A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:03:51 · Mike Murchison
[00:03:51] S1: Was, you know, we wanted to make sure everyone was successful. And , um, you know, and , and especially in the early days of our, our app's growth, you know, we were really, we really, really cared about the quality of the community and the quality of the, you know, the, the engagement that our initial user base was, was experiencing. And so, you know, it was, it was pretty sad to see us sort of pursue the conventional customer service playbook, which is essentially figure out how to talk to your customers less, the bigger you get. And that's what we, we were pursuing. I mean, that was the, that was the playbook that, you know, we like almost every other business in the world was running. And I, I'd say that that playbook was, when we saw that, you know , I became pretty curious about why it was that, you know, we were, we were investing in talk , figuring out ways of talking to our customers less because it struck me that the , you know, the bigger we got, the more valuable customer data would become to us. In other words, this whole paradigm felt backwards. And so I, you know, I became very curious about that. So picked up the phone and, and called , uh, as many VPs of customer experience as I could, I could find. And , uh, David and I interviewed a bunch of people and we asked them like, why is it that you're speaking to your customers less and not more as you're growing? And virtually everyone agreed with, you know, the, the premise that it was sort of backwards to be pursuing the strategy that they were, but they also echoed, they also echoed each other in saying that, you know, customer service is a cost center. You know, this is, this is how we're, this is how we are structured. This is how we are , we've designed things. This is my job, and while I know more about the customer than anyone else in the company, we, you know, can't afford to increase our level of interactions. That was really the understanding of that problem that became the, the sort of laid the ground where it ended up becoming a pivot.
00:05:42 · Pablo Srugo
[00:05:42] S0: This is where the insight kind of really starts, right? I mean, I think to an extent the reason is , is obvious why you wanna minimize, you know, the amount of customer interaction. It's just like, it's more profitable. And you could argue the other time thing too, which is the less, in a sense, customers reaching out to you too much might mean that your , your product's not working well, you should just make the product more user friendly, et cetera, et cetera. What did you, you obviously disagreed with that, at least to a certain extent. Like what, what were , what were your , what was your thinking? What was your reason for, for disagreeing with that in the first place? And not just, I think like everybody else, just , you
00:06:13 · Mike Murchison
[00:06:13] S1: Know, it was a few fold , a few reasons. Like, one was just this deep belief that, you know, software is a service. We know this as like, you know, people who work in the SaaS industry. The , the , the word service is a really important word. It , it's, you know, we don't tolerate an experience where in the physical world where we , we don't like to tolerate experiences where we pay for something and, and we don't get what we paid for, you know , the, the , the service bar in the, in the software world. You know, I think we just had a sort of visceral reaction how low that was. Um, so maybe that was the , the first thing. The second thing was that I think that the, the world, the , the paradigm of talking to your customers less, you know, it was really , really born of an era where people really weren't making as many data informed decisions. And it might've been because a lot of this information wasn't digitized to begin with. Very , if you're running a , a legacy contact center and you're doing millions of phone calls a day, and those are analog phone calls, very difficult to mine that data extract insights and, you know, inform your decision making . And that's really where, you know, customer service was born. It's through the, the telephone. However, you know, in the digital era where we can actually start to make use of this information, you know, you can do more with this, it becomes much more action, much more useful. And so I, I felt as though the technology was actually quite a bit ahead of the strategy, and that seemed like an opportunity for us in building volley felt like we, we really should be, we knew our success had come from really rapid feedback loops between our users and our product teams. You know, the , the question was, why , how do we, if that works at a small scale, it should work at least as well at a big scale, maybe even better if we had more data. So how do we figure out how to solve that problem? That was the, that was the question.
00:07:56 · Pablo Srugo, Mike Murchison
[00:07:56] S0: I see. And at first solving that problem was, was not so much about starting a new business venture, it was just about making volley better, right? [00:08:03] S1: It was, and I, you know, I went through this, you know, this really difficult period where it started to become clear that, hey, maybe this customer experience opportunity was, is is a bigger one, a more difficult problem to solve than the one we were trying to solve with Volley . But yes, initially this was about a curiosity we had around, you know, solving a , a problem that we were experiencing as, as the leaders of Volley and not as a, you know, as a, oh , this is a pivot opportunity, or this is a new business venture. It was, it was about solving our own, our own operational challenge. [00:08:37] S0: So maybe let's, let's walk through some of the steps, right? So you , you mentioned first you call a bunch of VPs and customer success and, and you validate the idea that they're thinking about it that way. And, and , and that, that that is the current paradigm. What do you start doing? What are the first few steps you start taking towards fixing customer success, at least, you know, within volley at first?
00:08:58 · Mike Murchison
[00:08:58] S1: Yeah. So I think , uh, step one, and hopefully this is helpful for, you know, the entrepreneurs in the audience who are thinking about, you know, perhaps in their own companies or were exploring a pivot themselves. For , for me, what was most useful is we, we first heard, confirm that there was a pattern that the same problem was manifesting across industries. Like, that was, that was a very important, a very important learning. And the way we knew that was pretty simple. I mean, picking up the phone call, you have a 10th phone call in a row, and people are saying almost, they're all using the exact same phrases when they're describing the problem and they're reacting to it the same way. So I al you almost feel like, like an anthropologist, like you just sort of get to a point where you can kind of predict what someone's going to say in response to one of your questions. So that was, that was step one s . Step two was, was really the , the commitment to understanding this problem at a much deeper level. And for, for us, you know, making that commitment meant going back to these VPs and asking if we could join their team , uh, as agents. And seven of them said yes. So our, our belief there was, okay, we, we, we have this, we , we, we've, we've identified there's this problem across industries. Now let's understand it more deeply. The way to understand it more deeply in our view was to experience the pain firsthand as manually as possible. And so we became customer service agents, and we were the frontline customer service reps for seven different companies.
00:10:28 · Pablo Srugo, Mike Murchison
[00:10:28] S0: And that was you and your co-founder, like as your CEO of a startup that's funded. You take some time to be an agent for another company. [00:10:36] S1: Yeah, yeah. [00:10:37] S0: How much time are you devoting to this? Like how are you making that work?