Modern businesses are constantly reminded that customer relationships are crucial for success. Now more than ever, customers are gravitating toward businesses that provide personalized and contextual service.As stated by Forrester, a willingness to prioritize long-term growth by building better customer relationshipswill be critical to business success in 2023.To asses and improve customer relations, you need a systematic way of managing customer requests and concerns. With the help of customer service software, you can unify, automate, and analyze customer service operations while keeping up with customers' demands.However, it can be challenging to determine what to look for in a software solution and to choose the right one for your business. To simplify the selection process for you, we've created a list of popular customer service software solutionsand analyzed their performance within the following parameters:Feature setLearning curveEase of useUser interfaceImplementationSupport offeredIntegrationsPricingContract termsAdaptabilityto different business models Based on our research,here's a summary of the top 10 customer service software solutions of 2023:LIKE.TG: Best overall customer service solutionZendesk: Best solution for integrating your help desk with other systemsSalesforce Service Cloud: Best customer service software for larger teamsHelp Scout: Best solution for email ticketing managementHappyFox: Best option for global knowledge base managementHiver: Best help desk for support via GmailFreshdesk: Best solution for small customer service teamsKayako: Best customer service software for live chat ticketingTeamSupport: Best support software for B2B needs10. Helpshift: Best solution for in-app customer supportHere's a look at our detailed analysis of each solution:LIKE.TGLIKE.TG helps you provide value-driven service by seamlessly connecting with customers across channels, like email, social media, messaging apps, telephony, and your help center. Thanks to an intuitive interface, it's easy to implement, and enhances the experience ofcustomer service representatives. Whether you are a small business or alargeenterprise, LIKE.TG equips your agents to offer personalized service at every step of the customer journey. Not only are your agents armed with customer context for each ticket but also always ready with a solution in hand to offer relevant and timely solutions.Decisionmakers can effortlessly tap into every minute detail of the ticketing journey, as well as agent performances and customer satisfaction levels, with visually appealing reports and dashboards.If you're looking for a system that is faster to implement with a minimal learning curve, won't diminish your budget, and is both flexible and scalable, LIKE.TG is the ideal choice for you.Pricing:You can explore the depth and functionality of LIKE.TG and its features with a 15-day free trial. There's also a Free plan available for basic ticketing needs. If you are a business with a small customer service team, Desk's $7Express planwill likely be the best fit. Other editions of Desk include Standard for $14, Professional for $23, and the Enterprise plan for $40 per user per month, billed annually.Integrations: With 300+ extensions and integrations available, you can seamlessly connect LIKE.TGwith other business apps.Security and compliance: LIKE.TG keeps your customers' data safe and secure by complying withISO 9001 requirements, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 (CCPA), and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).Mobile applications: Togive agents more flexibility, LIKE.TG offers a mobile application. It also offers a separate app for managers, called Radar, so they can monitor service operations, even when they're on the go.Learn why LIKE.TG is a good fit for your customers, agents, and business. ZendeskZendesk Support is a great option for teams focused onone type of customer service operation, like ticket management. It offers live chat support, telephony, analytics, and a help center as separate applications that can be included as add-ons to build a complete customer service solution. Its feature set is robust and extensive,but the platform can be complex to set up and use. This affects the implementation process and increases the learning curve for agents. Additionally, many users consider Zendesk's UIto be a bit outdated, which canmake it difficult for your agents to provide contextual and personalized service.Zendesk offers a free trial for 14 days, but does not offer a free plan. If you find Zendesk to be the right fit for your business, you can subscribe to their Support Desk plans, which start at $19 andincrease up to $115. If you wish to make changes to your Zendesk subscription, you can do so by making a request in writing before 30 days of the end of your present subscription cycle.Learn more about Zendesk's feature capabilities from this comparisonSalesforce Service CloudSalesforce is popular for its extensive feature set. It is good for businesses managing high volumes of tickets and require multiple business apps to connect with. However, due to its complexity, it can be time-consuming and difficult to get started. Managing tickets is not very easy due to Salesforce's outdated UI.Taking a closer look at pricing, Salesforce offers a free trial but does not offer a free plan. If you are a small business, you can get started with theEssentials plan for $25. Their Enterprise plans costs $165, but does not include basic features, such as telephony, live chat, and self-service, and offers limited AI, and limited analytics. Pricing tends to snowball, making it inconvenient for businesses to continue using Salesforce, or switch to another software solution. This is why it's a good idea to explore the features, add-ons, implementation, and after-support costs associated with Salesforce before making a commitment.Find an in-depth Salesforce Service Cloud feature analysis in this comparisonHelpScoutHelpScout is easy to get accustomed to,as its interface largely resembles Gmail's. Its customer support resources can help you transition to the platform in no time. With email, live chat, a knowledge base, reports, and simple if-and-when workflows,Help Scout is suitable for businesses with minimal support requirements. In particular, Help Scout's customers are drawn to its mailbox feature.However, if you operatethrough other channels, like telephony, social media, and messaging apps, you'll have to depend on third-party integrations.Pricing starts at $20 per user, billed annually, and extends to $65 per user. Upgrading or downgrading your subscription is easier than it is with Zendesk. However, if you are looking for a solution that is customizable and scalable, you might want to reconsider HelpScout on these grounds.HappyFoxHappyFox is easy to use comparedtomany other customer service software solutions. Its feature set is best for businesses that deal with limited channels and have small customer service teams. HappyFox allows you to include live chat, chatbots, and workflows in your support operations by subscribing to add-ons.HappyFoxstarts at $29 annually and can cost as much as $89 per agent. A minimum of five agents are required to sign up for a plan. You can explore the product for 30 days, but might come across roadblocks that require support teamsintervention. HappyFox offers multiple contractoptions, and if you plan on downgrading your plan or reducing your agent count, changeswill go intoeffect in the next billing cycle after your request is made. Large and growing businesses using HappyFox have reported app slowdowns, and limited integration options, customizability, and reporting capabilities.HiverHiver is a Gmail-based customer service solution, ideal for businesses that use Google Workspace. The support team is attentive, but some issues and bugs in the system might affect your work for a day or two. With Hiver, you can support your customers through live chat, email, WhatsApp, and telephony. Other channels, like social media and messaging apps, can be accessed through third-party integrations.Hiver does not offer many integration options. This can make it difficult to bolster your customer service platform with additional functionalities, and can get in the way of easy information retrieval and collaborative efforts.With a 7-day free trial, you can try out Hiver's highest plan. Plans range from "Lite" for $15 to "Elite" for $59. Hiver also offers a custom plan for teams that have more than 50 users. Hiver offers a pay-as-you-go service, and in terms of making changes to the plan, you can cancel your plan at any time without afee, but "you will be billed for the current billing cycle."FreshdeskFreshdesk centralizes customer support interactions from multiple channels, like email, social media, and live chat. Its integration capabilities are similar to Zendesk's and LIKE.TG's. Its UI is refreshing, butcan be overwhelming for first-time users, and can be timeconsuming to learn. Although the feature set is good enough for small businesses,it's difficult to scale Freshdesk to meet more extensivebusiness needs.You can explore the productthrough a 21-day trial, or opt for the free plan forbasic support requirements. Freshdesk's Support Desk plansrange from $15 to $79. Its omnichannel supportedition does not include a free plan, but ranges from $29 to $99. Omnichannel support gives you access to all supportchannels, but lacksnative integrations with WeChat and Telegram.Analyze Freshdesk furtherwith this comparisonKayakoContextual experiences are facilitated smoothly by Kayako. It offers cloud and on-premise software. Basic functionalities, like email support, Facebook, Twitter, live chat, help center, and reporting capabilities are included. However, telephony and messaging apps, like WhatsApp and Instagram, can only be accessed through third-party integrations. Although live chat is a popular Kayako feature, the feature's customizability is limited compared to its competitors. Customers have been happy with the simplicity of Kayako's new UI, but have also complained of system slow downsand errors. Responses are not wellrecorded, and SLAs might be misseddue to errors in the system. Learning and implementingKayako will require assistance from the support team. Plus, It can be difficult to integrate Kayako with other software, due to its limited integration capabilities.For a small business, this option may be easy to adopt, but in terms of feature upgrades and scalability, Kayako is lacking. It offers a free trial for 14 days.TeamSupportTeamSupport is a multi-channel ticketing system that enables support via email, live chat, messaging, and remote desktop control. One of the most appreciated features of Team Support is the ability to convert commonly asked questions into knowledge base articles. However, telephony and web forms are not built-in options. According to users, TeamSupport's user interface is sluggish compared to the interfaces of other customer service software solutions. The configuration and setup can be confusing for first-time users. Plus, synchronization and system breakage issues can become a hindrance when you're connecting with customers.TeamSupport offers a 14-day free trial, but no free plan. Their plans start at $49 and extend to $119. If you wish to make changes to the number of licensed users on your TeamSupport plan, you can do so with a written request to TeamSupport at least 30 days before the next renewal term.HelpshiftHelpshift is a help desk solution mainly focused on in-app support. Its live chat, knowledge base, rule-based bot, and AI that pulls articles from the KBare geared towards enhancing the gaming experience with in-app support. Helpshift also serves the fin-techand commerce industries. It allows users to report bugs, suggest improvements, and offer feedback related to the product or service. However, the designof Helpshift's UI appears to be outdated. Connectivity issues, delays in responses, and a complex setup can drastically affect acustomer's experience with Helpshift.You can explore the product through its 30-day free trial, or through its free plan. Paid plans start at $150. To accessmore advanced features for your unique needs, you can select Helpshift's custom pricing plan. You can upgrade at any time, but cancel only at the end of your subscription period.ConclusionWhen you choose a software solution for your business, you are investing in better customer and employee experiences. Dynamic analysis will help you make the right choice. Get started by taking advantage of free trials, and decide for yourself which customer service software solution is the best fit for your business.Disclaimer: All prices shown here are in USD. The names and logos for LIKE.TG are trademarks of LIKE.TG Corp. All other trademarks, brand names, or product names belong to their respective holders. Comparison information as of 25.04.2023

A few months back,whiletravelling for avideoshoot, we met some captivating people who ran businesses in these areas. I could not help but share these experiences in this series while I did take the liberty of changing their names.Itis inspired by the values demonstrated by the people of rural India.Their approach got me thinking of the customer service values in small towns and villages.It was a long drive from the chaos of the urban set-up. We had been travelling for quite some time andhadno plansofstoppingon our way to thelocationof ourshoot. Unfortunately, a few hundredkilometres on, our car broke down,leaving usstranded.Just then,apack of bikes, each carrying two or threemen, stopped by. They were dressed in linen shirts and dhotis, with variouscoloured scarvestied aroundeithertheir headsor necks. They were quick to recognise our problem and offered to guide us to thehome of themechanicwho lived in the nearby village. We immediately hopped ontheir bikes.Two men offered to stay back near the car to keep an eyeon it.We reached a small asbestos-roofed house.Onone side of the house,a few cycle tubeshungalong with an air pressure machine.Somegreased cloth pieces were lying about,andwe noticedtubs filled withbothclean and muddy water. On a chair, there was a tool-kit.A middle-aged man walked out ofthehouse, dressed casually in his linen cloth shirtwitha white dhoti draped traditionally around his waist.Thevillagersaccompanyingusran him through what had happened.He greeted us with a gestureof a namaste and a big smile on his face, introducing himself as Tukaram,the mechanic.Soon after,his wifeappearedwith some water for us to drink.Theyquickly moved the grains on the porch outside next to the hanging tubes, making space for us to sit.Ashort while later, we started back towards our car.Itwasalreadyquite a sunny afternoon. We indulged in some casual banter along the way. Tukaram quickly assessed the status of ourcar and said it would require a minimum of two hours torepair.I asked," Is there any hotel nearby for us to have something to eat?"He shrugged his head and said,"Alas! there is no hotel in the vicinity.Butwhy worry when I am here?Please let me arrange for some hot, pipping pakoras for you all while I work on your car. My wife is an amazing cook and her pakoras are very famous inthePampri village."When wereturned toTukaram's house, his wife had already begun the preparation.Our stomachsgrowledin response to thesmell of the food. Tukaram's wife,Anita Devi,invited us inside. She had already set up a dining areafor us.Along with her two children, shequickly servedussome hot onion pakoras, a tangy tomato chutney,anda cup of chai.The pakoras wereas delicious as Tukaram had promised.Eventually, Tukaramreturned with the news thatourcar had been repaired andwasparked in front of the house.We made our payment to Tukaram for his service,though his kindnesswasmore than we could everrepay.We said ourgoodbyes to the family, and theytoldus to visit them again.As the faces of the villagersfaded inthe distance,Ibegan to ponder:Who was I to Tukaram?When was the last time abusinesswent out of its way to meet the needs of its customers?Tukaram'skindness gotmethinking about the bond between a business and a customer. He had attended to us whole-heartedly withoutany apprehensions.This wasmore thana transaction between a business andacustomer.We had formeda bond that my companions and I would long remember.

