How to Stop Failing Your Customers: Reduce Ambiguity

This episode features an interview with Micah Peterson, Chief Product Evangelist at ProcedureFlow, the next-generation Knowledge Management software designed to help companies visualize and navigate processes.

In this episode, Micah shares with us:

• His simple but actionable tips for reducing ambiguity for customers
• What it takes to make consumable and democratized knowledge repositories
• Looking at customer obsession in a whole new way
• And so much more

Host takeaways:

Kyle: 

• Be aware of where your processes break down: The rubber really hits the road where the links in our processes are weakest. Learning where those weak links are and educating our employees on how to navigate those sore spots through fostering a relationship with our customers during those moments is key to better customer success.
• Leverage your SMEs: Your community of users can help improve your products. Get their feedback and better understand what you can do better through their direct feedback.
• Don’t be afraid to say “no”: When we think of customer obsession, the words “yes” “of course” and “always” tend to come to mind first, but Micah encourages us to think of the 99% and to say no to updates that don’t serve the bigger body of customers or the future of the product.

Lukasz:

• People will focus on confusion, so don’t be confusing: Standardizing and removing ambiguity out of the conversation forces customers to focus on the flow, on procedure, and on the business at large.
• Always ask, is this the right thing?: Prioritizing what we really want to achieve when all we want to do is what’s easiest, because oftentimes what’s easy is a distraction and not adding anything to the product.
• Prioritize requests: When we can provide various perspectives on dimensions by looking at different markets, we can then put on the weights in a more strategic way. Because when we can rationalize scoring, it allows us to cut across dimensions and ease any tension between the managers in those markets.

Segment Timestamps: 

*(01:00) - Never Have I Ever

*(09:16) - Innovation, Therapy & Other Wild Tales

*(26:28) - PM Power Moves

*(31:27) - Ship it or Skip it

*(35:58) - Host Takeaways

Links:

• Connect with Lukasz Weber & Kyle Kolich on LinkedIn
• Learn more about Zuora

>> Connect with Lukasz Weber & Kyle Kolich 

>> Learn more about Zuora