When The Dev Team Works Directly With The Customer

Jacopo Carassai at UXDX Community: Berlin. Video: https://youtu.be/hF4Uesy0YTE

Readable transcript: edited from the recording's captions for readability (fillers and false starts removed, punctuation and section headings added). Wording is the speaker's own. Timestamps are positions in the video. Names marked [?] could not be verified against the audio.

Introduction and what Nosto does

[00:00:00] The topic of today, that we have agreed with Catherine and Charlotte, is when the dev team works directly with the customer. This is what we are going to go through today, and thanks for the invitation. I'll repeat my name again: my name is Jacopo, with a P. I'm a front-end developer in Nosto working for customers, so this means that we are not working for the development of the product, but we're working for the development of the market, meaning that we're helping customers to use our product smoothly. We use our resources to get the customers to use our plugin within their online stores, and to blend it into their architecture without any error, also graphic-wise.

[00:00:54] I started working in Nosto, which I'm going to pitch to you in a little, in 2015, when we were still in a little apartment. The office was a little apartment with a squeaky wooden floor and a little toilet with a shower. And today we have six offices around the world and more than 100 people.

[00:01:22] About Nosto. Nosto is a software as a service for the content personalization of online stores, and more specifically we create personalized recommendations on site for online stores. So, customers who bought this also bought, cross-selling and so on. Triggered emails, follow-up emails, email marketing, Facebook ads, Instagram ads and so on. We run on every possible e-commerce platform, plus we also have the custom implementation, so that it can work really on everything.

[00:02:10] It was founded in 2011 and the product was launched in 2013, and today we are more than 100 people from more than 27, 28 nationalities, placed in offices in the Helsinki headquarters, Berlin now, Paris, Stockholm, London, New York and Santa Monica. Also we have been nominated the fastest growing personalization solution on planet Earth, and also some kind of good achievements. We became a Magento Silver technology partner, a Shopify Plus technology partner, marketing partner with this other little startup from Palo Alto, Facebook, I don't know if you know it. So, kind of good achievements we got, and for every achievement we also need a toast. So we also have our own beer that we brew in Helsinki. It tastes good. It's very good. I am more a wine kind of person, but it's very nice.

[00:03:22] Anyway, today I am going to touch on three key points. First of all, how the Nosto developers are set up to ensure that our customers are succeeding with our plugin. How we track objectives and roadmaps based on what the customers report to us as feedback. And how the customer experiences which are feeding directly into developers can impact their overall success in Nosto.

Every customer is unique: the customer segments

[00:03:53] A few years ago we had in our marketing print material some brochures which had the kind of tagline, every customer is unique, are you treating them that way? So we are prompting our customers, which are online stores, to treat their customers in a unique way, to create for them personalized recommendations, personalized content. But then we also turned this question back to us, and we wondered, are we also dealing with the customer in a unique way? Are we making the customers feel special? Are we making the customer feel an individual, more than just an account number?

[00:04:36] For doing this, of course, we have to narrow down and analyze the customer segment, the customer typologies we have today. The first one is the self-service customer. The self-service customer is usually a small or medium enterprise, which just gets to know the product via recommendations, the online app stores of their e-commerce platform. And they just decide to take a crack at our product and see how it goes.

[00:05:11] Usually the focus for these customers, for treating them in a unique way, is to have, first of all, very good working product UI and UX, so that they can use our product and our default templating in the best way, in order to make our product blend into the website. For sure, the usability of our product, so that they don't get lost. And the online support, the support chat with which we take care of them.

[00:05:41] Also we have the all-good customer, who usually has an in-house developer, an in-house designer. They're looking from time to time for very technical help, which we give to them, but otherwise they are very independent. They are just self-workers and they know what to do. In this case it's very crucial for us to have, first of all, very clear online documentation. Still the usability of the product, but also some direct support, either via email or with phone or with calls.

[00:06:17] But the customers we are focusing on in this presentation are more the ones in need of help. These are the customers which have a remarkable potential business-wise, but they don't have any design resources, or they have very limited design resources, usually very swamped. For this customer we have to focus, first of all, on full support, and most also on the design and the resources, which I'm also part of. But also on the customer success manager, to give to them a person which will speak up for the customer within the company, with our developers, with our design team, in order to make them get what they need for using our product and for succeeding with our product. Because our success is based on their success.

The instruments: direct lines, Slack channels, documentation

[00:07:09] So what are these instruments we give to our customer success managers and to our design and the resources, and make them collaborate with the customer in order to succeed? First of all, what I've tracked is that we have a direct line between our developer team and our customer managers. This means that mostly, in a SaaS company, it's difficult to make developers and account managers talk with each other, and mostly developers are out of reach, to be honest. But we break these barriers and we make this communication way, way clearer and smoother.

[00:07:52] Also we have a Slack channel. I don't know if you know Slack, it's this chat application, very popular. And in this chat we have also created channels, and we have organized the channels according to the features we have, may they be triggered emails, on-site recommendations and so on. So that we ask questions and we answer the questions ourselves, and we see this information within the channel, rather than misplacing them randomly. So that our customer managers, our devs, they don't have to scatter this information everywhere. And this is very important, to have a very harder[?] process for this.

