Your teams work hard to build new business. Yet growth often brings challenges that can slow down momentum.
Let’s take a closer look at how fast growth can affect your company:
Tech companies love to sell their products to enterprise customers. After all, a single sale can net tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars and thousands of users. Successfully selling to even a handful of such companies can significantly accelerate the growth of a software company.
Of course, this isn’t the only way to grow. Tech companies also achieve viral growth by selling cloud offerings to smaller companies.
In either instance, adding customers can profoundly impact the rate at which engineers complete projects — otherwise known as product velocity.
Takeaway: Slowing product velocity will eventually slow growth.
Product velocity is a key performance indicator; it can be influenced by the difference between what your product can do and what your customers want or expect. The impact of this delta is first felt in technical support.
A McKinsey study found that customer support becomes more important and complex as companies grow. In such instances, customer demands' increasing magnitude and complexity often skyrocket the demands placed on support. In turn, customer satisfaction is adversely impacted.
To varying degrees, this means that, as your customer base grows, along with their expectations, your developers may see more of their time being taken up with tech support. This shift requires them to turn their focus away from product development, which impacts product velocity and customer satisfaction.
Takeaway: An accelerated demand for technical support can adversely impact product velocity and customer satisfaction.
A drop in customer satisfaction is likely to set off the alarm. As mentioned above, initially, it may seem to make sense to shift your developers into the role of ad hoc support. After all, engineers know the product best.
However, this action may generate dissatisfaction among your engineering team. It may even cause them to leave the company, further decreasing product velocity.
But if that isn’t daunting enough, it often takes more than six months for a new hire to reach optimum productivity. That means even the best onboarding process won’t prevent slowdowns in product velocity.
Having a reliable pool of technical support talent is critical to maintaining a high-quality customer experience, but it’s also crucial in another way.
Takeaway: Hiring quality engineers is a well-documented challenge.
Today’s clients are conditioned by B2C services such as Amazon, Netflix, and Uber. Meeting their expectations is a challenge. B2B customers expect personalized service, omnichannel support, and digital ease of access to human care. As a result, B2B and B2C expectations are converging into a business-to-people (B2P) landscape.
In short, a high-quality support capability that’s personalized and responsive is critical to customer retention.
Takeaway: Clients expect a personalized experience that enables them to increase product value and close the gap between expectations and capability.
Given these findings, it’s no surprise that unmet customer expectations can weaken sales in a fast-growing company.
Fortunately, this trend can be turned around with a more holistic approach to fast growth. Such a strategy requires an effective and scalable technical support capability, one that a tech-enabled services company like ServiceRocket is uniquely able to provide. Schedule a call or click here to learn how we help companies deliver support that enables fast growth.