A few months back,whiletravelling for avideoshoot, we met some captivating people who ran businesses in these areas. I could not help but share these experiences in this series while I did take the liberty of changing their names. Itis inspired by the values demonstrated by the people of rural India.Their approach got me thinking of the customer service values in small towns and villages.It was day two of ourjourney when we entered a smallvillage called Chitkuli. We had travelled quite a distance. The villagewassilent, as most people had retired to their houses for the night. Most houses had a veranda orfrontlawn,and a porch.A fewpeople in groups of five or sixgathered around amakeshift campfire.Wecould hearlaughter.We stoppedto ask if there were any lodging facilities nearby.Aboynomore than fourteen years oldeagerly responded, "Yes!You can stay over at Sarpanch Khaitan's residence."Justthen,an old man with a walking stick in his handand a saffron coloured turban walked up to our car. He leanedthrough the window and gazed at our faces,seeming to judgeour appearances.He then informed that there were no lodging as such nearby for another two-hundred kilo meters.Hethenintroduced himself as the Sarpanch of the village,and invited us to be his guests. The village wasapopular stopover for travellers,sohe had arrangeda few cottages at the heart of the villagefor their comfort. He got into the car to guide us.We entered through abluedoor,noting thefloral paintingnear the entrance.We removed our footwearand dropped our luggagein a dimly lit front room.The Sarpanch led us toacommon room witha veranda at its centre.There wasa sofaatoneend, and a swing at the other.Two rooms wereconnected,and oneboasted afully functional kitchen. We all made ourselves comfortable. Then Mr.Khaitanhanded over the keysand introduced us to Chinna, the caretaker. Once he departed,wewentto our bedson the terrace,which were outfitted withmosquito nets.The next morningwe woke tobirds chirping and the commotion ofvillagersbeginningtheir daily chores.We decided toexplore the village a bitbefore continuing our journey to the shoot.The breakfast spread was already arranged for us in the dining area next to the kitchen. The smell of hot dosas and gheetemptedour stomachs.Afterour breakfast, Chinnatook usfor aquickvillage tourin his tractor.Allaround the village,we were greetedwith big smiles andindulgentdelicacies.Hand looms were the primarybusiness, practised bymany in the village. The designs were so intricate and beautiful that we could not stop ourselves from purchasinga pair or two ofscarves. In the end, when it was time for us to leave, a few of the craftsmen gifted eachof uswitha scarfas a souvenir.As we had already purchased a few scarves from them, we questioned, "Why again?"To which they replied,"This is our way to thank you for appreciating our craftsmanship," they said. "You could gift these extra scarves as a souvenir to your loved ones and share our stories with them."When asked about the lodgingfee,weweretoldwe could give a donation of our choice,and all the money collected would go totheupkeep of the place andthewelfare ofthe village.As we departed, Ionce again considered myquestion from thePampri village, my previous encounter that I talked about in my other blog.Duringour stay,I had forgotten that I wasacustomer.Iwondered, what is quintessential for ensuring customer satisfaction?In this case, it was thehumilityof the villagers thathad touched our hearts.We would cherish the memories of our stay for a long time to come.

We understand that nothing touches a customer's life as much as customer service. Your agents put in efforts to turn every interaction into a memorable experience. And the support software you choose plays a crucial role in their success. This makes it necessary to evaluate your software vendorfor both stability and longevity. If you are here to stay for the long haul, shouldn't you expect the same from your vendor?Zendesk has long been an obvious choicefor many businesses.Itstarted its journey bybringing an idea discussed over coffee to life. Mikkel Svane, Alexander Aghassipour, and Morten Primdahl, the founders of Zendesk, noticed a changeneeded to be made to the help desk solutions of the time. And so they fixed the loopholes and introduced a simplified software solution in 2007. This caught the attention of customers and investors, paving the path for success. Zendesk was growing and so were the interests of the founders—so they decided to go public in 2014.After going public, Zendesk's responsibilities were not limited to catering to customers' demandsor developing products butalso meetingWall Street's expectations, investors' interests, and more. And that meant their responsibility towards investors might have exceeded their commitment to their customers. Why do we say that? Let's talk about what's transpired over the last few months.Many were surprised to hear about the acquisition of a company that once rejected offers because,"they feared joining a large enterprise giant and being unhappy or, worse, that their product — which they had spent so much time working on — would be shelved." What made a company that was adamant about staying independent change its decision?And how would this affect its customers? We decided to dig a little deeper to understand the possible changesthat could result from a change in ownership.In order to understand how Zendesk's operations are likely to change, let's first talk a little about private equity (PE) firms.PE firms are investment management firms that provide financial aid to companies through various investment strategies, either in the form of leveraged buyouts, venture capital, or growth capital.These firms raise private equityfunds through pension funds, university endowments, high net-worth individuals, family offices, and other sources. These sources are referred to as limited partners, and they hold 99% of shares in the funds raised. Meanwhile, the general partners, responsible for making investment decisions and managing the operations of the acquired company, hold 1%. In return for their investment in the company,PE firms charge an annual management fee of 2% on managed assets and20% on returns acquired after selling the company.Though they raise funds from limited partners, in the case of leveraged buyouts, PE firms borrow money from different sources to fund an acquisition. The assets of the acquired company, and some assets of the PE firm, are used as collateral to obtain debt. This further increases the risk borne by the acquired company. In the case of Zendesk, Blackstone, an investment management company,has provided a $5 billion debt to fund thisleveraged buy-out.The acquired company is loaded with debt after this type of acquisition, and must service their debt through profitable returns and cash flow. Considering the number of players involved in the investment, amount of debt borrowed, and funds raised, will Zendesk be able to meet these expectations, especially considering its history?As evident from the graph, Zendesk has failed to produce any profits over the last 10 years. But if you think they can pull a rabbit out of the hat, keep in mind that"rabbits" are usually born from years of RD. ButZendesk has invested twice the amount in sales and marketing as they have in research and development.Moreover, it's present state since the announcement of the acquisition speaks a different story.Source: Zendesk Investor presentationsWe are aware that PE firms usually adopt rigorous strategies to ensure cash flow to meet their management fees, re-pay debt, and provide profitable returns to their investors. With a decline in Annual revenue rate so far, will PE firms operate any differently for Zendesk?Source: Zendesk Investor presentationsLet's take a look at the strategies commonly adopted by PE firms in tough situations.1. Employee layoffsWhen a cost reduction strategy is adopted, employees are impacted significantly. As the workforce decreases, the responsibilities of retained employees increase, along with their mistrustand frustration. This tends to hamper their performance. Happy employees create happy customers, and layoffs simply don't breed positive working environments.We saw the effects of cost reduction on the employees ofToys R Us.When the businesswas acquired by PE firms, management laid off 30,000 employees. A shortage of employees and under-investment in stores affected their operations and customer satisfaction levels.Ultimately Toys R Us filed for bankruptcy.When employees are lost or shuffled around, the quality of the customer experience declines. How would you feel if your account manager was replaced by another? Would the new manager understand your business as well as the previous one? Even if they did, would you get their undivided attention and consistent service in the midst ofa lay off situation?As a customer, it's you, or your business, that faces the repercussions of investors' decisionsas employee layoffs affect all the spheres ofbusiness and not just employees.2.Shift in decision making powerWhen debt repayment and earning fees become of paramount importance, innovation becomes insignificant. This further changes the priorities of a business. Nick Egelanian, SiteWorks president, shares the following views on PE firms:“At the core of these things, they’re running an investment firm, not a retail business. The retailer becomes the collateral rather than the actual business you’re in.”Nick Egelanian,President at SiteWorksThis is usually the casefor businesses PE firms acquire.Here's an example that shows what happened when an engineering company was led by an investor with no engineering background.Boeing, an aircraft manufacturing company, was known for its craft in airplane making. The company's leaders developed an environment where everybody was treated like family. They fostered innovation, and employees poured their hearts into product development. As a result, the planes were trusted by customers, and Boeing was able to position itself as a leader of aircraft manufacturers successfully.With privatization came many challenges, but Boeing stood its ground. It was still one of the greatest competitors in their airplane manufacturing industry. In order to expand its operations, Boeing decided to merge with McDonnell Douglas Corp. But asMcDonnel Douglas Corp. employees held major senior positions and major stakes in the company, they brought a changeto the atmosphere and management at Boeing. Boeing was no longer led by a team of engineers, but by an investor who adopted cost reduction strategies. Without any aviation background, James McNerney held the reins of the company. He decided to upgrade the 737 to accommodate more passengers.The result—the 737 max—was unreliable. Negligence, and the cost reduction strategy employed by James McNerney,resulted in the production of a faulty plane that cost 346 lives. This stained the reputation of a company that was once lauded foraircraft manufacturing.Innovation comes at a cost—but the repercussions of cost reduction are greater than the innovation costs.Zendeskfaced a similar situation when the shareholders that held only a 2% stake in the company rejected the founders' proposal of buying Momentive, the parent company of Survey Monkey. When an investor with such meager amounts of investment could affect some major product development decisions, what willhappen when investors like PE firms takeover Zendesk?3.Focus on inorganic growth: The buy-build strategyWhen organic innovation is out of their strategy to boost returns the PE firms rely on inorganic growth. They usually adopt a buy-build strategy, whereby they acquire smaller companies to gain fast returns in a short time. Although this boosts revenue of PE firms, it barely adds any value to the portfolio company.According to leading financial services consulting firm,Bain and Company, "private equity funds have not only developed an outsize reliance on multiple expansion to generate returns, but they have also lost ground when it comes to adding organic value."Acquisitions createnumerous challenges that affect integration, security, company culture, management decisions, and most importantly, customer experience. Here are a few examples of acquisitions that left customers dissatisfied and the reasons behind them:The acquisition of Nextel by Sprint Communications was intended to increase the customer base of both companies and improve cross-sell efforts. The acquisition faced a number of issues, from integration difficulties to cultural clashes. Nextel had to dependon Sprint'sapproval to take certain actions, which was another reason the acquisition failed. In the midst of this, the company also "struggled tokeep its customers happy."Another example of an acquisition that resulted in customer dissatisfaction was E-bay's purchase ofSkype. When E-bay acquired Skype, E-bay's management intended to introducevideo communication to its customers—but its customers really just needed an email feature to organize their transactions. E-bay's failure to properly integrate Skype into its operation, and its miscalculation of customers' needs, caused the failure of this acquisition.A threat to PE firms and your operations: Changing market conditionsAnother point of concern is the stability of a company. No matter how strong PE firms have been in the past, market conditions play a crucial role in deciding their future—and the future of the portfolio company. TXU, the subject of the most expensive acquisition from 2005-2007, filed for bankruptcy shortly after its acquisition due to achange in market conditions.PE firms, which were onceaccustomed to cheap flow of capital, are currently facing a threat to their profitability amid poor market conditions, rising inflation, demographic trends, and a retreat from globalization. According to The Economist, PE firms might be "heading for a fall."Considering today's high inflation, a predicted recession,and slow economic growth, will PE firms generate the same amount of revenue that they did during times of cheap debt? How will PE firms manage to provide effective returns to their limited partners (LP) who've gotten used to enjoying profits?When the pressure of staying afloat increases, businesses are likely to increase their prices.Recent trends indicate that some businesses increased prices multiple times in a relatively short period due to the present market conditions. But will they stop there?Here are two likely outcomes for PE portfolio companies after purchase:1. They are either sold or listed as an IPO by the PE firm (Buy-sell strategy)When PE firms feel they've gained enough from the company, they head towards their strategy of selling or listing the company as an IPO. The holding power of a private equity firm is 6-7 years. But lately, the holding period has decreased from 5.8 years in 2014 to 4.4 years in 2021. With rising market concerns, will the holding power decrease further, leaving portfolio companies vulnerable to changes?2.Theyend up filing for bankruptcyWhen portfolio companies fail to service their debt, they file for bankruptcy. In the past, most portfolio companies, such as TXU and Toys R Us,filed for bankruptcy when debts were pushing down their operations. A leveraged buyout of Toys R Us affected the staff and the product growth. But as the portfolio companies filed for bankruptcy, the PE firms continued to stay strong.This greatly impacts the reputationsof portfolio companies, and the trust customers place in them. That's what happened with Toys R Us. Although they were saved by another company after they filed for bankruptcy, the customer experience felt by customers was no longer the same. A continuous change in operations affects the originality of a company. Will repairing a piece of broken glass ever bring it back to its original form?Will Zendesk end up in a similar situation? Only the future will tell.As a business, it is up to you to decide—can you depend on a vendor with an uncertain future, especially for an area as crucial as customer service?If you feel you deserve better, think about LIKE.TG. We've been private, profitable, and reliable for 26 years.

