This article originally appeared on LinkedIn on 2020-01-26.
At UBX, as we move from a minimum viable product to start-up and to growth, we speak about the need to enhance quality and the ability to scale the platforms we have launched. One irony is that after launch we actually need unscalable, high-touch customer service. This may seem counter intuitive: how does unscalable service align with a need to scale? At first, this may seem paradoxical.
We need to leverage unscalable high-touch customer support and service when we launch new products and platforms for a couple important reasons.
Systems will always fail#
This is a fact of life. We can count on it and need to proactively plan for it. In the old days we would call this operational risk assessment and build mitigating controls to manage the risks of something not working. Big terms for what really amounts to having a back up plan or compensating process for when something does not work or goes wrong. Here’s the thing: when we launch a new product or platform, plan as we might, we cannot possibly anticipate everything that will go wrong. We have no choice sometimes but to learn as we go. In these cases we minimize the impact to our customers by over-compensating with hands-on customer service. This will pay off for a couple reasons:
- Customers will give us the benefit of the doubt in the event of system failures when we provide great service recovery. We make evangelists of our earliest customers. It is not difficult to imagine the positive word of mouth and posts on social. I would argue that the best stories people share about service are usually about what companies did when something did not work!
- The learnings from these recoveries uncover what we did not anticipate and generate the user stories/requirements for system enhancements that will lead to a truly scalable solution.
One Time Opportunity#
When we first launch products or platforms, it may be the only time we can afford to literally talk to every user or potential customer! Paul Graham of Y Combinator has said, contrary to conventional tech platform growth-at-all-costs wisdom, that it’s much much better to have one hundred users who love you than one million users who “sort of like you”. When we launch our platforms, this is our chance to make sure our initial users love us. When more customers join, we won’t be able to afford this level of direct engagement and we risk developing a platform that people “sort of like” - if we are lucky! We provide unscalable high-touch customer support and service when we launch new platforms because we can. We will not have this chance again.
Conclusion#
The path to scale requires a period of unscalable service. By investing in high-touch engagement early on, we build the trust and insights necessary to create a truly scalable and loved platform.