Eat your own dogfood.
Eating your own dog food — or dogfooding — is a geeky name that people primarily in the software industry give to using your own product.
Practicing what you preach 👌
From Microsoft to Amazon, there are quite a few big companies that are known for dogfooding and lots of well-documented benefits for this approach. Some of these are increasing customer centricity, discovering real-world problems in the product earlier and improving product mastery within teams.
In the early days, being software geeks ourselves, we adopted this approach at Pisano. After all, we provide customer experience solutions, and we had customers. A match made in heaven!
Throughout the years this has become a part of our culture and internal use grew steadily across the teams.
Lots of new features, improvements and products stemmed from this practice. We even set up an internal product feedback process (obviously, built into our platform 😉) to organize all the ideas we have about the product.
Today our product is at the centre of all of our operations. Moreover, it's become an indispensable part of our day-to-day process.
You might be wondering how we — a B2B company — use the same ol' platform that our mostly B2C customers like Adidas, Nine West, Vestel and IsBank use to manage the customer experience.
Aren't these totally different ways of business?
Well, it turns out a lot of B2C customer buying habits are popping up in the B2B space. And vice versa. Some call this trend the rise of B2H — that's business to human. We're seeing this at Pisano too.
Customers are humans. It doesn’t matter if they’re buying for their own company or for themselves. As humans, we expect consistent experiences across all types of journeys.
That's why we built our platform for humans and it works.
OK now that we've got all that covered, let's get down to the nitty-gritty. Here's how we use Pisano at Pisano to manage B2H experiences.
Customers vote with their feet.
Collecting feedback is essential for figuring out what your company can do before they do!
There are lots of ways companies can get feedback and gain insight into the pains and gains of customers. These can be primarily grouped into two categories: Qualitative and quantitative.
For those of you who don't like buzzwords, these are just fancy words for open-ended or free form (qualitative) and score or rating based feedback (quantitative).
Score based feedback is especially great for identifying opportunities for high-touch customer engagement — like a phone call. A popular playbook used by a lot of companies is to call or email customers who provide low scores and try to solve the issues the customer is going through.
Qualitative (open-ended) feedback is used to understand the underlying reasons for the actions, opinions and motivations of customers. When paired with other score-based methods it provides great insights into the lives of customers and is an invaluable source for ideas.
We employ both types of feedback collection regularly:
The days of spray and pray outreach campaigns are over. We're all bombarded with thousands of messages daily and we're even more skeptical than ever.
It's all about attention — the scarcest resource on earth today!
That's why businesses today need to be smart about what they do with the limited attention they get from their website visitors, event attendees, blog readers, etc. Businesses need to be present and proactive.
At Pisano, we're big believers of keeping all communication channels open. Everywhere.
You won't get any no-reply@pisano.co emails from Pisano or see a page on this website that doesn't have a live chat window. We love replies and we love to chat!
All our shared inboxes, live chat widgets, blog subscription forms are managed through our own platform. This allows us to manage all aspects of lead generation through a single view.
At our events, we use our tablet kiosks and QR code links to ask people questions and get contact info — a great way to grow our CX community and to generate more qualified leads!
Customer acquisition is just the beginning. Every company that depends on recurring revenue from customers, needs to focus on customer success. Because customer churn (AKA losing customers) is the silent killer — growth stalls and companies don't know what hit 'em.
That's why customer success teams need to make customers as successful as possible in using the product.
This will ensure customers to get the most value out of the business. Minimizing the risk of customer churn and maximizing the number of advocates!
Customer success is one of the obsessions we've had at Pisano for a while now. We work very hard to provide the most value possible to our customers.
To achieve this, we heavily rely on our own platform. We monitor the health of our customers through Pisano's Kanban board like segments.
Super clean 💯
We also keep notes of all the customer meetings we do and track our TODOs all in one place!
Support is all about being responsive. Businesses need to be there for customers when they have questions, hit snags or just need some help.
With a large number of customers and a large number of team members in our support team, it can get challenging to keep track of certain things, including knowing which tasks are assigned to which team member.
Our platform makes it easy to manage unified support inboxes, instant messaging with customers, issue tracking and team collaboration.
Features like routing and escalations make it super simple for us to make sure no customer request is missed — so we provide the best support experience possible.
Also, we have this cool conversation rating system that allows customers to rate their support experience once issues are resolved. This turned out to be a wonderful morale booster for our team because you get instant feedback on your service!
These are just some examples of the extensive use of Pisano. From talent acquisition to sales we have even more areas where we use Pisano.
But we don't need to go into all of them because I believe the real benefit of using your own product as a company is the constant feeling you get that you and your team are onto something BIG.
Knowing from first-hand your company creates real value for real humans!
What do you think? Are your products for businesses, customers or for humans?