Customer service is part of your product

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Customer service and support is often a function that is overlooked from a product management perspective. There are debates as to whether it falls under sales, account management, product, community or marketing.

It’s my opinion that customer service and support should fall heavily under product. If it is not influenced by the product team then it needs to be heavily ingrained throughout all areas of the company and in every employee. Some of the most successful companies make customer service a huge part of their product experience. Great examples of this are Zappos, Uber, Mailbox, Airbnb and Soundcloud.

What do I mean by making it part of the product experience?  I mean that customer service should be a central feature that integrates with your product. Users should quickly and easily be able to find out how to contact you with questions or if they need support. Also, making it a visible component of your product gives users and customers a feeling of comfort. This comfort level is critical for products that use, store or integrate with a users personal information.

One other thing that you should do is have an informal, internal “SLA” (service level agreement) whereby you implement a process where you get back to any customer service request within minutes. Most users and customers are not used to great customer service and you can blow users away by getting back to them within minutes of the point of contact. Even if you don’t have an answer for them right away you should at least acknowledge you or your team are on top of it.

One great tool that I am a big fan of is Olark. It allows you to install a real-time chat widget on your site giving you the ability to chat with customers, answer their questions and put it in offline mode where users can still contact you via email. Other great tools for managing service are Twitter (obviously), UserVoice and Zendesk.

If you have any suggestions on other great customer service examples or tools drop them in the comments.

Designing web applications to create an app experience

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Designing simple, elegant web applications is core to ensuring a consistent and clean user experience. I have spent a lot of time the last few weeks analyzing what helps provide an “app” aesthetic on the web, especially one that ensures the application feels more like a real app and not just a website. The reason this is important is because on the web there is no real definition of native or app–unlike mobile platforms such as iOS or Android.

Some key considerations to take into account are:

  • Logo & branding: Try to avoid full logos in the top left of the layout as this is something very native to traditional websites. If there is a need to incorporate branding you should use an icon or variation of the logo anchored into the nav bar.
  • Navigation bar: The header of the application should be anchored with a nicely designed (gradient, texture) bar that includes the branding and core navigation elements. The best way to represent the navigation elements is using buttons or icons, but try to avoid using icons that represent mobile motifs.
  • Footer bar: Having a nicely designed bar in the footer that is consistent with the nav bar really helps anchor the entire UI. It can make the application feel less like a web page that just ends after the main body.
  • Buttons: All buttons should have depth and strong interactions on click and mouseover. You should also use tooltips when necessary to give the user more information.
  • Font: Text should have shadows and depth, especially on navigation elements and buttons. I would also consider using custom fonts that you can get from Typekit or Google Web Fonts rather than standard Arial, Verdana, Tahoma, etc.
  • UI separation: Use strong ridgelines that have depth for separating buttons, elements, rows and assets. Spotify does a great job with this on their buttons and table headers on their grids.
  • Compact size: Design apps so that they are as small and as tight as possible, unless there is a real need for the window size to be large.
  • UI Interactivity: Making the UI customizable and interactive is really important. Adding things like animations, mouseover effects or being able to drag/drop UI elements is important.
  • Grids: All grids should have fixed headers when you scroll down, fixed column widths so the columns dont shift when data comes in and should be interactive when you mousover or click in a cell (such as changing the color of a row on mousover).
  • Flat Design: Flat design is also becoming a very big trend and one that I am following very closely. It can make very simple applications feel elegant and fluid. There is a really great article here that you should read if you want to learn more.

Below are some applications that do a great job incorporating the above elements are:

  1. Wunderlist
  2. HipChat
  3. Twitter
  4. Tweetdeck
  5. Spotify
  6. Asana
  7. Yammer
  8. Inbox2

Useful tool for product managers: Chrome dev tools

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As a follow-up to my post on Dribble I wanted to share a quick and easy tool that product managers should be using on a daily basis. Part of a product manager’s role is to constantly be tweaking and improving existing products. If you have a product that runs in a browser (website or app) a tool you should use to make UI, layout and fast tweaks is the Chrome Developer Tools.

If you know the basics of CSS it can be s a really powerful tool for a few reasons:

Speed: If the basic layout and product design are in place already, it’s a much faster way to tweak colors, gradients and layout.

Real-time: The changes you make are reflected in real-time. There’s no need to develop a wireframe, have developers agree to the spec and then have your designer turn it around.

Code changes:  Once the changes are made and approved you can then share the CSS code directly with your development team which makes the entire process much faster.

This is not ideal in every product scenario, but can be a really useful method to iterate quickly on an existing product. You can read more here on Google’s Developer Site.

Dribbble as a product and design tool

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Product and design go hand in hand. At the end of the day great design is a big part of having a great product. A beautiful and functional design makes a product exponentially better. Some examples of how design has driven product and product growth you can look at companies such as Fab, Path, Pinterest, Foursquare, Tumblr, Twitter and Instagram. All of these platforms on both web and mobile have implemented beautiful and unique designs. I am not saying that having a good design will make a terrible product better, but a product that has a beautiful aesthetic and a clean UX can go a long way in driving growth.

When it comes to choosing a look and feel for your product an extremely valuable tool that I use on a daily basis is Dribbble. Dribbble is a community for high quality designers who share their work and get feedback from the community. Part of being a product manager is being efficient and not re-creating the wheel so I often use Dribbble to help inspire my design, color palette and UX choices. If you are building an app, website, packaging or branding, Dribbble is a great resource that more product managers and designers should leverage in their daily workflows.

