the mistake. Instead, she turned what could have been an awful experience into a memorable one, and we’d absolutely book that hotel again. What stood out about this front desk clerk is that she asked us about our situation, and went above and beyond to meet our needs.
Far too many companies don’t take the time to think outside of their standard operations and product offerings to learn more about their customers. With a little empathy and the right questions, any team can develop stronger relationships that lead to increased retention and expansion revenue.
Let’s take a look at some of the most common mistakes teams make with their customers, and how to become more empathetic to their needs.
It’s all too common in engineering cultures to default to the attitude that the customer is doing it wrong. Engineers, by definition, go narrow and deep — writing code to solve detailed problems with a very specific focus. In maintaining that focus, it’s easy to lose sight of what the customer is trying to do.
For example, your customer may have a difficult time doing something with your product that’s supposed to be easy. Just because you’ve designed a workflow to be simple for most customers, doesn’t mean it’s easy for all. Ask yourself — do your customers need to change the existing configuration of your product in a way that’s untenable? Is your new and improved product adding friction? Do they need to take on unnecessary risk to adopt it? Take the time to solve the customer’s problems, rather than offering a blanket solution. Simply putting yourself in the customer’s shoes is the best way to unlock the next level of loyalty.
In one of my previous organizations, we were experiencing a slowdown in growth. The customer success team was first in the line of fire when expansions weren’t happening. Many people thought the best solution was hiring more sales reps and throwing a traditional sales model at our expansion problem.
In reality, customer success hadn’t been empowered to embrace selling themselves, building upon the strong relationships they had already established with their customers. Instead of hiring more reps, we decided to change the customer success organization to include sales quotas in their remit. By empowering them to sell themselves, rather than serving as lead generation for their account executive counterparts, we removed unnecessary friction and gave the customer success team the power to deepen their customer relationship based on aligned incentives. We found that no one was more qualified to sell than someone who’d been in the trenches with the customer. They’re the best people to understand what the customer is trying to achieve on the timeline they want to achieve it, while asking the right questions to solve their problems.
I’m not knocking the role of sales. It takes two different skillsets to land a new account and expand an existing one. While sales has the tools, and buoyancy, to break through neverending prospect indifference, customer success continuously earns the right to negotiate with the customer by being there for them in moments of crisis. They are advocates when customers need them most, and have built up the trust equity to consult on the best way to expand their relationship in support of a customer’s business objectives.
Sales and expansion becomes even more challenging when you’re in a commoditized market. Certain products have the luxury of selling themselves or selling on the momentum of a category (think: data and generative AI right now). Yet, when you have to differentiate yourself from the competition, the best way to do so is by identifying the problems you’re uniquely qualified to solve — and finding customers who have those problems.
At my own company, we’ve narrowed our ideal customer profile to focus on what we’re uniquely qualified to do for manufacturers and distributors. We’ve learned a lot from our existing customers and know that we are the best equipped to solve a certain subset of problems. Doubling down on a niche and owning it is never a bad thing in a crowded market.
Listening to customers with empathy doesn’t mean always saying “yes.” Often, solving a problem involves challenging the customer’s notion of what’s right and helping them arrive at a better solution for them.
For example, we worked with one major retail distributor to refine their product drop process when their commerce website was continually collapsing with traffic. By bringing in stakeholders from order management, marketplaces, bot mitigation, and other areas, we made sure that their commerce site wouldn’t fail when customers needed to transact on a tight timeline. In doing so, we helped them re-envision their original problem and challenged their concept of what was working in the past — moving from vendor to trusted partner in the process.
Ask your customers:
As you work through these questions, you’ll learn more about your customer and position your company where it is uniquely qualified to solve the problem. In doing so, you’ll not only set up your company for success, but develop a stronger bond with a customer who is more likely to retain and expand upon your relationship in the months and years to come.
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