PDO Strategies for Salesforce ISVs: Achieving 5-Star AppExchange CSAT
Imagine this: you've just launched a fine software masterpiece on Salesforce AppExchange, expecting fanfare, standing ovations, and perhaps a parade in your honor. 🎉
Instead, your inbox starts filling up, but not with the anticipated adulation. Welcome to the front lines of customer feedback – where the real fun begins.
Salesforce ISVs - What does an upset customer look like?
As a Salesforce PDO, we continually educate our ISV clients on the importance of deploying customer success teams; here is what happens when that advice is ignored for various reasons 👇🏻
I sent an email for help last month and just got a reply. Did you have to reinvent the internet to respond?
Navigating your support site is like being in a maze, except the prize at the end is more confusing.
I got a reply that was so vague that I thought it was a fortune cookie's advice.
The answers I get are too vague and don't solve my problem. I expect more precise guidance from the support.
I spent so long on hold I celebrated three birthdays. When's the party?
Your troubleshooting guide must be in Morse code because it's certainly not in plain English.
Your app said, 'compatible with all versions.' I guess our version is from an alternate universe? Because it's not working.
The installation process has been anything but smooth, leaving us stuck and seeking urgent help.
Introducing new problems with an update is highly disappointing. We count on improvements, not setbacks.
The lack of clear installation instructions adds to the stress. We're in dire need of straightforward guidance.
Running into issues after installation has been a nightmare for our operations. Immediate and effective support is critical.
This happens clearly because of a lack of knowledge base(product guides, documentation) and customer success teams, i.e. support and implementation engineers.
5 Key Phases of Customer Success for Salesforce ISVs
Depending on the App Roadmap and MVP release cycle, ISVs need to prepare a few support/implementation engineers to handle promptly inquiries related to the following phases:
Pre-Installation Concerns: Compliance, data protection, and privacy are paramount, especially for large Salesforce customers.
During Installation: Salesforce admins often face challenges during the setup process.
Post-Installation: After the app is live, it's not uncommon for new issues to arise. For example:
The app conflicts with existing critical business flows or triggers on standard objects like Account.
A UI component (LWC/Aura/VF) crashes after adding to a page layout.
The app’s backend triggers/flows throw exceptions or errors at some vital features.
Training - In case your App is pretty complex, training might be required for key stakeholders to ensure the app’s adoption is good. No customer would like to buy/renew an app that their team does not actively use or adopt.
Building Custom Accelerators - During the app’s implementation phase, some customers need custom solutions in Salesforce that talk to the ISV’s App and the existing flows and integrations. Some customers don’t have the Salesforce engineers in-house to deliver those solutions rapidly; here, some assistance from ISV can make a huge difference.
It’s easy for a customer’s Salesforce admin to give up on an App and move to a competitor if they don’t get prompt assistance or resolution to their concerns.
Demystifying Customer Success Team for Salesforce ISVs
Customer Success teams assist customers in achieving success with an ISV app throughout all five stages outlined above.
Role of the Support Team
First Line of Defense: The Support team is the first point of contact for customers facing challenges. They resolve issues, provide guidance, and ensure customers can use your product effectively.
Feedback Loop: Through direct interaction, the Support team gathers valuable feedback, identifying common pain points and areas for improvement, which can inform product development and user experience enhancements.
Role of the Implementation Team
Onboarding Champions: The Implementation team guides new customers through onboarding and setting up the product or service according to the customer's specific needs and objectives.
Tailored Solutions: They provide customised solutions and training to ensure the product integrates seamlessly into the customer's workflow, maximising usability and satisfaction.
Synergy Between Support and Implementation
Unified Goal: Both teams work towards the same objective - ensuring customers succeed. While Implementation focuses on getting customers started on the right foot, Support takes over for ongoing assistance and problem resolution.
Collaboration is Key: Regular communication between these teams ensures a cohesive customer experience. Sharing insights and feedback helps refine onboarding processes and preemptively address potential issues.