A few months back,whiletravelling for avideoshoot, we met some captivating people who ran businesses in these areas. I could not help but share these experiences in this series while I did take the liberty of changing their names. Itis inspired by the values demonstrated by the people of rural India.Their approach got me thinking of the customer service values in small towns and villages.On our way, we passed through many small villages,wherewe purchasedfresh fruitsandlocal delicacies. Many a time during our tea breaks,we chanced uponfascinating people from these villages. They would share stories,andsometimes,offerto sharefood theyhadbrought along for lunch.Bythe last mile of our journey, we were all eager toreachour destinationand set upfor the shoot. We had collected many beautiful handicrafts that were given to us as souvenirs in the villages we visited. Our creative director hadalreadyplanned to add themtothe misc en scene of the shoot.The road ahead was blocked.Aherd of sheep was crossing the road,shepherded by a young boy. He made a strange clicking sound through the corner of his lips, swaying his thin cane,mimicking an action of slicing through air. He saw us waiting to pass by, and tried to hasten the herd. We had a few snacks with us and decided topull over andoffer them to him.He smiledandsaid, "The road ahead is jammed duetoa tree blocking the path." Headvisedus to follow him for another way out that went along the fields. There were paddy fields to one side, a house in the middle,andsugar cane fieldsatthe other end. There was a barn next to the house,but few other homesin the vicinity.The boy introduced himself as Babloo. He was in school,and helped out his mother in the evenings.His motherhad just returned from the market after selling the season'sharvest. Shestill had some oranges left in her basket, which we asked to purchase.She theninvited usto have some ofthe orange juice she had made for her children. She welcomed us into her house and brought us each a glass. While we drank, shetoldusofthe hardshipsher family facedin selling their produce, as the middle men chargedexorbitant prices for their services.They had placed cots outside, under a hay shed as a place to relax.We spent a while talking and laughingbeforedeciding it was timeto leave. We purchased orangesfor our journey ahead, and the boy ranto getussome extrabottles of orange juiceto carry. When we tried to pay for the bottles, the mother replied, "I don't need money in return. Please keep the juice for the long journey ahead.After all,it is so sunny during the day.I am more than happytosharewith you."We waved our goodbyesand left for our journey, with thefaces and smilesof the familydisappearing slowly in the distance.By six in the evening,we reached our location. We retired to our roomsat a nearbyinspectionbungalow.The caretakerinformed us that dinner would be readyin the dining areaby 8PM.We all had a good power nap and freshened up for dinner.When we arrived, the food was already served on the table, and theroom was filled with the aroma of home-cooked food.We all sat around the table,andbegan to discuss the journey so far. How adventurous was our beginning with ourcarbreaking down at the very start!But luckily the villagers of the neighbouring areahad beenquite a help. Tukuram, who had serviced our car,had gone out of his way by not only repairing the car,butarranging a meal ofpakorasfor us as well.Our next stayattheChitkuli villagehad been just aswelcoming.We noticeda man about the age of fifty washaving dinner at a table next to us.He seemed to have been staying in the same accommodation as us.He hada diarynext to him,wherehewas quicklyjotting down pointswhile we were describing our journey. We askedwhy he was carryingthediary,andhe replied that he was penning down his research.He introduced himself as a commerce professor who taught at a university nearby. He was currently writing a book on the behavioural traits of trade in rural India.Heaskedfordetails aboutourjourney,and we toldhim about how the hand loom weavers from the Chitkuli village gave us scarves authentic to the practice as souvenirs. Their this gesturehadmade us feel as though we werepart of their community,rather thanmere customers. Tothis,the professor replied,"In researching thebehavioursof rural folk inbusiness, I have noticed that the value of togethernessservesas a priority.The rural folk believe that abusiness flourishes when your customerisa part of your journey,rather thana one-time transaction."Heexplained,"Rural folks tend to share deeper bonds with the people around them. They value interdependency and believeeach person playsa priorityroleinthe welfare of the community.It is these feelings among the rural folk that binds them together."He said, "You were treated not like a customer, but as a part of their familyandcommunity.That is because of the deep-rooted value of Athithi Devo Bhava, whichshapesbusiness transactionsin rural communities.""In contrast,considermost modern businesses," he said."When was the last time any business made you feellikepart of their familyduringthe very firstencounter?You have cutting edge technology, artificial intelligence,andaugmented reality, blah blah....available with business tools like CRMsandhelpdesks. But why is the human touch missing? Perhaps it is because those who build all these fancy toolsnever tookatrip like youhave.He then emphasized us to think,"Imagine someone from one of thevillagesyou visited—for example,Babloo the shepherd—growing up to build a high-technologycustomer service solution. Won't he bring all his empathy and cultural valuesto it?"That's when I replied to him,"Yes! There is already one such business, and I work for it."It's called LIKE.TG Desk. It was built in the heart of rural India in the year 2016 by leaders who believe in the notion of Atithi Devo Bhava. It is a business that stems from these very ideals.In fact, it is more than a business;it is a familyanda community.

Imaginewalkinginto astoreandstruggling to find assistance when you need it.Wouldyou walk out of that store immediately?Effectivecustomer support isessential. Itindicates thatyour business is a reliable place to be andensuresthat your customers feel acknowledged.Today,mostbusinessesmaintaina virtual presence to attend to a largercustomerbase.Butmany businesses fail toprioritize digital customer service the same way they prioritize in-person service. If you'd like to give your online help desk a stronger presence, and provide your customers withan ideal shopping experience, it's not too late.In this article, we'llhelp you findwaysto meet your ever-evolving customer supportneedsin contemporary times.Over the last two years, employershavehad toadjusttheir traditional work styles to accommodate the work-from-homemodel.Likewise, the customer care industry hasfelta major impact.Customer care is at an inflection point with an increase in call volumes (especially for complex questions), expectations of good customer experiences,and scarcity of customer support talent. According tothestate of customer care study,many companies are looking to improve the customer experience (CX) with a mix ofthe human touch and technology.Data credits: Mckinsey Company survey.5 Essentialsfor delivering top-notch customer servicetoday:1.Establish operations that are truly omnichannel:Loyal customers are the best allies in building a successful business. In order toearn loyalty, brands mustbe able to connectwith theircustomersand effectively caterto their needs.Nowadays, connecting with a customer is no longer restricted to your website and live conversations.With customer behaviour continually changing, it becomes even more challenging to determine one channel thatisbest for all customers.Modern support agents receive tickets from various channels, from email to chat, to calls, to social media platforms, and many more. This means active and efficient tracking of all communication platforms is essential.LIKE.TG helps your agents keep track of all their tickets in a single window. A wide range of ticket views and work modes, like status mode, priority modeand many other work modes by LIKE.TG help your agents to organize ticketsaccording to their preferences.2.Make the most of your social media accounts:According to arecent study, people age 25 and younger expect a brand to have a social media presenceand consider social accounts to be a reliable primary source of contact witha brand. This means a brand needs to be available on social media beyond its marketing/promotional activities.A rule of thumb of customer service is that a brand can provide better CX through quick and efficientresponses.Customersoftenexpresstheir grievances on social media platforms. According to a survey byConvince andConvert, 42% ofcustomers expect a response within 60 minutes ofraising a request.Thisexpectationhas made it necessary forsupport agents to be present on a wide range of platforms to provide their expertise.Many help desk solutions offer to help you aggregate all your tickets from different channels on one platform.Andwith LIKE.TG's Instant Messaging feature,you can respond to your customers on the same channel they used to approach you.3.Provide real-time assistance:Most businesses are investing in options for providing real time assistance to their customers. Around71% of companies agree that automationhas helped them stay strong during the pandemic. Withincreased investment in automation trending, chatbots have become extremely popular. The chatbot market has increased manifoldly over recent years.As artificial intelligence technology becomes more capable and accessible, it's becoming easier to provide timely and accurate customer service.With Zia, an AI. chatbot by LIKE.TG, you can provide support to your customers at the earliest.4.Invest in quality self-service options:To provide faster resolutions, customers areturningto self-service options. They prefer to find their answers through resources on a company's website, inthe company's knowledge base/community forums, or through automated chatbots rather than having to connect with an agent. Therising popularity ofgood self-service options hasnot eliminated the need foragents, buthas made iteasierfor customersto find answers tosimple questions, while saving their more complex concerns for live support.LIKE.TG has always aligned with self-service. With the latest addition to the self-service platform, Guided Conversations feature provides your customers with instant support and also empowers. It helps you build workflows to resolve simple and more frequent questions raised by a customer without involving a support agent in the process.5. Empowercustomer support agents:Itis now moreessentialthan evertoensure that your business is delivering prompt, effective customer service. While self-service has helpedtremendously in decreasing call volumes, agents continue to be responsible for addressing more complex questions. This requires companies toinvest inattracting and training talent that can handlein-depthquestions efficiently toimprovecustomer experience (CX) metrics. Withthe rise of features likeknowledge basesand automation enhancing self-service platforms,manysupport agents feel empowered and less burdened.Those in managerial roles also find their jobs simplified. Plus, support teams can beself-managedwhiledetailed analytics help facilitate a clear understanding of support team activities.Your customers are a part of your journey, and the customer experience plays an important role in determining the success of yourbusiness. LIKE.TG provides features,like multi-channel integration, the Radar app, custom functions, Guided Conversations,and Instant Messaging,that make it areliable, secure, and efficient solution for yourcustomer support desk.LIKE.TGDeskhelps you achieve betterrelationshipswith your customers bycatering to theirconstantly-evolvingneeds and demands.Tolearnmore aboutLIKE.TG'sfunctionalities,and howtheycan help you build a strongercustomerbase in thefast-paceddigital world,click here.

