A customer's experience vs. value | Jai Thirani | TDSU Ep. 68

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What a bizarre reference to make. So actually, I have been to a Rainforest Café, but it's been about 30 years. I went to the Rainforest Café in a mall for dinner, and afterwards I bought my first CD ever, and it was the Spice Girls CD.

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Oh yeah? So I'm just gonna put that out there. Mine was Papa Roach, which I should not have bought as a 12-year-old. I mean, that should have been your last resort.

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What's up, Lifers, and welcome to The Daily Standup with Lifetime Value, where we're giving you fresh new customer success ideas every single day. I got my man, Rob, here. Rob, do you want to say hi? What's up, Lifers? And I've got JP here.

JP, do you want to say hi? What's up, friends? Lovers? What's up, friends? And we've got Jai here. Jai, do you want to say hi? Hey, guys. Great to be here.

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It's great to have you. And I am your host. My name is Dillon Young.

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Jai, would you please introduce yourself? Yeah, for sure. So I'm Jai. I'm the founder of Sero.

We're a customer onboarding platform for B2B SaaS companies. And yeah, so I do customer implementations and customer success myself. But I also sell it to the community.

So I have an interesting perspective there. Yeah, you've seen it from both sides. So Jai, you know what we're doing here? We're asking every single guest one question and one question only.

What is on your mind when it comes to customer success? So why don't you tell us what that is from your perspective? Yeah, for sure. So I've been thinking about the answer to the question, what was the quality of my customers onboarding? The reason I've been thinking about that question is, I'm sure it's pretty obvious to everyone in customer success, but the quality of your customer onboarding really determines whether your customer is set up for success or not. Let me dig deeper there.

When you're thinking about the answer to the question, is that because you have the answer or because, woefully, you have no freaking clue? The rest of us are just flying by the seat of your pants. I think I do have a good answer for it. I don't think I have the complete answer.

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But the way I think about customer onboarding is, it's kind of like an onion and there's these layers of risk to it. And you can feel away at that onion, but usually people only focus on one layer, which is how much time did it take to get my customer to launch? But I think it goes a lot more beyond that. I think it also depends on how long did it take to train your customer? When did they start logging into your tool? When did they start actually using it? When were they activated? And then when did they finally see value? I think people kind of skip a lot of the steps there and try to measure this ambiguous term of value, but there's so many steps you can measure even before then that I think people just miss out on.

And value is so much harder to measure than time it took to stand up the platform, time it took to train, time it took until they were considered adopted. The system was fully integrated with their processes and their workflow. Obviously value would be the holy grail, but it's so hard to measure and it can be so personal for each customer.

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Rob, I want to give you an opportunity to tell us how you think about this, particularly as you deal with multiple different products and so a ton of different user personas. That's a good question. And I think it's interesting because if I reflect on the conversation we're having so far, I'm hearing a lot of speed metrics, which are valuable.

Those are important. No pun intended. They're valuable.

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But I'm also realizing that there are times where you look at how much value is actually delivered. If you buy a product that's supposed to make you $20,000 and it makes you 10, yeah, it made us money, but it wasn't quite up to our expectations. So there's this question.

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So first hypothesis is speed to value. Second hypothesis is how much value. But then there's another third hypothesis too.

These are not mutually exclusive, by the way, but there's this third hypothesis around just the customer experience, which could be independent of the product value. I think many customers actually do judge products based on their experience rather than the exact product value. So I don't see those as being synonymous, whereas I used to, but it's a kind of complex thing, especially when you think about different multi-threading value at different layers of the client chain.

Tell me how you think about, and maybe throw this back to Jeb, but when Rob says experience, what does that make you think of as somebody who's trying to solve this problem or make it easier, reduce the friction? What is experience versus some of those much more quantitative metrics? What does that mean to you? I should answer this because I've been thinking about this a lot lately. Because I used to use them synonymously, experience and value, and then I realized from a friend of mine that I was wrong. Imagine you go to Rainforest Cafe for dinner because you really want a dinner.