Vital Take away
The customer success team must communicate Customer feedback to ISV and the core engineering group. This helps ISV re-prioritise the feature roadmap based on some critical gaps identified by customers during the 5 phases outlined above. The feedback also helps improve onboarding guides, videos and other relevant practices.
A big sign of success for ISV is the seamless and rapid onboarding of customers.
Customer Success Team Structuring for Salesforce ISVs
Salesforce ISVs can be solopreneurs, established SAAS companies with healthy revenue streams, or someone in the middle. As a Salesforce PDO partner, we have seen it all, and it hugely impacts the structure of customer success teams.
Customer Success for Solopreneur Salesforce ISVs
As a Salesforce product development outsourcer, we ran into two broad categories of Solopreneurs:
They have decent funding as they exited a successful startup and want to build another business on Salesforce AppExchange.
The customer success setup is not a big challenge, as from their past business experience (possibly SAAS), they are already familiar with the importance of customer success teams.
As a Salesforce PDO partner, we plan training and onboarding of customer success teams while scoping and budgeting the app (ahead of MVP release). This ensures the app’s go-live on Salesforce AppExchange is aligned with the availability of a well-trained and equipped customer success team.
Self-funded, possibly with a limited budget. They are mostly business experts, Salesforce admins/engineers/architects looking to make big on Salesforce AppExchange.
Depending on the complexity of the app, mostly these Solopreneurs plan to handle customer success themself. However, this can impact their ability to focus on sales and marketing efforts, a critical area to focus on app release.
As a Salesforce PDO, we suggest Solopreneurs train at least plan 1-2 admins or junior engineers offshore (to keep the budget in control), and those engineers can do shifts to ensure customers have someone available to answer their queries across timezones. However, a customer success team working 24x7 is mostly not required for all ISVs, as some apps are precisely targeted for a given geography only.
Customer Success for Salesforce ISVs with existing SAAS apps
As a Salesforce product development outsourcer, we helped many such ISVs who want to bring their existing SAAS solutions as a connector on Salesforce AppExchange, as this gives their business exposure to Fortune 500 brands that use Salesforce. These customers, again, are well aware of the importance of customer success teams, and our job as a Salesforce PDO partner is to find a win-win path forward, which could be:
Training their existing SAAS Customer Success Teams on Salesforce basics and the typical challenges a Salesforce customer could face during various phases of app consumption. This works best and is mostly the case, as the current Customer Success team is well-trained on the ISV’s SAAS solution. Salesforce is mostly another connector to their suite of SAAS connectors, along with Shopify, Zoho, Hubspot, etc.
If the current customer success team is overbooked, as a Salesforce PDO, we work in a timely and cohesive fashion with ISV to outsource or hire an in-house customer success team.
FAQs
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Depending on budget, ISV’s timezone and their prospective client’s timezone, a support team can be hired directly by ISV, or a Salesforce PDO can hire customer success staff off-shore to work in the required time zone.
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Customer success teams can’t succeed without proper App and Salesforce fundamentals training. A support function can be planned in many ways, for:
Some junior Salesforce admins/QA/developers involved in MVP release development can assist with Customer Success. They know the product and Salesforce platform well and will not need any additional technical training.
Hire customer success engineers near the end of the MVP Dev cycle. They get a dev build to play around and train along with QA. This also gives a reasonable amount of time to warm up the support team before the app's release.
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You will need an excellent communicator with decent tech skills as a Customer Success Engineer. Don’t try to hire a costly, highly certified Salesforce engineer for this job.
The name of the game is “communication”; make sure they can get into the customer’s shoes, communicate and understand their pain points. Make a cautious hiring decision based on the level of tech play required, depending on the app's complexity.
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ISVs should consider the complexity of their app and their business size, from solopreneurs to established SAAS companies, to determine the right mix and size of the customer success team, including in-house and outsourced members.
Related Reading
Article by our Salesforce Architect & MVP Abhinav - The Ultimate Guide: Succeeding on AppExchange
Official ISV-Force Guide — A bible for all ISVs, if you have the bandwidth to read and consume it.
Official Salesforce Partner Community ISV Track Guide — requires Partner Community login, as an ISV or SI partner.
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