Know what makes a new customer want to stay with you? Hint – it’s not the software.
Long-term retention is linked to the impression you leave in those first few days and weeks after signing a new customer.
What was their first experience with your platform? When a support issue arose, what was the good, bad and ugly of how it was handled? Should they have an issue that needs to be escalated, do they know how that works and, equally important, will they remember it when the time comes?
These are the lightning fast moments that can shape a customer’s long-lasting impression of not only who you are as a software provider, but who you’ve chosen to partner with, and whether the “value” promised in the sales process is worth their perceived hassle. From there, it’s a short leap to “We’re canceling our contract.”
Avoiding this bleak fate really isn’t that difficult. It’s all in how you handle customer support, making sure the process is seamless not only for your software customers, but also for every partner with whom you work.
That’s our model at First American.
Here, “Customer Support” encompasses many stakeholders including:
- You, the Independent Software Development Vendor
- The Merchants Using Your Software
- The Customers These Merchants Ultimately Serve.
By design, we are structured to support each one. This allow us to deliver the level of in-the-trenches support that gives your business what a transactional integration project cannot – a sustainable competitive market advantage.
The foundation for that begins with a solid partnership between our Integrated Software Development Team and the software vendor’s support team.
From the outset, these groups are in close communication through weekly meetings focused on the mission-critical aspects of integration.
These conversations shape the processes that keep the entire project on point; that includes the fundamentals of how we will handle software integration, down to the details of proper credentialing, a common source of post-development technical issues.
That may sound like a bunch of fancy “IT talk”, but its importance will resonate with any independent software vendor who has ever dealt with a merchant when the “Welcome” email instructions didn’t exactly go as planned.
It’s one of the most common first-line support issues we see. Copying and pasting the software credentials seems straightforward, and it is when you speak all things software as your profession. But for a time-strapped business owner, this ask feels like a confusing distraction taking their attention away from where it really needs to be. So we provide web hooks and an API to remove this error-prone manual step and to ensure payments are up and running.
Our support also includes the creation of reference material and other assets useful in the post-integration phase – think escalation path documentation and rendered PDFs that put these processes in plainspoken language so it can easily be added to a customer-facing website.
And in the moments when it matters most, when a transaction issue arises, when the merchant is frustrated and when your reputation as a software vendor is on the line, we provide support through our award-winning Customer Care team.