[00:08:39] Also it's very important to us to document everything. This means the customer team, the customer manager team, is required to document all the bugs and issues within the Jira system. I don't know if you know also Jira, this project management tool. And we do this for mainly two reasons. First of all, in this way we can escalate the issue directly to the right person. And also we can track the trend of problems that customers are experiencing. Once we track the trend of problems, the developer can turn that trend into a feature, or can fix this problem once and for all, so that it would never happen again.

[00:09:21] Also we have our devs always available. This means we have a channel, we have a lot of channels, we have channels also for contacting our developers directly. This means we can, first of all, make sure that the developers are aware of the issues that the customer is experiencing. And also we try to reduce the backlog which, at the end of the day, all the devs have on their desk, and probably most of you know what I'm talking about.

[00:09:58] And last but not least, being a solution which provides personalization, it would not be us not to make the customer feel special. In fact, mostly when a customer is experiencing an issue, they not only talk with their account manager, but they can also have the chance of a developer chiming in within their email thread, so that they can see the issues, and eventually they can also ask the customers directly whatever they need to for the resolution of the issue. And of course this makes the customer feel like they are a priority. It's like they are special and treated with a white glove.

The always listening model

[00:10:45] For doing this also, how do we define objectives based on what the customer gives us as feedback? We've developed this model, so to say, called the always listening model. The always listening model, which is just a word, represents a call between the customer and our account manager. But in the back, silently, someone from the front-end team and someone from the dev team is also listening to the conversation while the CSM is having the talk.

[00:11:26] This has proved to have several benefits on the customer success. First of all, it allows the devs to have an insight into the customers' opinions and feedback about the products, which otherwise they would never have the chance to get via the customer manager, because he's not interested in reporting it. And also, if the customer brings up an issue while the CSM is doing, so to say, the talking, the dev can also inspect the issue right away, because he's the one in the call but doesn't have to entertain the customer with the talk.

[00:12:05] And it helps us to understand how the retailing ecosystem changes, and which problem we can solve, and most importantly, which problem we can forecast, to not let them happen again. And this is bold, because providing more understanding about what it's like to be a retailer is for us very important. You don't know this, but now you will. Nosto, which is a plugin for e-commerce for personalized recommendation, was founded in 2011 by three Finnish guys who were retailers themselves, and they needed something like Nosto.

[00:12:45] So being in the mind of a retailer, and knowing what it is like to be a retailer, but also knowing what are the business goals, where are they going, what they want to achieve, for us is extremely important. Understanding the customer's thinking, so to say. And all of this can be translated into personal development. Personal development, mostly for us, for the developers, for the designers, because we are all of us talking with the customers. We all have the chance to chime into an email thread and ask the customers what we need to. And this is what I think can be considered personal development, at least from our point of view.

Turning customer experience into feedback for developers

[00:13:33] But we also have to consider how the customer experience, when it is turned into feedback to our developers, can impact the overall success of Nosto. How do we do this? First of all, we are very, very good at reporting feedback from the customer. This means, when a customer reports feedback for an issue, it's for us vital, crucial, to know where the issue is and how to replicate it. Because it's not always easy. Some online shops need a VPN. Some shops are proxied. Someone is working on a stage environment, and it's not always accessible. IP restrictions and so on. So for us, knowing how to get to the issue and how to reproduce it is vital, with millions, billions of accounts around the world.

[00:14:35] Also, staying ahead of the curve of the market trends, which means, in other words, that customers love to be the one doing something, to be the one getting to test something, getting to test a new feature. And it's very important for the devs to push out new features, new ways for, at the end of the day, achieving the all-time goals. I remember when we launched, months ago, the possibility in our feature to use the user-generated content from Instagram. The merchants we had selected for beta testing, they went bananas. They were just crazy, they wanted to do that. And in fact this feature has been, like, boom.

[00:15:23] Last but not least, the merchant has to know we are not out of reach. All too often in a SaaS company it's absolutely almost impossible to get to talk to a developer, to get to talk to a designer, to get to talk to someone which is not your account manager. But in Nosto this is not the case. We give to our, let's say, the top-notch customers, but also the premium customers, the customers that are in the segment that today I decided to inspect[?], we give them the chance to contact us directly, to contact us also via phone if needed. A lot of merchants have my working phone, and they can contact me directly and we can solve the issue.

[00:16:14] But also it's a way for creating a bond with our customers, and to create this special relation. At the end of the day, when we see the stats from our support center, and this is related to the issues coming from our support chat center, there is a median first response of 26 minutes. We have a lot of heart eyes emoji, I don't know how to say, happy ones. And the median time to close an issue is one hour per minute[?], which for the market trends is pretty good. Plus, here some random stats, some random quotes from our customers, which are telling us "legend", for example. And this is very, very pleasing.

[00:17:07] So, for wrapping this up, and going kind of back to the first slide: yes, for us every customer is unique, and yes, every customer needs to be treated that way. And in case you have questions or feedback or flowers, there is my email address, or I will be hanging around close to the beers. So, thank you.