CX Tech Stack Guide for Startups - AWS

CX Tech Stack Guide for Startups

1

Zendesk’s CX tech stack guide for startups

1

Zendesk

When Zendesk began in 2007, it had the building blocks common to many successful startups: a great idea, passionate advocates, and a bit (or maybe even a lot) of good luck.

Along the way to becoming a publicly traded

company, we’ve learned quite a bit, but we haven’t

forgotten that our early success stemmed from

the support of fellow startups willing to give our

products and ideas a chance.

We also understand just how challenging it can be

for startups, which is why we’re sharing what we’ve

learned. In 2018, we published a guide to customer

service aimed at helping startups build great

experiences for their customers, and now we’re

following up about another challenge: how to think

about your customer experience (CX) tech stack to

solve immediate problems while keeping future

needs in mind. The strategic decisions you make

about your CX tech stack in the beginning can set

you on the path for long-term success and ensure

that your great product idea isn’t impeded by

unwieldy tools.

CX Tech Stack Guide for Startups

Customerengagement—what is it?

3

"There are different phases of how a startup evolves – even the hyper-growth startups on day one, they're not focused on growth. They're focused on engagement."

- Ravi Belani, Managing Director, Alchemist Accelerator

Simply put, customer engagement is about building customer loyalty and strengthening the bond between your customer and your brand. It begins with a startup’s first interaction with a customer—often a trial version of a product or an outright purchase—but also includes support requests, marketing e�orts (in which customer data plays a key role), and beyond.

It might seem like a lot to take in when you’re focused on getting your product to market, but don’t neglect customer engagement—it is inextricably connected to the customer experience. In fact, Ravi Belani, managing director of the Alchemist Accelerator, thinks that startups should prioritize engagement over monetization. “There are di�erent phases of how a startup evolves—even the hyper-growth startups on day one, they’re not focused on growth,” Belani says. “They’re focused on engagement. Typically as a startup you’re going to have to choose between growth, engagement, or monetization—and it’s very di�cult to do all three. You sort of need to choose one of the three, and when you’re beginning, in [Alchemist’s] experience, it’s mainly engagement.”

Building a tech stack for now and the future

4

CX Tech Stack Guide for Startups

" Re-platforming sucks—it’s hard and it takes a long time. In some ways, getting a better deal because you have a champagne problem—you’re growing really fast—that’s the easier part. The diligence I would do is less on pricing and more on, are the customers that are using this piece of software at a much bigger scale?”"

- Ben Barclay, Zendesk’s VP of technology alliances

Ease of integration:Making a decision to adopt customer experience software isn’t just about finding a tool that will scale—it’s also about choosing a solution that works well with the other software your team uses on a daily basis. According to Blissfully’s SaaS Trends 2020 report, the average SMB uses 102 di�erent apps in running their business, and that number only goes up as a company grows.

You will naturally want to build a stack that has a mix of broad platform software that can power a lot of things at once, alongside best-in-class point solutions. The key to allowing those tools to work together is strong integration capabilities, so look for products that have the developer-friendly APIs and SDKs you’ll need to create a stack that not only works together but that works for you.

Ensuring that your startup will be able to provide a great customer experience from launch day and beyond requires having a set of tools in place well before the first customer purchases your app or service. As Ben Barclay, Zendesk’s VP of technology alliances, sees it, startups need to think long-term: is this CX software provider operating on a global scale, with global support? Does this tool not just meet requirements for this year, but five years from now?

When you think about building a CX tech stack that not only works for you now but can support you in the future, it boils down to three main things: scalability, ease of integration, and feature robustness without infinite configuration requirements.

Scalability:Thinking about how a CX tech stack will scale over time can give startups valuable insights about how to meet expected growth in a cost-conscious manner. Will that CX solution give support agents the tools they need to work more e�ciently, thus keeping head count at a reasonable level? What about collaboration and communication between various internal teams, such as sales, marketing, and product development? Will it o�er rich historical data on your customers that has been pulled from other tools your startup uses—information that will help cultivate and nurture relationships?

“What’s important is that you pick software that will help you scale from a future functionality perspective more than from a price perspective,” Barclay says. “Are you investing in something that has the footprint, the support structure, and the feature functionality that will support that scale? Re-platforming sucks—it’s hard and it takes a long time. In some ways, getting a better deal because you have a champagne problem—you’re growing really fast—that’s the easier part. The diligence I would do is less on pricing and more on, are the customers that are using this piece of software at a much bigger scale?”