You want a meal, right? You get an experience because you got all the animatronic animals and maybe you got a great server and then the waterfall and then the little toucan and whatever. All this stuff, that's part of your experience, but it's not the exact value that you were going for, which was dinner. You could use a similar analogy with gym memberships, right? Can I have everybody raise their hand if they've ever been to a Rainforest Cafe? Am I the only one? What a bizarre reference to make.

Actually, I have been to a Rainforest Cafe, but it's been about 30 years. I went to the Rainforest Cafe in a mall for dinner, and afterwards I bought my first CD ever, and it was the Spice Girls CD. Oh, yeah.

I had the cassette. I'm just going to put that out there. Mine was Papa Roach, which I should not have bought as a 12-year-old.

That should have been your last resort. Jai, I want to throw it back to you because I did originally pose that question to you. Rob so rudely interrupted to talk about the Rainforest Cafe inexplicably, but I'd like for you to tell me what you think about with experience.

I think experience is definitely in the hands of product teams. I think they're the ones who can define how that customer feels using the product and how easy it is to navigate to perform the actions they're looking to do. I personally think it's going to become a bigger and bigger part of the user experience.

Users are not okay with laggy software that takes time to work, time to set up. So I personally think experience is going to play a larger and larger part in selection of software. I do think with what Rob mentioned, they are exclusive.

They're not the same thing at all. You can feel great using a tool but not get the outcome you were looking for, and you've missed value, but experience has been great. So I do think it's a balance between time to getting there, experience, and the value itself.

How do you think about the experience of the onboarding process? What if the onboarding process is super fast, but it makes you feel terrible as a customer? Yeah, I mean, I think most products don't invest in onboarding because it's not their core function, which is why companies like ours exist. And we're kind of meant to make sure you get that time and experience while you can focus on the core actions in your product where you're delivering value. But I think it's very rare to have seen a very fast but painful onboarding.

So I think you're talking about a case which is rare. They could be bullying you into onboarding or giving your data. I've been in experiences where they're like, you got to give us your data now.

And if you don't, it's almost like this threat during the onboarding process. It didn't make me feel good. And that's kind of what I'm getting at with that question is, I think there's a spectrum of experience to value.

If it's super, super valuable, but it makes me feel terrible, okay, well, maybe I'm fine with that because they got the job done. But we'd really love for both of them to be on the positive side and as far into the positive as possible. Yeah, 100%.

I think if a user starts off with a feeling of hatred towards you or the platform they're using, they're going to kind of take every mistake that comes thereafter as, oh, I knew this was coming. Versus if you kind of start using the product with a feeling of, okay, they onboarded me really well. They were very friendly.

They gave me my space. And then they make a mistake. It's okay.

I can let go of this one. I'm sure it was a one-off. So I think that emotional adaptment at the start of the onboarding and post-onboarding is really key to having the customer on your side.

So I would definitely prioritize that even if you have to give up a bit of the speed. Right. I agree with that.

JP, what do you think? I think we're about out of time, but onboarding is a really important part of the customer journey. Yeah, definitely want to set them up from that point. It's definitely tougher to recover.

JP, have you had any experiences where you weren't responsible for the onboarding, but it did not go particularly well and you had to pick up the pieces after the fact? Have you seen that? How do you bring them back? How long do I have? Tune in next week where I give you my answers. Fair enough. Fair enough.

And that's our time, folks. JP, abstaining from answering. Some of you have never been to a Rainforest Cafe and it shows.

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At least two of us. At least two of us. Jet, thank you so much for bringing this up.

I think it's a great topic. It's the nuance involved with the onboarding process, particularly given the impact it has on retention potential downstream. Very valuable.

So thank you for bringing this to the group. We're out of time for now, but we'd love to have you back in the future, so we've got to say goodbye for now. This was great, guys.

Thank you for having me. Thanks, Jeff. Thanks, Jeff.

All right. See you. You've been listening to The Daily Standup by Lifetime Value.

Please note that the views expressed in these conversations are attributed only to those individuals on this recording and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of their respective employers. For all inquiries, please reach out via email to Dillon at lifetime value media dot com. Find us on YouTube at Lifetime Value and find us on the socials at Lifetime Value Media.

Until next time.