ChatGPT is a generative artificial intelligence (AI) that can outline blog posts, provide research to bolster your content,generate images, and write codes. Many people are excited about all the possible applications of ChatGPT. ButwhenGPT-4 generated a list of jobs it can potentially replace,it raised some concerns.It might be alarming to see that customer service representative jobs are second on the list. But it's important to keep in mind that while ChatGPT can sound authoritative, it cannot truly differentiate between fact and fantasy, and it certainly cannot predict the future. The chat window page even alerts users that ChatGPT "may occasionally generate incorrect information," and "may occasionally produce harmful instructions or biased content."The hype around AI invokes images of robots bent on threatening humankind, blame Westworld, The Matrix, and I, Robot. However, The reality of AI is far less terrifying. It rather has a harmonious relationship with humans, empowering us to do our jobs better.But can ChatGPT be used in all customer service situations? Let's find out.What ChatGPT cannot do:Empathize with the customerGPT-4 claims it can take over the jobs of customer service reps because it "thinks" it can replace empathy. Many have declared thatChatGPT generates misinformation that sounds convincing, and this certainly seems like an example of that. Although it is programmed to recognize and understand certain phrases that indicate human emotions, it cannot experience emotions in the same way customer service reps (humans) do, so it cannot truly empathize with customers.Handle complex questionsChatGPT can provide relevant information from the data it is trained on. But it may not be able to provide comprehensive solutions to complex questions, especially those that require creative problem-solving. Moreover, it cannot understand the context of a conversation, so there always needs to be a human in the loop to handle exceptional customer support cases.Provide personalized supportEvery human should be treated equally but not the same. Humans differ in temperament and opinions, and an AI algorithm might fail to consider that.Although it is possible to integrate ChatGPT with business-specific systems like your help desk or CRM and train it on specific domain knowledge, it doesn't know your customer better than you do and falls short when answers need to be tailored to fit specific customer needs. Always provide the correct answerChatGPT uses a large language model that is continuously trained to improve response accuracy. However, like any artificial intelligence, ChatGPT's responses may contain biases or inaccuracies that may confuse customers. Although ChatGPT generates human-like responses, users must still edit, personalize, and fact-check them.ChatGPT is more of a companion than a full replacement for its human counterparts. Even with its shortcomings, it has the potential to improve customer service operations significantlywhen used appropriately.What ChatGPT can do:Summarize a thread or a knowledge base articleChatGPT has excellent summarization skills. It can quickly process lengthy articles or conversations and pull out the most relevant points. This is particularly helpful when an agent has to transfera ticket to another agent or department. ChatGPT can also help repurpose an existing knowledge base article into step-by-step instructions to sharewith a customer.Rephrase agent repliesChatGPT can generate multiple phrasings of the same text response in a few seconds while retaining the original meaning. Agents can ask ChatGPT to make a message more friendly or formal. It can generate multiple responses, so agents can choose the most desirable option. This helpsimprove the fluency and tone of the reply.Auto-completeticket replySimilar to predictive text on your smartphone, ChatGPT cansuggest possible phrases/sentences to complete your response. Support agents generally know the correct answer, so with minor tweaks to what ChatGPT suggests, they can createand type out responsesmore quickly.Analyze customer sentimentAs noted earlier, ChatGPT cannot empathize with humans, but it can recognize keywords and phrases that indicate human emotions such as happiness, sadness, and frustration. This skill can be used to sense the tone of an incoming thread and determine the customer's mood. Here's an example of one such use case implemented by LIKE.TG that allows the agents to view the Customer Mood Summary to understand and engage better with the customer.Provide multilingual supportThe exact number of languages that ChatGPT supports cannot be determined, as the GPT model continues to update and improve. However, at this time, it already knowsquite a few languages.It can translate messages from one language to another in a few seconds.With its multilingual capabilities, ChatGPT can help in providing support to a wider range of customers.Create templatesTell ChatGPT what you’re writing—a support email reply to a review, help article, return policy, or something else. ChatGPT can generate templates for all your common communication materials and questions. Then, you can customize the content with relevant product information and other details.Power business chatbotYou can use OpenAI's API to incorporate ChatGPT into your website or app and use it as a business chatbot to provide around-the-clock support. It can be trained to answer commonly asked questions by surfing the company's knowledge base and performing specific tasks such as booking appointments or placing orders.Wrapping up!The workplace is constantly evolving, just as it has been for centuries. People lost their jobs to machines during the Industrial Revolution. But those who embraced the changes became more relevant. Right now we are experiencing an AI revolution.Humans are — and always will be — fundamental to AI, because AI cannot interpret events, actions, or tones like humans can. A set of computer programs cannot feel like humans, so they don't consider feelings. They fail to understand situational nuances. But the only way to keep up in the modern workplaceis to embrace GPT and similar technologies.

Today, most businesses rely on cloud-based solutions to operate smoothly and cost-efficiently. Dependence on the cloud is often based on the convenience of software maintenance, the flexibility to adjust licenses based on usage, and the reduced costs of use and operation it provides.However, not every software solution on the market offers these benefits. Take, for instance, Zendesk.When Zendesk introduced its customer service software solution, businesses were drawn to its simple and easy-to-use offerings. A short time later, in 2010, Zendesk announced a price increase, leading to a 300% increase in some users' monthly fees. In response to customer backlash, the CEO grandfathered pricing for existing customers and expressed a commitment to provide "the best product and the best value for all of the additional functionality we roll out in the future." However, the product that once enabled businesses to operate smoothly grew in complexity.Since 2010, Zendesk has undergone several changes, the most significant being its acquisition by an investor group led by Hellman and Friedman, and Permira. A few months after the announcement, there were speculations about employee layoffs, a change in CEO, and a price increase.One by one, these all came to fruition. Are there more changes ahead for Zendesk's customers? Once again, only time will tell.Recently, Zendesk announced a 15% price increase for its service software and a 20% price increase for its other add-on products, citing the same reason they did in 2010: product innovation.While many customers expressed unhappiness, others chose to opt in to multi-year contracts to temporarily save their businesses from increased costs. This workaround meant customers could no longer enjoy the pay-as-you-go subscription model, one of the reasons many opted for a cloud-based solutionin the first place.Now comes an important question: Is increasing prices wrong? Not as long as customers get the value the vendor claims to offer. This is why we decided to dissect Zendesk's current pricing structure against the value it offersto customers.As you may know, this pricing is only for one part of a more complete customer service solution. If you choose Zendesk as your customer service platform, you will need to piece together multiple applications to make it work for you. Essential features, like call, chat, messaging, analytics, and the help center are available as separate products for purchase, and have also seen a 20% price increase.Some basic features are either absent from the application or offered as extensions. Moreover, every time Zendesk acquires a new feature, customers have to pay for the acquired feature as an add-on or as part of a high-priced bundle edition.This means you will be paying for Zendesk's acquisitions, as well as Zendesk's acquisition of $10.2 billion.As a leveraged buyoutwith a history of 10 years of consistent losses,Zendesk and its investors are bound to look for better returns on their investment. With anexorbitantdebtto pay, a history of losses, and an uncertain economic situation at present, will Zendesk be able to continue to innovatethrough acquisitions? And will customers have to continue paying the price for it?At LIKE.TG, we believe that there is a better way. We built our products through years of sustainable research and development to deliver efficient software at the right price. We've been reliable, self-sufficient, and profitable for 26 years.Switch to our customer service software, LIKE.TG. Trusted by companies like Daimler, Godrej, and 100 thousand other businesses around the world to build lasting customer relationships.To learn more about how LIKE.TG's functionality stacks up against Zendesk's, head to this comparison page.Disclaimer: Facts cited are based on our internal research.

Imagine walking into a store to buy a pair of shoes. The salesperson is friendly and helps you find the perfect pair. You're happy with your purchase and you leave the store feeling great.But a few weeks later, the shoes start to fall apart. You return to the store for a refund, but the customer service representative is dismissive and unhelpful. You leave feeling disappointed.Even though the salesperson won you over initially, the bad customer service experience left a lasting impression. You're unlikely to shop at that store again.Now, imagine walking into a different store. The salesperson is friendly, but they don't have the right size or style of shoes for you. You're disappointed, but you understand.However, the customer service representative goes above and beyond to help you find the perfect pair of shoes. They check other stores in their chain and even order them from a different warehouse. You're so impressed with the customer service that you become loyal and enthusiastically recommend the store to everyone.The takeaway from the story? Sales has to win once, but customer service has to win every time. Credits: Shep HykenYou need to cross the finish line first to win the race, and that's similar to how sales need to close a deal to win a customer's business. However, customer service is more like a marathon. You need to keep running and providing excellent service to your customers, even if they don't make a purchase right away. That's because good customer service can turn a one-time sale into a lifelong customer.How can your customer service teams win every time?It’s all too easy to lose customers in a competitive consumer-driven marketplace. And providing poor customer service is one of the fastest ways for that to happen. Here's how you can set your customer service team up for winning.Be present on channels that matter to your customersTo connect with your customers, you must be available on the social media platforms they frequent, the communities they engage in, the forums they seek advice on or even the direct line of instant messaging apps they use. You have to do more than simply exist on these channels: Listen intently to their concerns, participate meaningfully in conversations, and be prepared to address issues publicly and transparently when necessary.Make the experience so smooth that customers won't need to reach outJeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, is quoted as having said: “The best customer service is if the customer doesn’t need to call you, doesn’t need to talk to you. It just works.” This perfectly sums up the idea of empowering customers to take control of their own experiences. Today, customers, like you and I, expect a superior standard of self-service from all the brands we interact with. The integration of self-service portals, automation, and artificial intelligence is currently paving the way for continuous improvements in this domain, promising to democratize the self-service experience.Be fast, but uphold qualityIn customer service, you have to find the sweet spot where speed meets quality. Here's how:Prioritize and triage requests to address urgent needs quickly (think about a server outage) while dedicating focused time to complex problems (like refund disputes).Equip your customer support reps with the right tools and resources to solve problems independently. They need clear guidelines, readily accessible information, and the ability to make decisions without lengthy approval procedures.Automate repetitive tasks like password resets or basic order tracking, freeing up time for reps to focus on complex inquiries and personalized interactions.Monitor performance and act on itCustomer service, unlike sales, can be difficult to monitor because the results are not immediately credited to your account. Quantifying customer service can be tricky, but it's far from impossible! Here are a few ways to measure the impact of your customer service efforts:Quantitative metrics:Customer satisfaction (CSAT): Use surveys or post-interaction prompts to gauge immediate satisfaction with specific interactions.Net promoter score (NPS): Ask customers how likely they are to recommend your brand, providing a strong indicator of overall loyalty.Customer effort score (CES): Measure how easy it was for customers to resolve their issues, revealing potential friction points.First contact resolution rate (FCR): Track the percentage of issues resolved on the first interaction, signifying efficiency and reduced frustration.Average resolution time (ART): Monitor how long it takes to address issues, identifying areas for improvement in speed and efficiency.Customer churn rate (CCR): Calculate the percentage of customers who cease doing business with you, highlighting potential service flaws.Qualitative metrics:Social media sentiment: Gauge overall customer sentiment towards your brand and customer service by analyzing public online conversations.Customer reviews and feedback: Mine reviews and feedback for recurring themes, revealing positive and negative aspects of your service.You are ready to win!While sales seal the deal, it's exceptional customer service that makes customers stay. Sales aim for that one victorious moment, but customer service plays the long game,aiming to score a fresh win with every interaction.To win at customer service, choosing the right tool can make a significant difference. Consider giving LIKE.TG a try and experience how it can improve your customer service game!

Empathy. You’ve heard it’s an essential skill for product managers, marketing managers, and UX teams. But how can you put empathy into practice when engaging with customers and prospects? Empathy is a way of understanding your customers’ underlying needs and motivations. I believe that empathy can lead you to build a better product and then explain to the world why you’re building it. I think of empathy as listening closely but also as a way of asking better questions that matter. Here are a few tips and examples you can use during your customer interviews to arrive at unique insights you wouldn’t have otherwise – and ultimately build great products. Understand How Customers Define Success A good place to start is by asking questions to help understand a customer’s motivation to solve a problem. If your product is B2B, you want to understand what they want to achieve with their business and the metrics they use to measure success. In B2B, it’s important to remember that “customers” are not businesses but people. Here’s an example: When I was helping to validate the product that eventually became AppFolio, we scheduled several long conversations and in-person visits with our target business owners. We wanted to learn about the products they used but also to understand what they wanted to achieve with their business. At first, we assumed that they wanted to make more money. That often was true, but frequently we heard something different. Many simply wanted to maintain the business but run it more efficiently so they could have more free time (we heard about golfing on Fridays more than once). Others wanted to build a sustainable business they could pass on to their son or daughter. By understanding these motivations through empathetic questioning, we could build a product and compelling value proposition that resonated with our target customer. For your customers, ask the basic questions that illuminate success metrics – for example: “Why did you start this business?” “How did you get into this job?” “How do you know you have had a successful year?” Understand How They are Solving Problems Today When talking with prospects, ask for examples of how they solve their problems today. If they are currently your customer, they may be supplementing your solution with other solutions—this is essential to understand. You can discover great product opportunities when customers are cobbling together multiple solutions (including spreadsheets and paper) to solve the problem. For B2B products, there is no better option than being in their office to see the systems, workflow (and problems) first-hand. You can also see nonverbal cues. Phone interviews are fine, but seeing stacks of paper, wall charts, sticky notes, and other workarounds can give your team inspiration for innovative ways to solve the problem. Uncover the True Motivators As a product manager, you already know it’s crucial to uncover pain. But sometimes, customers and prospects tell you what you want to hear. Or tell you something is important when it’s actually not very high on their priority list. Asking the right questions can help you get to the true motivators. Here’s an example: When researching the concept that became LIKE.TG, we interviewed dozens of product managers to understand their product roadmapping process. As a result, we uncovered a lot of pain and motivation to change an ineffective process dominated by spreadsheets and presentation tools. But we learned that the challenge for them wasn’t only about saving time and getting out from under the burden of Excel and PowerPoint. By asking the right questions and listening closely, we understood that it was also about creating a compelling vision and looking good in front of stakeholders and executives. As a result, our product roadmap software looks beautiful and delivers on speed and ease of use. The best way to uncover true motivators is with open-ended questions. Using “why” and “how” are great tools to use often. Couple that with listening closely, and you are on the right track. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '3f36d63f-fe4f-400d-ab83-a64b28767625', {"region":"na1"}); A Few More Tips for Empathy Listen to their language. Listen closely to the way that customers phrase their problems and their domain space. Then, use that language when talking with them. These descriptions and words can not only provide you with a way of discussing issues in a common language, but you can later use this language to describe your product and build out value propositions that resonate. Debrief after each interview. If you can, interview in pairs or as part of a team. Take notes and have a follow-up discussion to document what each of you heard. I guarantee that you heard things differently. Let customers answer questions themselves. Don’t prompt them with suggested answers. Instead, give them time to answer the question. Sometimes uncomfortable silence is good and will yield responses you might not have gotten otherwise. I’ve seen first-hand how empathetic questioning and listening can help uncover true motivations and provide a path to better products. It’s also great to let customers know that we care enough to truly understand them.

