At Just we place customer success at the top of our priority list. Our approach is high touch, personal, and maybe an unconventional—we combine resources from product development with customer success. In this post, we'll look at the added value both our customers and our team receive as we combine product development and customer success.

Process

Our process is pretty straightforward. After a customer signs up, our sales executives introduce them to our customer success team. We have a two-step onboarding process that makes sure customers hit the ground running with our product.

First onboarding meeting: As we deliver a software product, we could have given access to the tool straight away and left users to figure out how to use it on their own. Instead, we do the quite opposite. Within the first week after signing up we run a 30 min video call or personal meeting with all our new customers. In this meeting, we get to know the new customer better, including their set-up, how they are organized, how they trade FX, what banks they trade with and more. They get access to the tool and we do a thorough walk-through of product features. The main objective of this meeting is to make the customer familiar and comfortable using our product. Since the ability of Just to analyze FX trades depends on customers uploading trade confirmations, we also use this meeting to assist in uploading their trade data.

Second onboarding meeting: In most cases, customers upload their data within a week after the first onboarding meeting. We then book a second onboarding meeting to look at the data and findings together with them. We share our findings and thoughts and they can talk though their impression and ask any questions regarding how the bank prices them and how they compare to similar customers.

These two onboarding sessions are usually enough to get our customers comfortable to approach their bank to learn more about their FX margins. We follow our customers closely during this period and support them if they have any questions during the process.

So what is "success" for our customers?

Our customers sign up to our product for many different reasons—our job is to understand these reasons and expectations, minimize the time customers spend getting what they are looking for, and help them be self-sufficient with our product. Our onboarding process helps us take the guesswork out what success is to each and every customer. We strongly believe the benefit from spending time with our customers greatly outweighs the 60 minutes it takes. Here are a couple of examples why we believe so:

  • Take the guesswork out of customer profiling, personas, and user behavior As a product team, you are constantly seeking information about the people and organizations you try to solve problems for. It is well-known that getting access to different users, stakeholders, and organizations throughout the lifecycle of their product journey can be hard and very time consuming. By combining customer success and product development resources, we get direct access to the different users of our product. In addition, we get to follow them through their journey from first time user, upload, insight and negotiation. This insight is vital to our team to make sure we spend our time on solving problems and building features that actually matter to our customers. In short, we talk, we onboard, we design and build. We then loop back on new and old customers to get feedback.
  • Using our own product: Another important benefit from working closely with our customers is the fact that we spend a big portion of time analyzing and exploring customers data and insight using our own product. We do this to make sure we understand what position they are in and it makes us better rigged to help them if needed. When building a product solution in which each customer's data is unique, it is sometimes hard to make sure we test new features and find corner cases before our customer do. Again, spending time navigating and understanding our customers and their data helps us see new feature and product opportunities.

Scalability

How scalable is our process really? With our current pace, it is still scalable. How we choose to handle it when we rapidly grow our customer base over the coming years is yet-to-be-decided. One thing is for sure at least: our customers will be onboarded personally and we will be actively making sure they get maximum value out of our products. Also, we as a product team think is time well-spent as it makes us focus on the right things and makes our discussions shorter and less reliant on guesswork. Think about how many meetings and discussions you have on what you think is the best way forward... and how much time you could save if you had first hand access to the needs and success criteria's of your customers and users!

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