How to Identify Unrecognized Customer Problems

Speaker A: Hello everyone, and welcome to Another edition of SaaS Therapy, the show where we help you save your most important business relationships, your customers. I'm Todd Kirk and today is a beautiful summer July day here in Utah. So I decided to go in the neighborhoods around our office and just start, start having a nice little combo with you and enjoying the outside air. I, uh, am flying solo this week because my normal co host and compadre Casey is out on vacation with his family in Montana. So figured I would just check in with everybody today. You know, I've had a lot on my mind lately about how the world is shifting in the, in the vein of customer success and customer education. We've got a significant impact that we're seeing with the way AI is, is changing the way we think about work. And uh, just earlier today actually I did a webina with my good buddy Neil, who is the co founder over at Clouseof. And one of the things that I've been really thinking a lot about is just how we provide support to our customers. You know, there's a lot of different resources that we try to provide to them. We've got the lms, right? Oftentimes that's a place where we're just dumping a bunch of content. Maybe we've got the knowledge base, maybe we've got the, uh, some in app guidance, a lot of times, customer success teams, you got your customer success platform. Well, these tools do a lot, but one of the things that's hard is they don't always produce the actual end goal that we want, which is primarily that the user of the software is getting the value out of it. Now there's a lot that can help move the needle for a customer. And a lot of times that's what we, as the customer success rep or the customer education person, that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to spend the time to help the customer really see and understand what the software can do. We're trying to teach them how to do it. And then once I got my champion, once I got my person who knows what they want to do, then I got to go figure out how to actually get them to teach everybody else within the organization so that they can become true advocates and really make things happen. What's cool though, is the more I think about it, the more I realize that we have to figure out a way to help enable the customer to be able to do that better themselves. So let me tell you what I mean. If you think about every single customer that you've ever met. Most of the time customers, they are coming to you because they have a problem they want to solve. They come to you because they have a, uh, use case, a scenario, a job that they're trying to accomplish. And every single customer that you have, they buy software primarily because they're hoping that you can help them solve that problem. And the reason they don't typically renew is either a, they solved the problem, they got you for it, and they never found a reason to keep you beyond that, or they felt like it was too hard or too difficult, or it didn't go far enough to help them achieve the end goal that they wanted to achieve. So how do we do that better? You know, when you think about all of us as individuals, why, why do we change? Why do we not change? Why did I decide to go on a walk today versus just sitting inside of an audio booth today? I think it really comes down to the fact that every single human in the world, we all have motivation. We all want to be. We all have our own internal motivation. We have extrinsic motivation too. Like I can, somebody can incentivize me to do something. But usually the external factor, it might pique my curiosity if somebody came in and said, hey, you know, if you use this tool, I'm going to give you a gift card. Or hey, you know, if you use this tool, you know you're gonna look really good in front of your peers. That kind of external motivator can be really, really helpful to get somebody to start something. But unless they find their own why their own reason internally, it doesn't generally stick. It won't stay around, it won't cause anything that you actually wanna see happen in long term. And so how do you kickstart that internal motivation? Well, it usually comes down first to making sure that the user knows what the problem is. So there's a, there's a great author in the sales world, Daniel Pink. Really? Like, uh, is it Daniel Pink or Daniel Pinkman? Oh man. See, maybe one day when this is way bigger, we'll get bigger names like him on but one of one of his books, he mentioned the idea that one of the things that I think we tend to think about is we look at ourselves as problem solvers. And I mean think about when the world of AI today too, problem solving, it's not really something that is hard. If I know I have a problem and I feel the pain of that problem, well, guess what, I'm gonna, I'm gonna go try to solve that and I Have more tools at my disposal than I ever did in the past to be able to make that happen. Today I can go and look up how to build an, uh, application in Claude that could solve my problem for me. So we don't need problem solvers so much today as we do need problem finders. So what I mean is, a lot of times people know they have a problem, but they don't realize they have other problems. And being able to find a problem that I don't see, being able to help me understand how significant that problem is, now that is something that is really, really valuable. And I think it's really, really critical that we start thinking about how we, we illuminate the problems that the customers don't see. And if we can get better at that now, all of a sudden, we can create some more motivation. Because as soon as I feel like there's a problem I need to solve, I'm going to go and I'm going to figure out how to solve it. And if you helped me find that problem, well, then I'm going to assume that you probably