Founder-Led Customer Success: Tips for Delivering a Great User Experience

Congratulations! You have found early customers who are willing to try out your product. You know that there are still some holes in your customer experience. You’ve built an awesome MVP. But you haven’t optimized your marketing funnel. You might not even have a billing portal yet, let alone polished automated email and in-app messages. But this is a strength, not a weakness! This gives you the opportunity to provide a truly personalized customer experience. Something your larger, more established competitors cannot afford to do.

As the co-founder and CEO of Sendspark, I’ve worked with hundreds of founders who use our platform to create personalized videos that transform skeptical beta users into customer champions. In this article, I’ll share the best tips and tricks I’ve learned from our community on how to bridge gaps and drive customer success.

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Create personalized onboarding videos

When new users sign up, use Sendspark to record personalized welcome videos showing them how to get started.

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This has several benefits:

• It's simple and actionable
• The videos can be easily referenced in the future if your users ever need to make changes
• The personalization goes above and beyond to show your users that you care about them
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Now, at some point this will stop being scalable. You’ll have more new users than minutes in the day to record videos! And at that point, instead of recording personalized videos, you’ll want to create a few core videos and embed them into your in-app messages, email automation, and/or help articles. But I would still recommend starting with personalized videos, because that will help you really nail the messaging. Each video should be a little better than the one before it. Only when you find yourself repeating yourself should you create the evergreen video for automation.

Here’s how I would suggest crafting your video:

• Start with their goals. What are they trying to accomplish by implementing your product?
• Record a tutorial showing they can set up your product. You want to SAY everything they’ll need to know, but only take time to SHOW the unintuitive parts of the video to save time. You want to keep the entire video short (30 seconds to 2 minutes long)
• Remind them why they should get started now. Restate the benefits, and add some urgency for when they should do it right today instead of next week
• Close out with a clear next step. Make it easy for them to get started!

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Provide actionable recommendations

Okay, now let’s say they are up and running with your product. Great! But… Is there anything they could be doing differently to get better results from your product? If yes, then make them a video to show them tips and tricks that will help them get more out of your product. Maybe they don’t have things set up properly. Or they’re missing out on a new feature. Or they just need some ideas to spark usage. Record a video showing EXACTLY how they can do better!

This has several advantages:

• They’re able to see the “vision” of how things will be if they take the time to make these improvements
• The explanatory video makes it super easy to understand the actions they should take
• It’s easily forwardable in case they need to loop in another team member to make these changes

Make sure these videos are focused on their success and their potential outcome. You don’t need to show every feature… Just the key action items needed to achieve pilot success!

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Get feedback

Of course, pilots are not just for your customers to see value in your product. They’re also for you to learn how to iterate and improve your service. And the best insights come from customer feedback.

Sendspark makes it easy to request video feedback from customers. You just send them a link, and they can record a video. They can record as many takes as they’d like, and when they’re happy with their video, they can click “submit” to have it automatically uploaded to you.

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There are several use cases for you here:

• Let users record feature requests and bug reports. They can show you exactly what’s going wrong, or how they’d want to use a new feature.
• Let users record testimonials that you can share with prospective customers or investors
• Or even better, let users record videos showing how they’re implementing your product successfully to help other early adopters who would benefit from a similar implementation.

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Final thoughts

At the early stages, nothing is standardized yet. Your product is still being developed. Your target customer might not be defined yet. And you’re still gathering the key insight on what “success” means. And that’s fine! As a founder of a startup, you’re building the plane as you fly it. Embrace your stage, and go above and beyond to personalize the experience for your pilot customers. This is a critical advantage you have over your competitors. You’re lean, you’re nimble, and you can move fast to create tailored video experiences! Enjoy the process, and let Sendspark be your partner in creating personalized videos for customers. Sign up here for free.