“We’re agile, so why do we need a long-term product roadmap?”I hear this question regularly. At first blush, the termsagileandproduct roadmap seem like a contradiction, but they’re not. In fact, you should have an agile product roadmap. In most agile product development organizations, the backlog is used by the development team to track what’s coming next, at least for the next few sprints or iterations. Many agile teams rely heavily on the backlog, as it maps out short-term initiatives. But the backlog in itself is not the roadmap. This post explains why you need both. Product Roadmap vs. Backlog A product roadmap is different from a backlog. The product roadmap defines a strategic view of where the product is headed over the mid to long term, whereas the backlog defines the product features and initiatives for the near term. The roadmap is tied to the organization’s vision and long-term strategic goals, often for the next 12 or more months. In an agile organization, the roadmap provides guidance rather than a strict project plan. It’s Hard to Communicate Strategy in a Backlog An agile product roadmap communicates to the organization the big picture – the initiatives that move the needle, expand markets, address competition, and create customer value.That big-picture thinking can’t be distilled in the backlog. It’s challenging to communicate strategy in a list that’s 200 items long, especially to executives and other stakeholders who may not think in terms of iterations or sprints. Even agile organizations need this strategic view. At LIKE.TG we’vediscovered our customers are sharing product roadmaps with the engineers to give perspective to the backlog. It helps the development organization understand how the next few sprints fit into the big picture. An agile product roadmap speaks in terms ofepics and themes, while the backlog is the detailed features and other tasks that deliver the product.In a sense, the backlog is a translation of how your team will deliver the vision outlined on an agile product roadmap. Get Strategic Project Alignment ➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'bfb5032e-5746-4c05-9f2a-54b36ba0e871', {"useNewLoader":"true","region":"na1"}); Why an Agile Product Roadmap Makes Sense A roadmap should be agile and thought of as a living document rather than a plan set in stone. Like the backlog, the product roadmap should be regularly discussed, prioritized, estimated, updated, and shared. Because an agile product roadmap will inevitably change, it’s important to set expectations with your stakeholders that the roadmap is not a promise. Many of our customers keep the roadmap dates at a monthly or quarterly level, or leave the dates off altogether to avoid setting the impression that features will be delivered by a specific date. Product owners need to regularly communicate where the product is heading so that everyone is on the same page, especially to stakeholders who make final decisions, control the budget, or influence the direction of the company.Your agile product roadmap, therefore, should be a visual, easy-to-digest document that your stakeholders can understand and that gives perspective to your backlog. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '3f36d63f-fe4f-400d-ab83-a64b28767625', {"region":"na1"});

If your product team is like most, you have software for capturing issues, managing requirements, and tracking projects. After all, it’s essential to manage the details and deliver quality product releases. But we hear regularly from product managers who tell us it’s too hard to use the information in these tools to plan and create a high-level product roadmap for communicating with executives and other stakeholders. Here’s the problem: the current tools often develop the roadmap from the bottom-up details, not the top-down big picture. Product managers are looking to flip their process around – they want an easy way to create a high-level product roadmap without first entering the low-level details. And those details are often not defined or fuzzy at best, especially if they’re more than a couple of quarters in the future. Even though most product managers are using sophisticated product management software, the irony is that it simply takes too long to create a decent product roadmap that executives understand. As a result, far too many product managers turn to dated tools like PowerPoint and spreadsheets for planning and communicating their high-level strategy. Just this week a VP of Product summarized it nicely for me. She said “I need to find something that my executive team likes. Every year we seem to argue over templates. I want to get out of the line of fire and get some part of my weekend back.” What we’ve found through dozens of conversations with customers is that product managers and product executives want a simpler way to do top-down strategic planning and communication. They want to have productive discussions about future big initiatives, themes, or epics that move the needle for the company. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '3f36d63f-fe4f-400d-ab83-a64b28767625', {"region":"na1"}); Several product managers have told us their executive team simply doesn’t care much about the details—what they really care about is whether the proposed roadmap fits with the strategic direction of the company. Successful product managers tap into this by keeping the roadmapping process high-level and collaborative. We found that by helping product managers easily create and then share their high-level product vision, they can get the executive team, marketing, engineering management and the rest of the organization on board with the strategy. We built LIKE.TG as an elegant way to quickly create a beautiful top-down product roadmap and then present the strategy to the executive team and management. It provides product teams a way to do high-level strategic planning, entering details about business value, development effort, and other information only at the point when it’s better defined. Through this process, the product team minimizes disconnects and gets everyone on the same page earlier in the process. Is it time to turn your product roadmap process upside down? photo credit: Margaret Killjoy cc

Recently I spoke to a class at the UCSB Technology Management Program about market validation and failure testing – the process of testing whether customers will buy your product before you build it. I was part of a startup several years ago that raised millions – we spent about$10 million of it developing and launching a product that no one wanted. It was a mistake that was avoidable. Download the Anatomy of a Product Launch ➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '0edb2611-2761-4434-90b0-f055704d9daa', {}); Through that failure, I learned how to first validate product concepts before building andscaling them. I’m a believer in the process and have used it successfully for many products and services, including GoToMeeting, GoToMyPC, AppFolio, and LIKE.TG. Here are seven best-practices I outlined in my talk that you can use in your market validation and failure testing efforts. 7 Steps for Testing if Your Product Will Fail 1. Adopt the philosophy of market validation. “My assumptions may be wrong.” For me, this approach underlies everything about market validation and customer development. Too many entrepreneurs and product managers are too rigid in their belief that they know what’s best for the customer – this only increases the risk of failure. 2. Write a testable hypothesis. Write a testable hypothesis for the market segment, problem, product, and business model. You can document your hypothesis in several different ways, whether that’s the Business Model Canvas, the Lean Canvas, a simple document, or sticky notes. 3. Focus first on the problem, not the product. Understand the problem thoroughly by first conducting 10 problem discovery interviews. I find that by focusing on the problem first, the product concept falls into place much more rapidly. 4. Ask open-ended questions. Make sure you understand your customers and are nailing the real customer pain. I wrote about this in 10 Great Questions Product Managers Should Ask. 5. Pitch your solutionto 20 customers after you have nailed the problem. An ideal pitch tells them their problem and how your solution solves that problem. It also describes what your product won’t do and potentially tests pricing. 6. Iterate your hypothesis as you learn. In the spirit of agile, you should iterate as you learn. However, unlike many Lean Startups, you are iterating on a concept or prototype rather than an actual product. 7. Track your interviews. I use a template for tracking customer problems, value propositions for our product, must-have features, objections, probability of buying, and interesting quotes. Keeping good track of interview notes isessential when conducting dozens of interviews. The notesalso serve as great customer evidence for justifying product initiatives to stakeholders. I then summarize what I’m hearing into a spreadsheet to make it easier to digest the massive amount of qualitative information I’ve gathered.

Deciding which initiatives to include in your futureproduct releases can be daunting. Product prioritization is even more difficult when there are too many opportunities to choose from and too many stakeholders to satisfy. Often these all-important decisions are disconnected from a company’s strategic goals, with product prioritization discussions dominated by opinion, a knee-jerk reaction to the latest lost sale, or the influence of a, particularly vocal executive. By using a scoring method to guide your product prioritization discussions, product managers can facilitate a more productive conversation about what to include on the product roadmap. While there are many inputs that ultimately go into a product decision, a scoring model can help the team have an objective conversation about product prioritization. One way to work through the process is withLIKE.TG’s Planning Board, a framework to help prioritize product opportunities. Based on product management best practices, the Planning Board helps you and your team objectively score new initiatives.More importantly, the Planning Board gives you a process to guide your strategic discussions. Whether you use a spreadsheet or the Planning Board, this method can make the product planningprocess more productive and help you get buy-in from key stakeholders. Think Benefit versus Cost Every potential initiative has two major considerations: the business Benefit and the associated Cost of implementing it. Product managers implicitly or explicitly use this calculation when prioritizing. The priority of an initiative is a composite of Benefit versus Cost (clearly, items with high Benefit and low Cost get higher priority). Benefits can be described as customer value, strategic value, revenue potential, cost reduction, or any other strategic objective your company may have. Costs often include implementation or development effort as one of the key categories. You may also want to include the impact on ongoing operational costs, or even an initiative’s risk factor. With the Planning Board you prioritize opportunities based on a customized set of Benefit and Cost categories. For example: Your company’s specific Benefit and Cost categories will be different – some companies based their categories on an ever-evolving set of criteria, while others use the company’s strategic initiatives as a basis. Whatever categories you choose, thePlanning Board is customizable. The Planning Board takes into account the relative weighting of each category that you assign (the weight can add up to any number you choose). Discussing the weighting of each category in your planning meetings is a great way to get an agreement on what’s important to the organization. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'e1e87713-3763-4c27-8f73-f817614e5f52', {}); The Scoring Discussion: It’s All Relative Once you have an agreement on the Benefit and Cost categories, you can begin scoring the initiatives. The Planning Board uses ascale of 1-5 to rank each opportunity in a category: One (1) is low Benefit or low Cost. Five (5) is high Benefit or high Cost. It’s important that you score items relative to other items. In other words, an initiative’s score only matters when you compare it to another initiative. And because business objectives can change, scores can change as well. Once you have a score for each item, you can have a fact-based, objective discussion with the team about what to include on the product roadmap. Of course, simply because an item has a high score doesn’t mean you add it to the roadmap. You still need to practice good product management, and that includes assessing many more variables than could be included in a product prioritization framework. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '3f36d63f-fe4f-400d-ab83-a64b28767625', {"region":"na1"}); The total score and rank is a composite of Benefit versus Cost and takes into account each column’s weighting. For example, an item with 5’s on the Benefit side and 1’s on the Cost side will calculate the maximum score. Which initiatives should you score? At LIKE.TG we recommend you use this model for only big features, themes, epics, and strategic initiatives rather than smaller features. In other words, use the framework for evaluating the needle movers that make an impact on the strategic goals. We’ve made the Planning Board flexible enough that you can pull in opportunities from the backlog (Table Layout) or items that are already on the roadmap. LIKE.TG is a web-based product roadmap software. If you haven’t already, feel free to sign up for a 30-dayfree trial.