5

Robustness without the robust-messOnce, customers were content with one or two channels—say, phone and email—but increasingly they expect an omnichannel experience, one in which they can move seamlessly from texting, chat, social media, and so on without having to repeat themselves (Zendesk’s research indicates that 68% of customers are annoyed at having to do so). The expectation that businesses will meet customers where they are plays a significant role in customer satisfaction and loyalty, elements that can spell the di�erence between success and failure. Considering that fewer than 30% of companies o�er self-service, live chat, social messaging, in-app messaging, bots, or peer-to-peer communities, doing so as a startup can prove to be a key di�erentiator in the marketplace.

This seachange in customer expectations means that shared email inboxes and a call center just won’t be enough to keep customers engaged and happy. You will need to find software that brings all of your customer communication channels together, and then allow you to easily apply workflow and automation that make your team productive and leave your customers well cared for. Many tools can o�er a lot of feature robustness but place a high burden on the user to deploy, so be careful to understand how much configuration a tool will require as you do initial evaluation.

With these things in mind, let’s take a look at a few elements of customer engagement that startups should be considering.

CX Tech Stack Guide for Startups

6

Customer service and support.

Will your CX solution work with your other tools?Making a decision to adopt customer experience software isn’t just about finding a tool that will provide an omnichannel experience that’s fueled by rich customer data—it’s also about choosing a solution that works well with the other software your team uses on a daily basis.

For example, Slack has become ubiquitous in the workplace as many companies de-emphasize email in favor of real-time conversations via the instant messaging platform. Being able to seamlessly integrate Slack conversations into your CX platform isn’t a nice-to-have: it’s absolutely necessary, especially when support agents reach out to product or sales teams to resolve customer issues. Those conversations can serve as a treasure trove of information, which can drive the creation of self-service content while also serving as a searchable record of how your team collaborates on resolving tricky questions.

This is why a startup, when making a decision about its CX tech stack, needs to consider whether a provider o�ers a wide range of plug-ins for third-party productivity tools. Are you managing your development sprints with Trello and marketing email campaigns with Mailchimp? Are you running your ecommerce operations on top of Shopify? Integrating those applications with your CX tech stack can give support agents critical information about things like upcoming releases or past purchases, and also allow for more proactive communications with users.

Also, think beyond your existing tools—will the platform you choose provide a marketplace with plug-ins that help you train agents and keep track of their performance? If your tech stack includes a CRM, will you be able to link sales files from Dropbox? Be sure to take stock of all your third-party tools—including ones you plan to adopt in the future—before committing to a customer experience platform.

Any of your employees that engage with customers need tools that are intuitive, easily configured, and customizable. In those heady days right after launch, startups face a pair of challenges: lack of funds for a large support team—often everyone, including the founder, has to assume the role of agent in the beginning—and a product that’s probably a little rough around the edges.

To make the most of lean support organizations, startups need support software that enables the kind of workflow e�ciencies that maximize agent output while providing actionable data about sta�ng needs and performance.

Yet agent e�ciency, while essential, is only part of the picture. As mentioned earlier, startups must implement an omnichannel support system or face competitive disadvantages, ones that’ll be di�cult to overcome. And it’s not enough to simply provide a wealth of support options for customers; your agents need context. If a customer reached out by text and then followed up via email, will the agent answering the email see that previous interaction (as well as all previous ones with that customer)? Will that agent need to switch back-and-forth between incompatible tools?

When choosing a tool for your CX tech stack, be sure it provides deep functionality for self-service content (including easy ways to flag solutions for help center articles). This can ensure that your startup will be able to scale support operations while keeping the team at a manageable size. It also allows agents to focus on more complex issues while giving customers what they prefer (as the Harvard Business Review discovered, 81 percent of customers try to fix problems on their own before reaching out to a support employee). Since our early days as a startup, Zendesk has developed best practices about how to build robust self-service options, including features that leverage AI to help keep knowledge content accurate.

CX Tech Stack Guide for Startups

7

Customer data (and how to use it).

sentiment-tracking tools such as Net Promoter Score� surveys. Todd Olson, CEO and co-founder of Pendo says, “We see ourselves as an ‘increase engagement’ company. It takes more than analytics or messages to do this — it takes both. Analytics are interesting and powerful, but our messages provide our customers with the ability to experiment and create change — change that can improve your business and/or help you learn even more.”

But NPS surveys aren’t the only way to ask customers for direct feedback. No matter how great your product is, some customers invariably leave—and though that’s generally not great news, it serves as an opportunity to learn why they’re leaving, via churn surveys. Every startup wants to reduce the churn rate, and services such as Brightback can make it much easier to present surveys to former customers, often very shortly after they’ve canceled. While it might be too late to salvage the relationship with that departing customer, their feedback could lead to changes that will help you retain others.

