Human-First Customer Success

There is no secret sauce recipe for a customer success strategy that applies to every business in every industry. Each organization has a unique way of operating the business and a target customer base with a certain set of needs or goals. To follow a universal recipe for success would be a disservice to your business, and your customers.

Customer success is an organization-wide goal and priority at Aryeo. We define Customer Success as all of the activities related to keeping our customers happy and helping them achieve their goals through the effective adoption and use of our platform. Our mission is to streamline real estate content throughout the industry – for those who generate it (photographers/creators) and those who consume it (agents, brokers, etc).

As empathetic people, it’s in our nature to hear grievances, troubleshoot challenges, and build relationships with a wide orbit of fellow human beings ranging from our teammates, to customers, to their customers — all people that rely on our software every day. Because of this reason, we often hold ourselves and our work, to superhuman standards.

Our product exists to help people solve a business need and our Customer Success Team is an extension of the product itself. We don’t just help customers by providing a great product—we also provide support, encouragement, and consultative help too. This brings us to the key principles that built the foundation of Customer Success at Aryeo.

Key Principles For Success

Customer-Centric Business Model: Aryeo has a culture of doing business that focuses on creating the best experience for our customers. We put them at the core of our business in order to provide a positive experience and build long-term relationships. We focus on the whole customer journey for a greater customer experience that helps us build trust from the very first interaction. Building trust means developing a unique relationship with our customers that feels authentic and transparent. And ultimately, the relationship is rooted in the desire to ensure we are providing customers with immediate value. We strive to provide more than just good support and service and focus on helping creators achieve their desired business outcome.

‍We’re Humans: We can probably all agree that getting an automated messaging service or interacting with a robot is super frustrating when you need help. Tell me I’m wrong, I’ll wait. At Aryeo, we call incoming customer inquiries conversations, not tickets. Tickets are meant for logging bug reports and feature enhancements for the product team to review and act upon. Customer support should feel personal. Every customer should feel like they’re involved in a one-to-one conversation with a human or business, not filing a support ticket that isn’t treated as part of a broader relationship. As a business, this requires responding quickly, honestly, personally, and proactively.

When chatting with our creators we approach them with empathy and work quickly to assist them with their needs. Their needs could range from simple how-to questions, complex account configurations, or it could be a prospective new client evaluating our tool and has some questions they’d like answered before making a decision. We even go as far as to extend invitations offering to hop on the phone with creators to help with onboarding needs or to discuss best practices based on a unique use case. Our team is here to help every step of the way! No robots necessary.

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Practice Active Listening: Customer feedback is the center of what informs and drives our business strategy. The Customer Success team is on the front lines every day with customers having conversations about challenges, needs, goals, and desired outcomes. To help track and manage feedback we use a tool called Canny.io that’s built right into our app. Customers can visit our Feature Requests dashboard where they can find a public facing roadmap of features we’re working on, planning to build, or is currently under review. They can also interact with our Aryeo community feature requests dashboard. Here they can log a new feature request, upvote an active post, comment, and receive real-time updates when the status of a request changes. Actively listening to our users and implementing their feedback to make a better product helps us build loyalty and trust with customers in an authentic, meaningful way.

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Platform Experience: We proactively eliminate potential customer problems and proactively fix those that arise. We need to be able to justify renewal every month, and doing so requires an emphasis on helping customers to see value and success with our product. Our goal is delight customers from the moment they sign-up and throughout the entire customer journey.

Based on the parts of the Aryeo System creators have shown interest in during account creation, we’ve scaffolded out a personalized onboarding experience for each creator to help get started! In this dashboard, creators can learn about the different parts of the system and how to master each. As each item is completed, we’ll mark them as completed to track progress. We incentivize creators to complete the onboarding tasks within their trial period by rewarding them with 15 free bonus listings.

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A new system can be overwhelming at first. To help, we’ve collected some of our favorite Aryeo Guides and Courses and put them all in one place! Aryeo will grow with you and your business from Day 1. Creators can learn how to use Aryeo and take their business to the next level with helpful video courses led by our team. We also have a dedicated support center packed with articles to help answer your questions and get you up and running in no time 👍🏼

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Conclusion

In my career, I’ve always found that “human-first” captures the spirit of what Customer Success is all about. It’s about viewing your client not as a transaction, stat, or as a deal, but instead as a human being. Customers want to connect – to learn, share, and sometimes they just want to commiserate. We know our client base well and we do our best to try and understand the person we are talking to. We think about issues like industry, use case, business model, personality, and the like. It’s easy to get lost in the data, analytics, and KPIs. We must always remember to take a step back and see the humans in it all. If you’re not invested in your customers’ success, you’re going to fall behind other businesses who are.

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