A few days agoI had lunchwith the product team of a mid-sized software company, and one of the product managers had a conundrum: “Sometimes I hear the same feature request over and over, but when we finally release it customers barely use it.” Does that sound familiar? How can we as product managers avoid these dead-weight product features? How can we determine whether to 1.) implement a feature exactly as customers request, 2.) defer it, or 3.)deliver something that is completely different than requested but solves the core problem? hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '3f36d63f-fe4f-400d-ab83-a64b28767625', {"region":"na1"}); In my experience, good product managersoften combine all three (especially the deferring part). But for the product features you decide to includeon the roadmap, there is one practice that can help you make sure they will add value and get used: Set aside the feature request andfirst understand the job that customers need to accomplish. I’m assuming you’ve already nailed the basics: You have a process for validating prototypes with customers, and once you release a feature, you have the metrics to measure the success of the feature. “I need the following product features…” Before LIKE.TG I worked fora SaaScompany developing business software for vertical markets. The software was complex, including accounting, CRM, and marketing. Everycustomer came to our solution from another solution, and they often came to us with a pre-conceived mindset about what features the softwareneeded to have. We routinely gotrequests for product features and reports that (surprise) mirrored exactly what they were using in their previous solution. Sure, it would have probably satisfied the customers to simply add the button, feature, or report they asked for. But through understanding the job they were trying to accomplish we were able to imagine solutions that they were not able to imagine themselves and deliver product features that completely revolutionized their workflow. Download Building Your First Product Roadmap ➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'a81908bd-d7dd-4be2-9d7e-cb09f3f90137', {}); Case Study: Eliminating Hours of Work with a Few Clicks Withtheir previous solution, our customers would print out reports that needed to be producedevery month. In some cases this process would last for days; printing hundreds of reports, collating them,attaching checks, and stuffing it all into manila envelopes to be mailed. It was a cumbersome, horrible process. Some even had family and children join them for “stuffing parties” because it was so time-consuming. But this was a part of their life and they expected our software to support this workflow with the appropriate reports, printing, and buttons, and so on. Before building our solution, we spent hours onsite at the offices ofour earlyprospects to understand their workflow, hear their pain points, see the stacks of paper on their desk, and internalizewhat they were really trying to accomplish. We watched over their shoulder, asked a lot of open-ended questions, shot hours of video, and ate (too many) donuts with them in the break room. We thoroughly understoodthe job they needed to accomplish: delivering reliable information and payments to their customers (to be clear, the job was not printing reports and mailing checks). We envisioned how their life could be different by using the latesttechnology to optimize their workflow. We knew how it could improve their business and how much money they would be saving if we could shave hours off their process by moving the information and payments electronically. Once we understoodthat, we were able to release innovative product features that our customershadn’t considered or thought possible. For our customers, what previously took hours or days could now be accomplished in a few clicks. The results were wildly successful features that contributed to ourcustomers becoming hugepromoters of the software. Not every feature needs to be re-imagined. Sometimes there is low-hanging fruit you can deliver that happens to match exactly what customers request. But there are often product features that warrant further digging to really understand the job the customer is trying to accomplish, and get the right initiatives onto your product roadmap. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '5894a003-79ce-4ea3-9804-dae280a96106', {});

A few well-phrased questions can yield fantastic customer insights. But knowing the right questions to ask during customer conversations and win-loss interviews takes a lot of practice and a healthy dose of curiosity. Here are ten open-ended customer interview questions I have in my arsenal that have worked well for me over the years when engaging with prospects and customers on products including ProductPlan. Asking a few of these questions can make a difference in the features you decide to include on your product roadmap. Download My Customer Interview Tool Box ➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '7f735619-2494-4c81-b86b-cf6e764a20c3', {}); 1. Why? This is by far the most powerful question you can ask, so ask it often. Product managers should rarely accept a customer’s initial response; promptly moving onto the next point without pressing further can cheat your own understanding. By asking “why” as a follow-up question you can often extract a more enlightening response and get to the crux of their issue. For example, when I interviewed people about the product concept that became Citrix GoToMyPC we spent less time talking about remote access features and more time asking why their life would be better with our solution. As a result, we uncovered a stronger value proposition for the product. 2. How do you do that today? This is a great question when a customer asks you for a specific feature. Rather than taking their feature request at face value, dig in to really understand how they are accomplishing the job today. If you can, have them show you their process or how they are using their current product. This line of questioning proved particularly useful for LIKE.TG when we interviewed product managers to understand how they were building and communicating their product roadmap. 3. How do you know you’ve had a successful year/month/day? This is a valuable question for business products where you are trying to uncover metrics and customer goals. If your product can help your customers achieve their goals or help make them more successful, you are well on your way to a valuable product. 4. How do you feel about your current solution? This one is good for understanding opportunities to differentiate your product from competitors, especially during win-loss interviews. A good follow-up question might be “Where does your current solution provide the most benefit? What do you like best about it?” These questions make it clear that you are searching for opportunities to understand the motivations behind their choice; not judge the chosen solution. 5. What is the most frustrating thing about your current solution? This is a multi-purpose, open-ended question that you can use to open up the conversation flow and to discover pain points. If the solution you are validating doesn’t solve a real pain point, it might not be valuable enough for your target users. 6. What do you wish you could do that you can’t do today? This is a variation on the “If you could wave a magic wand…” question asked by many product managers. I’ve found that questions like these work well for very specific features or use cases. Be careful about asking this question in too general a fashion or too early, as it can lead to ambiguous results or a blank stare. 7. How would your day/job/task be different if you had this? I use variations of this question depending on the circumstances, but the objective is the same: understanding how your solution or feature solves a problem and what type of value a customer would place on solving that problem. Download the Customer-Centricity Checklist ➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '18e41c50-6f24-4828-9f8d-c263df079a5e', {}); 8. Can you give me an example? This is another great general-purpose question that can give you a goldmine of supporting evidence for your new product or feature. In customer interviews, especially for early-stage market validation, it can be easy for conversations to stay high level. Asking for specific examples lets your interviewee know that you are willing to dive into the details, which will provide you with much more information than a higher-level discussion. 9. If this were available today, would you buy/use it? This question in itself may not result in an accurate answer (and can often lead to false positives). It’s what you do after this question that counts: Ask this question and then be quiet. Listening to their response for 60 seconds can give you insight into their decision process and the value they place on your product or feature. Make sure to follow-up with detailed questions such as “Would you walk me through the purchase process?” 10. Why would you recommend our solution to others? You can use variations of this “ultimate question” to gauge satisfaction with your solution and then ask follow-up questions. Try a few of these questions with customers or prospects during your next interviews. Some are better suited for new product development, but most will work well for your ongoing feature validation and win-loss interviews.Of course, great questions aren’t worth much unless you listen closely, read between the lines and then ask deeper follow-up questions. If you’re interested in more information on customer interviews, check out our Customer Interview Tool Box. It’s packed with tips and best practices for product managers looking to get the most out of their conversations with customers.

More product teams are taking advantage of the Minimum Viable Product concept—deploying products early to customers in order to learn and iterate. MVP is a fantastic approach for releasing products and features faster with less waste, and one that is often utilized in agile product management. But I’ve consistently found that it’s essentialtocombine the MVP with features or value propositions that directly relate to the customer’s biggest pain point. When you do this, it’s possible to release successful newproducts thatare evenless thanthe “minimum.” You might call this the 80% MVP. I base this 80% concept from releasing many minimumproducts over the years, including GoToMyPC, GoToMeeting, AppFolio, and LIKE.TG. Here are a couple of my observations: The MVP is subjective, and only byreleasing can we learn what the real minimum is. Even after conducting dozens of customer validation interviews for a product,I consistently discoverthatone or twofeatures I thought were necessary to include in the MVP could have been released later. I learn that there are otherthingsthat would have added evengreatervalue. The MVP must tie back to high priority customer problems that were discovered during validation. Delivering acompellingproduct thatrelieves pain candelight customers, even if it’s lacking features. Customers are forgiving if you show them you are focusing on high-value items for them rather than striving for the “perfect” feature set. My advice to you:Skip perfection and get a minimum compellingproductinto the hands of real customers.Tweet this Look, you still need to deliveronthe basics: products with features that are valuable,easy to use, and thatdelight customers. I’m not advocating releasing crap. But in my experience, to create successful products you need to combine MVP with unique and compellingvalue. This is how youcan make your product apurple cow. Does Your Minimum Viable Product ProvideEnoughValue? Compelling productsaren’t necessarily limited to features – it can beyour pricing, packaging, or anything that solves a top customer problem. For example, with GoToMeeting, our initial product lacked many features that were availablein competitive products such as video. However, our “all you can meet” pricing was a unique differentiator that solved multiplefrustrations customers had with the current solutions. This philosophy works wellfor new products as well as future initiatives you are adding to your product roadmap. Here is my high-level process for defining a compelling MVP: First, engage customers by conducting problem discovery interviews. Define your proposed features, making sure that features tie back to problems you discovered. Validate the productin subsequent interviews. After validation, cut features further, making sure to retain one or two valuablefeaturesthat hit the biggest pain points uncovered during problem discovery interviews. Cut the MVP to less than you are comfortable with. AtLIKE.TG, we released the original product and continue releasing features based around this philosophy. We have several in-depth interviews with customers to understand the pain, the value, review prototypes, and understand the minimum feature set. We then ruthlessly prioritize and cut the MVP but make sure to include features that are highly compelling and differentiated. For example, our product includes aprioritization frameworkfor making product decisions. We interviewed dozens of product managers to understand how they were prioritizing features and their challenges with prioritization. Our first release of this feature was a mere shadow of the feature we ultimately envisioned. But there were several compelling elementsthat made it superior toanything our customers had: It was collaborative and shareable. It was integrated with the visual product roadmap. It provided transparency. It was based on industry best practices. After releasing our MVP for the prioritization feature 1.) customers used the feature and 2.) got value out of it (or rather, they gotenoughvalue out of it). Because we solved painwith ourinitial release,our customerswerepatient and engaged as wecontinued to enhancethe feature based on their input. We still have far to go torealize our full visionfor the feature, but the stage isset for success. All product managers at one point have wondered whether they’ve prioritized the right features beforereleasing a new product. Sometimes deciding that your feature or product is ready for release is tough.The bottom line is to first fully understand customer problems before deciding your MVP and compelling value. Then pull the trigger faster to get your product out the door.

Pricing SaaS products presents unique challenges—and opportunities—for product and marketing teams. In the past few years, I’ve had a hand in setting pricing for several successful SaaS products, including GoToMeeting, GoToMyPC, AppFolio, and LIKE.TG. In the next few articles, I’ll review lessons for how to price a product that I’ve learned along the way. This first article is about what I consider to be the #1 mostimportant element for pricing SaaS products: customer value. Understanding customer value is essentialfor pricing all software products, but even more so with SaaS. Read the Power of SaaS Pricing Experiments ➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'c948d259-0fb9-457e-aece-634799b48e6d', {}); Because mostSaaS products are priced witha recurring subscription, every month or year your customers reevaluate whether they want to continue subscribing. This makes it even more critical to ensure pricing is in line with the value your customers receive. Let me define what I mean by “value.” First, a value can be quantitative, such as time saved or additional revenue earned. Measuring this is straightforward, and is the basis of Return on Investment calculations. If your product is B2B SaaS, you are likely already factoring this into your pricing decision. But here is the tricky part: Value can also be qualitative, such as pain relief or lifestyle benefits your product provides. By thoroughly understanding and documenting this sometimes nebulous qualitative value through customer interviews, you can begin to narrow in on possible pricing models and a price range. It’s understanding this qualitative value that can help product managers set theirproduct apart from the competition. I believe that customervalue should be the primary consideration for your price and pricing model. Notfeatures. Not what competitors charge. And definitely not your costs. Pricing SaaS Products: A Case Study When we were determining pricing for GoToMeeting, I interviewed dozens of potential customers to gain a deep understanding of customer pain and the value they might receive from conducting online meetings with our concept. We discovered: Cost and time savings from reduced or eliminated travel (quantitative value) Cost savings from switching to our solution versus expensive per-minute pricing of existing solutions (quantitative value) Increasedusageof online meeting technology because users were no longer tied toper-minute charges (quantitative value) Lifestyle benefits from conducting meetings remotely (high qualitative value) Reduced frustration by eliminatingcomplicated online meeting solutions (high qualitative value) By understanding thesequantitative and qualitative values, we developed GoToMeeting’s unique $49 “All You Can Meet” flat-rate pricing (an industry-leading innovation at the time). Pricing and your customers The pricing model directly relates to the pain and frustration we heard from prospective customers in our interviews – the current solutions were difficult to budget because the per-minute charges varied so widely. The buyer experienced sticker shock every month. Therefore, peace of mind wasanother qualitative value we could provide customers with our pricing model. While it’s hard to assign a dollar amount to qualitative values, these are the benefits that ultimately made GoToMeeting a no-brainer for millions of customers. Because the product was SaaS, we had the flexibility to price our product differently from the competition and create a unique product in the market. In a sense, we made pricing a part of the product. It became a differentiating feature that marketing promoted heavily. Most product managers already know that finding the right price is more art than science. However, if you thoroughly understand the value of your SaaS product, you can delight customers, provide competitive differentiation and ultimately launch a more profitable product. In the next articles, I’ll describe other lessons for pricing SaaS products including how to develop unique pricing models and several tips for setting the right price.