Customer data can help you boost engagement and sales, but for startups that information also fuels rapid product iteration. You will want to put a lot of time and energy into developing your customer data model over time, but you shouldn’t let that stand in your way of deploying tools to get the customer insights you need. Sure, you can guess what current and potential customers want from your product, but do you really want to gamble with your great idea? By choosing the right CX data tool, you can take the guesswork out of the equation and start tailoring your iterative development process toward your customers’ needs.

While it’s technically possible to build a great product without customer feedback, it’s rare—and extremely risky. Startups need product development tools that enable rapid, customer-focused iterations that take the guesswork out of the process, Barclay says. For example, Pendo’s Product Cloud gives companies the ability to understand and guide their users’ journeys using invaluable insights, in-app walkthroughs and direct feedback through

Customer acquisition

8

to close deals, which is also aided if the CRM they’re using is fully integrated with your CX tool. Customer experience software should also enable support and sales to engage in centralized conversations with members of the product team, especially if your startup’s product is particularly complex.

Meanwhile, don’t forget that marketing plays a crucial part in acquiring customers, and it’s vital that the CX tool you chose integrates smoothly with marketing platforms such as MailChimp. When choosing a marketing tool, startups need to think about a few factors: will it help you understand your users better and craft messages that resonate with them? Can you build integrated campaigns with it, and does it have design tools that make it easy to create professional, consistent marketing materials? Will it enable your team to easily set up di�erent channels—email, social media, landing pages, and paid advertising—in order to reach the widest possible audience?

One of the biggest challenges many startups face is acquiring customers. But, it’s important to have the building blocks with support and data in place before you start to aggressively market to new customers.

One of the most powerful ways to acquire customers is through a free trial. And this is where customer experience software shines—as those users experiment with your startup’s product, they will often reach out for guidance and support. Having a central view of what these users are saying — aided by robust reporting and customer feedback captured via your knowledge base — can help your business improve service and gain valuable insights that could inform the product roadmap process.

This view into the customer journey, even in trial mode, can also provide support reps opportunities to point out features that are available in the paid version. Salespeople can then use that customer data to address pain points proactively, making it easier

CX Tech Stack Guide for Startups

Consistency is key

Zendesk for startups: the incubation program at Station FWhen Zendesk began in a Copenhagen apartment in 2007, founders Mikkel Svane, Morten Primdahl, and Alex Aghassipour were primed to disrupt a customer service software industry marked by high costs and long implementation times. Along the way to becoming a publicly traded company, Zendesk has learned lessons that it’s ready to share with other dreamers. That’s why Zendesk has created a support program for startups located at Station F in Paris, where our experienced leaders will impart practical tips, access to our worldwide network, and lessons from our high-growth journey to B2B SaaS startups just beginning their own quest.

Designed for startups with about five employees, this program provides networking opportunities with VC firms and accelerators, as well as discussions with Zendesk co-founders and executives, access to a program manager, and invaluable insights from our go-to-market team. “We are committed to growing our business in France and investing in the region because it o�ers top talent and a burgeoning startup community,” Svane says. “France is a fast-growing technology innovation hub with a digital ecosystem that is beginning to rival some of the top performing global regions, and we’re excited to participate. 10 years ago, we had no choice than developing our business in the United States. Now we want to give startups the choice.”

Zendesk Incubation Program at StationF is open for B2B SaaS Startups that want to build on Zendesk Marketplace. If you are interested, apply here.

No matter which part of the customer engagement process you look at—providing support, managing data or customer acquisi-tion—the importance of having a consistent customer experience cannot be overstated. Your customers will demand it, from product launch to the day you ring the bell at the New York Stock Exchan-ge. And by laying the groundwork for a seamless customer experience—powered by a solution that will scale with your startup’s growth—you’ll give your great product idea the chance to break through.

It’s imperative that startups consider these questions sooner rather than later, because the data is clear: companies that increase customer retention rates by just 5 percent can improve profits by as much as 95 percent, and that focus can lead to greatly expanded market share. And as Zendesk discovered in our most recent CX trends research, companies that excel at leveraging customer data see 36% faster resolution times, a 79% reduction in wait times, and solve four times as many issues as lower-performing competitors.

“Companies that increase customer retention rates by just 5 percent can improve profits by as much as 95 percent.”

9

CX Tech Stack Guide for Startups