Flint's Blog

Customer Advisory Council

A  year ago Billtrust had an offsite management meeting where we discussed a number of things, including how to better integrate customer feedback into our product development plans.  Through 2007 we had done this very informally. In my previous life at enterprise software companies, we would hold annual user conferences in some attractive destination and invite all of our customers to attend.  There would be a couple of days of presentations by management followed each night by alcohol consumption that rivaled college days.  They were good bonding events but I never felt that we really gained enough insight into what customers were looking for or the pain they were feeling.

This week we hosted our first Customer Advisory Council meeting (CAC - pronounced kack - I know it's terrible, I lobbied to come up with something different but I was overruled :[  ).  We invited 8 influential customers in for a day and a half of intense product conversations.  We talked about each of our product lines, asked the customers what was going good and more importantly what we could do better.  We bounced future product plans off them.  We talked about the performance of our difference teams. 

Prior to the meeting, my expectations were really middle of the road for what we would accomplish.  Some companies do this to placate customers and make them feel important.  I really didn't want that.  I was looking for concrete things that we could do to perform better and deliver better products.

It would be difficult to overstate how great the meeting was - both for us and according to the customers, also for them.  I personally jotted down roughly 20 product suggestions that either weren't in our near term plans or we hadn't even considered. 

For example, we are going through the final stages of certification for PCI compliance which has to do with storing of credit card numbers.  We discussed this as part of one of our product updates and one of our customers mentioned that they were struggling with this as well.  This particular customer is in the distribution business and they accept credit cards for in store purchases.  These credit cards gets stored in their ERP system so they are subject to the PCI guidelines.  This was one of those light bulb moments.  I knew first hand what a pain it has been to go through this PCI compliance process so knew it was going to be a pain for them.  Maybe we should productize what we have done for PCI Compliance and offer it to our customers so they don't have to deal with it.  Seems obvious in hindsight, but I had never thought of it.   

I'm sure there are a lot of formats to run a Customer Advisory Council, the one we selected worked well for us.  What's more important than which format you choose, is to do something where you can get customers around a table and pick their brains.

How Well Do You Really Know Your Customers?

I like to think that I've got a pretty good grasp on how our customers feel about the job Billtrust does for them.   I'm a big believer in Management By Walking Around which keeps me reasonably in tune with what's going on.  Two things happened this week that made me question whether I'm really as in touch as I think.

Everytime our sales team gets a new customer we make a fairly big production about "Signing the Contract".  I like to sign all the contracts personally.  Tom Scott, our VP of Sales, sends out an email to the entire company congratulating the salesperson and others involved.  And occasionally we will play a celebratory game of foosball.   Anyway, back to my point.  One of our salespeople was talking about a customer the other day and for the first time I couldn't recall whether they were a customer or not.  As far as I knew they were still a prospect that we were trying to bring on board.  So I asked myself, "Self, how can you know what your customers think about you if you don't even know who your customers are?"

Coincidentally, this was the same week that Mitch Rose, our VP of Marketing, sends out our annual customer satisfaction survey.  I like to read each of the individual responses and while I look at the rankings in the different areas, I always find the most value in reading the customer comments.  While the majority of the comments are positive, I can't help but focus on the negative ones.  One negative comment on any area is always a concern for me. Two negative comments on the same area is a trend and causes Flint the Nice Boss to turn into Flint the Boss From Hell who everybody avoids. 

The customer survey this year had a couple of interesting comments that reminded me once again that maybe I'm not as in touch as I thought I was.  If you don't survey your customers regularly, go to SurveyMonkey and do it right now.  Make sure you ask open ended questions and ask about how you're doing in areas that you know are your weakest.  You never know, you might just learn something.

What Would The Customer Want?

Several years after starting Billtrust we felt the need to have a guiding principle for engaging with customers.  When you handle millions of bills per month for hundreds of customers, there is a fair amount of questions, concerns, and sometimes complaints from customers. The famous line of "The Customer is Always Right" never felt right to me.  In fact, it is seriously debunked here.

After much deliberation (or maybe it came to me in a few seconds but "After much deliberation" sounds far better), we came up with a question as our guiding principal.  Every time we need to make a decision, we would ask ourselves "What would the customer want?" 

Here's a real example that occurred a few months ago when we strayed from our principal.

A customer sent in a billing file in to be processed that failed processing because it was missing a fax number.  A customer service rep immediately called the customer and let them know there was a problem and ask them to correct the file and resubmit it.  That’s good customer service. 

But is that "what the customer wants"?  My guess is no.  For something as basic as a missing fax number, maybe the customer just wants that item mailed out instead, or emailed back to them.  In fact, you probably don’t know until you ask.  That would be great customer service.

Some non-believers will argue, well wouldn't the customer want us to send out all of their bills for free?  Well maybe short term they would.  But long term if we did that we wouldn't be in business so there obviously needs to be a balance.

We need to earn a customer's business every day because we live in a highly competitive market. This guiding principal has helped us immensely.  What do you think?