Most product people are familiar with the sticky problem of feature bloat. You may also recognize the issue by its other uncomfortable names: feature fatigue, feature creep, or feature overload. It’s the thing that happens when, for instance, the machine you bought to make the world’s best, quickest espresso also tells you the weather and time, is equipped with an AM and FM radio, has ten settings for temperature, bonus options for froth consistency (thin to thick), and comes equipped with iPhone-integrated alarm tones that tell you when your espresso is done (that part admittedly sounds sort of neat). While the makers of this espresso machine may have listened to user wants, the inevitable loss of frustrated and confused current and potential users would indicate that the creators didn’t focus on user needs. Yeah, a handful of users may have asked for bells and whistles, but fundamentally what they wanted was a damn good, quick espresso. Put another way, the espresso machine makers prioritized capability over usability and ignored real customer needs. As MSI.org wrote in a study of the feature fatigue problem over a decade ago: “Because consumers give more weight to capability and less weight to usability when they evaluate products prior to use than they do when they evaluate products after use, consumers tend to choose overly complex products that do not maximize their satisfaction, resulting in ‘feature fatigue.’” Echoes Rian Van Der Merwe in his more recent article How to Avoid Building Products That Fail: “…more isn’t necessarily better.” Touché. While loading up features in the beginning may buy you some early users, the high cost of alienated, churning customers, the expense of accruing and paying down additional technical/engineering debt, the potential confusion regarding your product and brand identity, and frustration from engineering and product teams (complete with a loss of organizational trust in your decisions) can lead to catastrophe. Of course, the espresso machine is a simplified example. In reality, your product-bloating features may initially seem essential but turn out in time to be unnecessary — at which point it may be too late. Your challenge, then, is to decide which features your product and customers actually need and which you can realistically afford and to avoid the others like the plague. So how to avoid falling into the tempting trap of feature overload? With the laser-focused ammo of a four-tiered process: be informed, mindful, selective, and cutthroat with your feature decisions. 1. Make More Informed Decisions by Validating Feature Requests Considering all customer feedback does not mean taking all customer feedback. This means you must separate the signals — the worthwhile feedback — from the noise. You can do so by asking validating questions about the quality and significance of customer feedback before acting on it. Primary indicators of “valid” feedback include volume, frequency, request source, and intent. Is a feature request high-volume or limited to a few customers? Does it come up with some frequency? If you say “no” to one or both of these questions, it may be a sign that the request is noise. Additionally, the source of the feature request matters: you should know how long the person behind a request has been a customer, their use case, account plan/level/type, their industry, and — depending on your company — how satisfied they are with your product overall (NPS). This will give you a greater measure of the request’s relevance. If the feature seems actionable, then dig a little deeper to ask what the intent of the request is: What is the underlying pain behind the request? Is there an underlying pain that justifies the feature request? It is your job to use the product management resources at your disposal — from usability tests to field studies to surveys — to uncover your customers’ true needs. Ensure that you only build things that solve actual, real problems, or you may find yourself sagging under the weight of unnecessary features. 2. Make More Mindful Decisions By Considering Complexity Costs and Technical Debt You know the old saying, “There’s no such thing as a free lunch?” That adage applies to features, too. Development and support costs are just the beginning of a feature’s expense. But woe to the product manager who does not consider the complexity costs and technical debt a given feature adds to their product. As Kris Gale, VP of Engineering of Yammer put it to First Round Review: “Complexity cost is the debt you accrue by complicating features or technology in order to solve problems. An application that does twenty things is more difficult to refactor than an application that does one thing, so changes to its code will take longer.” What may take two weeks of coding to develop, for instance, may take much more work and time to maintain down the road. You must decide whether or not a feature’s complexity cost is necessary or unduly burdensome. A potent mix of common sense, intel from engineering, and data testing that evaluates the feature’s usability and usage can help drive this interrogation. If you do decide to move forward, make sure to continuously check that customers are using and getting value from the feature (see: that it’s meeting your customers’ needs). Have you accidentally made their experience unnecessarily complex? If so, take stock, pivot, and be more mindful moving forward. 3. Make More Selective Decisions By Considering What Matters and Saying NO “Yes” sounds good, doesn’t it? We tend to equate “yes” with positive, happy things, and “no,” with negative, bad things. But it isn’t that simple. Oftentimes a “no” to a feature request can actually mean a yes — a yes to remaining aligned with your product vision, your overall product strategy, and other business goals. These are the things that really matter and can be forgotten when in the weeds of product and feature development. Feature doesn’t solve an actual problem? No. Doesn’t align with your company’s core purpose? No. Not enough demand for a feature (as you’ve discovered when validating it)? No way, José. If you’re doing your job, “no” should be the answer to the majority of your feature requests. That way, the features that get a “yes” are the ones you, your team, and your customers know have real value. Being more selective also has the added, crucial effect of making you a more trustworthy product manager, which means you can more effectively make decisions that combat the feature bloat that make your team and customers feel, well, sick. 4. Make More Cutthroat Decisions by Removing Bad Features Saying no to proposed features is often not enough. Sometimes you’ll need to be even more brutal by doing away with poor product features entirely. These are vampire features — learn to recognize them, and then kill them before they kill your product. If a feature’s complexity cost outweighs its benefits, if it doesn’t meet real customer needs, if only a handful of customers use it, if it’s outdated or irrelevant, etc. etc. — take a deep breath and cut it. Yes — you (and your engineers… and others) have given this feature life, nurtured it, and even made sure it’s easy on the eyes. But what has it done in return? It’s harmed your business and the integrity of your product. Make like a mob boss and whack it. In Sum Feature bloat can cost you precious resources, weigh down your team, and harm the integrity of your product. By making informed, mindful, selective, and cutthroat feature decisions, you can ensure that you’re building a focused, manageable product that meets a true customer need. About the Guest Author: Sara Aboulafia is a member of the marketing team at UserVoice. Outside of work, Sara writes and performs music, binge-watches comedy, and spends an unhealthy amount of time futzing with technology before happily retreating to the woods.

The Definition of the Key Responsibilities of Product Managers In most cases, your core role as a product manager will be two-fold: First, to set the long-term vision and strategy for your company’s products. To communicate this strategy to all of the relevant participants and stakeholders. Typically, the primary tool you will use to accomplish your key roles will be a product roadmap, a strategic, high-level visual document conveying the “why” behind the products you’re building. The product manager’s job description is often not well defined for such a vital and pivotal position within many companies. In addition, product manager responsibilities often vary from company to company, and at first glance, it seems like no two product manager jobs are identical. Case in point: The three statements below come from three very different (and accurate) product manager job descriptions and the key responsibilities of product managers. Example Job Descriptions of the Key Product Manager Responsibilities: Manage from concept to design, sample production, testing, forecast, cost, mass production, promotion, support, and finally, product end of life. Delivers the operating plan: the achievement of growth objectives, including market share, revenue, profit, and return on investment for all the channels/categories of business and key customers. Responsible for managing and implementing marketing activities through research, strategic planning, and implementation. That’s quite a variety of skills. Whether we look at three or ten job descriptions, you can see that each product management role is varied and unique. I’ve seen the role and influence each product manager has depending on many dynamics—the company’s size, the type of company, the type of product, and the stage of the product. We recently reported the key skills for the role, metrics, and challenges between large and small companies differ significantly. So, what are the key responsibilities of a product manager? What do they all have in common? Moreover, how can you use the role most effectively to usher successful products into the world? 4 Key Responsibilities of Outstanding Product Managers As a product manager, it is essential to understand that you are a central hub within your company for a lot of critical information about your products, market, competitors, customers, prospects, fundamental industry analysts, and many other constituencies. To succeed, you will need to continually gather and analyze data and business intelligence from all of these sources (as well as your internal sources like sales and customer service). Then, use this data to inform the creation of your roadmap strategy. You will interact with a broad range of departments to ensure your products’ success. You will also translate the input and data you gather to build a case for many decisions you present in your roadmap. As such, there are several vital skills you’ll need to bring to your role as a product manager. 1. Be transparent about your prioritization and roadmap process. Remember, much of your role as a product manager will be explaining “why” to various stakeholders and constituents. Why you’re prioritizing one feature or theme over another in a release; why you’ve chosen to focus more on one particular goal for the next two quarters versus another goal. The best way to get the relevant constituencies — sales, marketing, engineering, your executives — on board with your strategic thinking is to be clear and open with them about why and how you are making decisions. 2. Be able to say “no,” but explain why in terms that stakeholders understand. There will be plenty of times when an executive will ask for a new feature his gut tells him will be great… when an engineer will suggest tabling the development of a feature set to save time on the next sprint… and when a sales rep will ask (even beg) you to add a specific tool to the next release because a prospect has promised to buy if it’s included. But if those requests will undermine your strategic objectives for the product, you will often have to say no. The key will be in your ability to articulate why (that all-important word in a successful product manager’s vocabulary) you cannot accommodate the request. Again, the more strategic and backed by evidence you can make your roadmap, your constituents’ more likely to understand when you need to say no. 3. Be a ruthless prioritizer while balancing the needs of customers and stakeholders. Regardless of your company’s size or budget, you will always face limited resources for your product development. That means you will always need to prioritize and continually weigh the competing factors of your products, your company’s limited resources, and demands from various stakeholders. If you’re unsure how to set priorities or weigh various factors in developing your roadmap, several great models canhelp you get started — such as weighted scoring and the Kano model. Some of our team explained more about how the model works in the video below. 点击播放声音 @keyframes VOLUME_SMALL_WAVE_FLASH { 0% { opacity: 0; } 33% { opacity: 1; } 66% { opacity: 1; } 100% { opacity: 0; } } @keyframes VOLUME_LARGE_WAVE_FLASH { 0% { opacity: 0; } 33% { opacity: 1; } 66% { opacity: 1; } 100% { opacity: 0; } } .volume__small-wave { animation: VOLUME_SMALL_WAVE_FLASH 2s infinite; opacity: 0; } .volume__large-wave { animation: VOLUME_LARGE_WAVE_FLASH 2s infinite .3s; opacity: 0; } 3:43 #wistia_chrome_23 #wistia_grid_43_wrapper .w-css-reset{font-size:14px;} #wistia_chrome_23 #wistia_grid_43_wrapper 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.w-css-reset-button-important{border-radius:0!important;color:#fff!important;} Download the Prioritization Guide for Product ManagersFirst Name*Last Name*Job Title*Phone Number*Email*LIKE.TG is committed to protecting and respecting your privacy, and we’ll only use your personal information to administer your account and to provide the products and services you requested from us. 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Bring evidence-based decision-making to your communication. As I’ve stated previously, one key trait of successful product managers is their ability to answer “why” to the many questions they must field from stakeholders throughout their organizations. One of the most effective ways to answer why is with evidence. It’s much more compelling than your opinion — or anyone else’s. If you have real-world user data, customer feedback, and metrics on your product, then you already have an excellent source of business intelligence to inform how best to build your product roadmap. So let your analytics help guide your decisions. If you don’t have real-world user data on your products yet, don’t worry. There are plenty of other ways to gather useful intelligence about your product, customers, and market. Ask your customers directly. Study your competitors’ products. Read online communities or comments on your company’s blog where your prospects or customers discuss your products or your competitors’ products—study research reports from the analysts who cover your industry. When an executive or sales rep asks why you’ve selected one direction over another for the next iteration of your product, your ability to present a compelling explanation backed by real data will go a long way toward earning their buy-in. hbspt.cta.load(3434168, '95beb659-8ca3-4c13-b7a2-32365cbd3900', {}); Because you play a central role in your organization — always gathering valuable intelligence from various stakeholders, customers, and your market — you are in a unique position to define the success of your product. Your role as the product’s strategist and evangelist will be central to your success and the success of your products. Ready to put these skills into practice? hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'e29c8e8c-234d-44fc-985b-67a542504810', {});