have expertise that I don't. And I'm going to trust you to help me solve that problem for myself in the future. So just something really valuable to think about as you, as you try to go down that vein. So what might that problem be? Well, one example in my world, right. So I love what Clouseau is doing. I'll highlight them really quick, mostly because we recently just decided to partner with them because I love their application. I think it makes a lot of sense for people in the customer education and the customer success space when it comes to making content. So you know that you need to provide resources to your customer. A lot of times you do. Uh, which is great. Most, most software companies that I know have some level of content that they're providing, whether it's articles in a knowledge base or short microlearning videos that they put on their YouTube channel or in their LMS or whatever. Right. The problem comes down to most of that content feels really difficult a, to maintain. And I think everybody recognizes that problem. What a lot of people don't recognize is the problem and the amount of time that it takes you because you just kind of assume that the only solution, the only problem or the only way to tackle the problem is to dedicate a person to spend hours and hours and hours making that content. And as, uh, somebody who's made thousands of videos in my own life for education purposes, I've realized that there are videos that take at least 10 plus hours to make. I've been in a situation where I'd spend two hours writing a script, another two hours producing the audio and the visuals for that, another two or three hours editing the video, another two or three hours getting feedback from my peers and making changes to those videos before I finally had a, uh, polished and finished video. So it can take 10 plus hours just to make a minute. Is that worth it? Well, that minute might never get viewed by anyone. And if I didn't do it well, then people might watch it and come away more confused, more frustrated, and feel like we didn't give them the support that they actually needed or wanted to be successful. So I do think there is something to be said about how we tackle this problem differently. But maybe we've always assumed that the only way to tackle content creation is through that 10 hour long process, but there's a whole other piece on top of it. A lot of people are just not aware of this problem, and that is that when it comes down to creating content, content quality has a big impact on the likelihood that somebody consumes it. So if I go in and make a video and it's a minute long, but the audio is really bad, and the mouse motion of the screen capture when I'm trying to show my application is all janky and all over the place, or if it's really verbose and has a bunch of filler content that nobody actually wants to consume because I couldn't figure out exactly what I wanted to say, then that's going to decrease engagement substantially on how likely the user is to get through it. In fact, we've done lots of studies over the years on this. We've analyzed here, brainstorm probably 50,000 plus videos on how, uh, how to increase engagement on content. And if a video gets over about three minutes, you start to see a pretty substantial drop in the likelihood that people complete the video. But the professional grade quality of the video also has a really big impact on whether or not people complete it. So now we have this whole thing, right? I want it to be good, I want it to be high quality, but I want it to be fast. And my traditional means I have to do one or the other. I can have somebody who I hire who has a lot of expertise, it's going to be expensive and slow. Or I can ask someone who may be a product expert but not a content expert, they'll go create content and it's not going to be very good. Well, is that a problem that you recognize that you have? Well, maybe it is a problem that you recognize that you have, but is the speed something that you see as a problem, or is it just, uh, something that you've just accepted as the way that it is? Now all of a sudden, when you start to realize how much time it takes, maybe that becomes way more painful and you're more apt and open to listen to the solution, which, in my mind, Clouseau and Brainstorm. Really great pair to solve that problem. So hopefully when you think about what you're trying to do with your own customer base, what if we were to just step back for a little bit and think, what are the problems that my customers don't realize that they have? And then how do I help them to see and understand that they have problems they didn't recognize? A lot of times we need to solve the problem that they bought us for, right? If somebody bought you because they knew they had a problem, they're going to want to go solve that problem. So we got to do that first, obviously. But if you want your customers stay around for the long time or for the long term, it's really important that we also identify the other problems that they don't recognize that they have, and then we find solutions for those too, because then they'll be way more likely to stick around in the future. Well, everybody, I hope it's been a good walk with me today. You know, we, we try to post every single Wednesday. This is obviously just a quick Todd walking around town video, but if you have any thoughts on how you have been able to better find and identify problems for your customers, if you've been able to come up with good resources, good ways of communicating that, whether that's just asking the right questions or posing the right story, I'd love to hear about it. Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn. Send me a message. Comment on this episode. We'd love to hear your feedback. Come subscribe, join us. We're here every week. Thanks, everybody. Have a great rest of your day.