Never argue or get frustrated in front of customers

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Frustration

This is really common sense but sometimes can be difficult in the moment. One thing you should NEVER do in meetings with customers or partners is show obvious frustration with members of your team. Even worse is starting to argue with them. It leaves a bad taste in everyone’s mouth.

Even if it is subtle everyone at the meeting will pick it up. You will have an extremely difficult time recovering from it and your customers or partners will leave the meeting with a really bad feeling about your company. Don’t be surprised if you never hear from them again or if the deal slows down and dies from that point.

It comes across to customers that there are major issues with your team (even if there aren’t) and creates a hostile and uncomfortable environment. If this happens the best thing to do to recover is ignore the frustrated party and divert the conversation back to what the customer cares about.

Navigating Enterprise Sales: Finding a Sponsor

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Navigating a large enterprise during a sale is challenging for many reasons: politics, bureaucracy, identifying the right decision makers, selling against internal initiatives, and the list goes on.

There are many ways to make sure your sales process goes well but there is a key piece of advice I wanted to share based on feedback and experience I have had with enterprise sales: find an internal sponsor who will go the distance for you. Sponsors are critical in helping a sale close as they help with navigating an organization, getting you in front of the right people and giving you candid feedback on product, strategy and pricing.

Here are some key considerations for finding and managing an internal sponsor:

Sales stage: You need to make sure that you find a sponsor as early as possible in the sales process. Getting them early will help get you in front of the right people and move the conversations forward at a faster pace.

Fit: Your sponsor needs to be a good fit within the organization. You want to make sure your sponsor has influence, understands the internal politics and most importantly, your product needs to be a fit with his her internal role and strategy.

Whats in it for them: The best sponsor-company relationship is when you can help your sponsor succeed. You need to find a way to make sure that your sponsor has a path to success as well, whether it’s a potential promotion, salary increase or increased influence within their organization.

Trust: You need to make sure that there is a strong level of trust with your sponsor. You need to be able to have candid and open conversations with them that you can’t with others at the organization you are selling to.

Alignment: This goes a long with trust, but you need to make sure you are both strategically aligned and that the sponsor is not using you for information, intelligence or technology.

Procurement: This is only applicable once you are close to closing a deal, but a sponsor can be invaluable in getting you through internal procurement and vendor management. Make sure to lean on your sponsor to help move things forward at this stage.

A sponsor can really help accelerate getting a deal done so always make sure you are on the look out for a strategic sponsor in the early stages of your sales process.

The FinTech Hackathon: Building a Community

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The FinTech HackathonFinTech Hackathon, an event I help put together with a great group of organizers, took place this past weekend at AlleyNYC. We had over 200 attendees as well as representatives from over 20 firms from across the industry–it was a great success and produced some really innovative products and ideas. It was also great to see the winning team walk away with $10,000 from Novus Partners!

Building a community around an industry is challenging, and doing so for the financial industry is not an easy task. I have watched the fintech community grow and come to its own over the last year, and we organized this event as a way to bring this community together. There is a lot of innovation happening across the industry and our goal with the Hackathon was to further promote innovation and expose the community to the technologies and platforms that are part of the growing fintech ecosystem.

I was pleasantly surprised by the amazing turnout we had. There were over 200 developers and designers who built 35 working MVP’s in just under 24 hours. We also had an amazing group of 16 technology partners who provided their API’s and platforms for attendees to build on top of. The demo day was a huge hit with over 100 additional people who came out to watch the teams demo their hacks.

FinTech Hackathon

The talent at the event was incredible. We had developers and designers from some of the major financial institutions, hedge funds and trading firms as well as aspiring entrepreneurs who were all trying to solve real problems. There were products built to enhance risk management, analytics, trading, payments, visualization and big data. It was inspiring to see what was built in just 24 hours and the energy and dedication throughout the Hackathon was amazing.

FinTech Hackathon

I really can’t wait for the next event and wanted to quickly recognize our winners:

First Place and $10,000 winner: Real ID - An innovative way for banks to identify the real identity of customers

Second Place: TidBits – Bitcoin futures exchange, price hedging and merchant tools

Third Place: Zap – Mobile payments without a physical card reader using computer vision for face and card detection

FinTech Hackathon

Our Technology Partners also selected teams for the best use of their technologies and handed out some awesome prizes:

10gen: Mosuq

Caplin: FinGraph

CardFlight: Mobile Sales Platform

Dwolla: Little Victories

Estimize: Social Earnings

OANDA: GlobalFX

OpenGamma: Arcadius Reconciliation

OpenShift: Social Point

StockTwits: FinTrack

Zipmark: Tidbits

I also want to thank our sponsors, technology partners and judges because without them we could not have put the event together:

Sponsors: Novus Partners, OpenShift, Blackstone, Betterment, Moven, WilmerHale and the FinTech Innovation Lab.

Technology Partners: 10gen, Bloomberg, Caplin, Dwolla, Estimize, OANDA, OpenGamma, OpenFin, StockTwits, Tradable, Xignite, Zipmark, Disqus, Kaazing, Cardflight, SlashDB and the Treasury Department.

Judges: Sallie Krawcheck, Matt Harris, Matt Turck, Erica Frontiero, Kim Trautman, Bijan Treister, Celina Morjeon.

FinTech Hackathon

We cannot wait for the next event so make sure to sign up at www.fintechhack.com to stay updated!