Pricing is such a core part of a SaaS product’s business model that you need to get it right. In this series, I’m writing about SaaS pricing lessons I’ve learned from launching several SaaS products including GoToMeeting, AppFolio, and ProductPlan. In the first part of our series, we reviewed why pricing based on customer value is key to a great product strategy. In the second part, I described how SaaS gives product managers flexibility to be creative with pricing models. We cover the art of subscription pricing in our webinar below: Here are 10 tips for how to price your SaaS product that you can use. While many of these apply to SaaS products, the lessons overall apply to software product pricing in general. Read the Power of SaaS Pricing Experiments ➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'c948d259-0fb9-457e-aece-634799b48e6d', {}); 10 Lessons for Pricing SaaS Products Pricing must be a part of early validation. While you may not nail your final pricing until later, the earlier you can zone in on your SaaS pricing model, the better off you will be. This gives you a greater chance of building your pricing modelintothe value proposition. At a minimum, during the product conceptualization stage, actively interview potential decision-makers about their purchase process, how they purchased their current solution, and frustrations with the current solution’s pricing. BallparkLTV as early as possible. Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) is socritical to a SaaS business model that you need to estimate it as early as possible – wellbefore you have customers and revenue. LTV influences the sales model and what you can afford to spend to acquire customers. While there are lots of ways to calculate LTV, I recommend keeping it as a simple back-of-the-envelope calculation with input from customer interviews and similarproducts. LTV > CAC. The formula for success is simple in the SaaS world: LTV overtime must be significantly greater than customer acquisition cost (CAC). SaaS companies with a recurring revenue stream like Salesforce.com have LTV multiples that are three to five times the cost to acquire that customer. Doing back-of-the-envelope calculations on CAC will help you avoid surprises down the road. Your sales model influences your pricing. Conversely, SaaS pricing constrains the sales model options available to you. For example, if you have an expensive field sales force, you need to ensure that your customer LTV is high enough to support that model. You’ll struggle if your average customer purchases $50/month over a two-year lifetime. Ultimately, your buyer persona determines your sales model, so make sure you understand the expected purchase process. Create upsell opportunities within your pricing model. One of the advantages of SaaS is the ability to offer upgrades and services that drive additional revenue. Consider these within your SaaS pricing model, as they can make a substantial difference in long-term product revenue. This is the model we used with great success at AppFolio. Use caution when offering annual prepurchase discounts.Many SaaS products that license on a monthly basis will offer a discount for annual prepurchasing. However, with SaaS pricing, use this with discretion. Analysis shows that over the long term, you leave significant revenue on the table. Consider free trials.If your acquisition and activation model is simple enough, providing a limited free trial is a great way to increase your sales conversions. It’s common to offer 15- and 30-day trial options. Service is key.Because SaaS is typically licensed as a subscription, your customers are at risk of churning every renewal period. Service and support are even more critical than with traditional software. For this reason, many SaaS products build support and regular upgrades into the standard licensing fee. Consider whether your customers will be receptive to additional fees for support and maintenance for a product that they expectto work flawlessly. Customers don’t care about your costs. I’m not suggesting you ignore your costs, but don’t price your product working backward from cost. This is not how your customers will think about the pricing. Sure, the cost of goods sold needs to be a factor for you to be viable, but this is not related to how customers value your product. Pricing perception doesn’t follow economic rules. Customers often buy products for reasons that seem disconnected from the Return on Investment calculation. Pricing, specifically SaaS pricing, is highly psychological. For this reason, the demand curve is not linear – a lower price doesn’t necessarily equate to more customers and revenue. Take this into account by thoroughly understanding the qualitative value that your product provides. Takeaways With web-based SaaS products, it’s easier than ever to conduct A/B tests to gauge buyer behavior, pricing, and acquisition costs (before and after launch). As you test the user interface, I encourage you to test your pricing with equal fervor. Use qualitative customer interviews to get enough data points to make good decisions. Get it right for SaaS pricing, and you have a recurring revenue stream that places your product’s portfolio value well above traditional software products. Pragmatic Marketing Webinar:Missed Jim Semick fromLIKE.TG for the Pragmatic Marketing Webinar? Watch the recording to learn more about pricing software products. Learn why LIKE.TG is the easiest way to plan and communicate your product roadmap.Try it freetoday.

No doubt you’ve heard of the coming Internet of Things (IoT) and how it’s going to change our lives through billions of Internet-connected devices and sensors. But is IoT mostly hype? And if it’s not, how can product teams prepare? Preparing for the Internet of Things Last monthI moderated a panel discussion for the MIT Enterprise Forumto discuss IoT opportunities and challenges. Our panelincluded device, data, and security experts as well as representatives from companies launching IoT products. To be honest, before I began preparing for the event I wasn’t convincedabout the impact of IoT. I thought that products like Nest, Dropcam, and pill bottles that remind us to take our medicine are cool, but wondered if a world of Internet-connected washing machines was really all that special. But after talking with the experts and moderating the event, I have come to realize that over the next few years there is a huge opportunity for companies providing hardware, software, data, and services for customers in almost every industry. My takeaway is this: product managers and product teams need to be prepared to capitalize on IoT – it will eventually deserve a place on your product roadmap. Product teams will want to consider these areas for the future: Prepare forthe data. Each device will create immense amounts of data. There will be challenges with processing the data and connecting different data sources together. Business intelligence and data discovery systems will become more important to organizations. There will also be opportunities to make innovative connections between data and devices that weren’t previously possible. Interaction design will be more important than ever. Every device will need an interface. While there are efforts to create standards, today each device interface is often a separate ecosystem. This will create opportunities for UX and interaction teams to provide innovative interfaces that include visual, audio and tactile feedback. Security and privacy will be challenging. Any new technology introduces security and privacy concerns, and IoT presents special challenges. Devices can give access to our homes. Databases contain confidential information about our health. Companies will need to give cybersecurity and privacy high priority as they introduce new products and services. Low-priced sensors will spur innovation. There already is a growing array of sensors and the price is dropping rapidly. Sensors that can measure light, humidity, sound, location, movement, temperature and other items will give product teams incredible opportunities to innovate. Whether you are in the consumer, automotive, healthcare, manufacturing, construction, or another industry, IoT will affect your products and services. Teams willneed to have a strategy to innovate and rework legacy products to fit into this new world. Image credit: Nest Labs

Henry Schein, Inc. is the world’s largest provider of health care products and services to dental, animal health and medical practitioners.Teams at Henry Schein rely onLIKE.TG for strategic planning and roadmap communication. We chatted with product manager Dan Larsen about how he’s using LIKE.TG: What are you using LIKE.TG for? “We share alive version of the roadmap with teams in remote offices. We also use the Planning Board to conduct benefit versus cost weighting.” How has LIKE.TG helped you? “We’ve saved a huge chunk of time. LIKE.TG has helped us improve the business by giving us back our time to think strategically about the business, and not tactically about how to share information.” What is your favorite feature? “What I immediately liked about LIKE.TG is that it was super simple to start using.One of the first times I had one of those ‘Oh wow, this is cool’ moments was when I started using the Planning Board for scoring.” Read the full Henry Schein customer story. Read more about teams doing great things with LIKE.TG.

Like you, we have now seen a dozen articles predicting the top trends for product managers in 2016. Yes, we know that better communication is on the rise. But what is really happening in the product management world? At LIKE.TG we have the opportunity to engage with hundreds of PMs every month. We’ve identified some long-term trends that will take place not just in 2016, but in the coming years. If you are looking for a new product management job, here are five trends that should be on your radar. 1. It’s time to boost your skills: More training choices than ever We’ve noticed a proliferation of training and other opportunities to learn the skills that product managers need. This includes training classes, both through traditional organizations such as Pragmatic Marketing and newer entrants such as General Assembly. Even academia is getting involved, with several universities offering continuing education and specialized programs for product management and software product management. We expect that this trend will continue with grassroots events such as ProductCamp, meetup groups, and other informal learning opportunities that appear for product managers. 2. Lean startup methods will continue to be in demand Companies — even large enterprises — are continuing to embrace lean startup and customer development processes. As a product manager, it’s important to continue to read up and practice these skills in your role. These skills include rapid prototyping, engaging early with customers, iterating rapidly, and killing bad ideas. 3.Product Managers will have access to more data than ever With so many data and analytics tools coming on the market in the last few years, product managers have more metrics-driven data for making decisions. But with the good comes the bad — there is a firehose of data. As a product manager, you’re at the intersection of so many data streams from support, finance, sales, IT, and other departments. Product managers are needing to deal with more complexity than ever. Luckily these tools continue to become more mainstream and refined. And the best practices around metrics-driven product management are becoming more well known and written about. Many of these tools such as Pendo.io, Kissmetrics, Intercom are specifically geared towards product and customer engagement. 4. Proliferation of product management tools In 2016, vendors will continue to fill software gaps and product managers will have a stronger set of purpose-built tools at their disposal. With specialized tools for roadmapping, customer engagement, analytics, project management, and more, product teams will be able to work more efficiently than ever. For example, our 2015 product roadmap survey revealed that most product managers are still using and are frustrated by presentation software (PowerPoint) and spreadsheets (Excel) to manage their roadmaps. PMs are hungry for new solutions that let them engage with stakeholders in a more productive way. 5. Living roadmaps will become more predominant A roadmap should be agile and thought of as a living document rather than a plan set in stone. Unlike the product roadmaps of a few years ago, today’s roadmaps, at least in the longer term, are now fluid. This is partly the result of agile development techniques, but also because of a growing awareness that decisions made in the executive conference room may not be the right answer once customers are engaged in the validation of new ideas. Like the backlog, the product roadmap should be regularly discussed, prioritized, estimated, updated, and shared. And product roadmap software or other web-based tools enable the roadmap to adapt quickly as decisions are made. [Free book] Backlog Refinement: How to Prioritize What Matters ➜ hbspt.cta.load(3434168, 'ba6d6ffb-c21a-41c0-8f7e-7f79e553dae1', {});

Orion Health develops software solutions for healthcare organizations worldwide, helping to improve the care of 35 million patients. Founded in New Zealand in 1993, Orion Health now has 27 offices in nearly every region of the world. Orion Health uses LIKE.TG to create roadmaps that easily communicate vision and strategy to stakeholders across the company’s many teams and regions. We chatted with Mark Robertson, Strategic Project Manager, to learn more. Here are some highlights from the conversation. What do you like most about LIKE.TG? Mark: “Most tools claiming to do roadmaps were cumbersome, hard to set up, and complicated to manage. I knew we’d end up not using them. But LIKE.TG was a clean, visual roadmap tool — and it was so intuitive that you could start using it in minutes.” What are you using LIKE.TG for? Mark: “The product roadmaps we’ve created with LIKE.TG make it so much easier to quickly communicate information across teams. LIKE.TG gives any of us in the company — no matter what team or part of the world — a common place to start a conversation about a project.” How has LIKE.TG saved you time? Mark: “We were using highly detailed tools like JIRA, Excel® and an internal wiki to track everything. Sure, if a salesperson in the US or an executive in New Zealand knew exactly where to look, they could figure out what was going on. But otherwise, we really had no way of quickly communicating the high-level view of our ongoing projects” How has LIKE.TG helped your organization? Mark: “Here’s an example of what we were up against our old approach. Our security team wanted to propose a new process, and we needed management buy-in. So they built a 12-column Excel spreadsheet to present the idea. When the steering committee saw it, their eyes glazed over, and they assumed we had no plan — because we weren’t visually depicting it for them. This time, [with LIKE.TG], the stakeholders got it right away. We haven’t gone back to our old Excel model since!” Read the Full Orion Health Customer Story:Visual Product Roadmaps Improve Communication