Focus on customer service
When Hyland hands you his business card, you’re actually receiving access — not simply a card. On that little card is not the general company phone number or an assistant’s extension but rather his direct office line as well as his cell phone number.
“Make sure there are no gatekeepers to the senior leadership — period,” Hyland says. “Don’t have a bunch of hoops to go through before you actually talk to the owners or the senior management in any department. That would be No. 1, so customers have to know that they’ve got a final backstop with the leadership of an organization.”
This is just the start of how Hyland Software focuses on customer service, the second critical factor to growing the organization.
“Senior leadership has to lead by example because if they’re not doing it, no one’s going to do it,” he says. “If they’re not customer-oriented, they’re not taking calls, they’re not getting in front of the fire and getting out on the front lines with customers who need help or need resolution on stuff and they’re trying to shirk all those responsibilities, it will not trickle down at all.”
Hyland says that customer service starts with making yourself available to your customers.
“Customer service has a lot to do with accessibility,” he says. “[It’s] making sure that you’re projecting to your customer base that we want to hear from you — it’s not you bought our product and good luck.”
That’s why Hyland and the other senior executives at the company make their phone numbers available for all of their customers, and that’s what he expects of all of his employees, as well.
“If you’re not willing to get on the phone and help customers with problems, you’re not going to last here,” he says. There’s no way for you to exist in this organization if you’re going to take this standoffish us versus them. To us, it’s about partnership. It’s about locking arms and dealing with issues. It’s about saying sorry when you make a mistake and moving on to a solution fast.”
To get everyone to adapt this mentality, Hyland says you have to focus on training your people in customer service.
“Don’t skimp on training for people, particularly when they start with a company,” he says. “Don’t just say, ‘Good luck.’ You have to give them context on where you are in the industry and what your corporate value system is and how you approach customers in general and what we care about as an organization and what our goals are this year and what are we focusing on. People armed with those parameters are better able to serve customers.”
You also have to continue talking to them about why customer service is so important long after they start.
“It means being proactive,” he says. “It means training your people and giving your people the power to make decisions that are pro-customer and they understand that this is who signs the paycheck and building that mentality over time.”
That understanding of who signs his employees’ paychecks is critical, and to reinforce it, he talks about new customers at every Monday-morning meeting with the company, where he reads the name of each new customer that has come on board in the previous week.
“It may sound corny — I could just say the number — ‘Hey, we got seven new customers last week,’ but I think it’s important for people to hear who these companies are that are signing our paychecks and for them to see the names written in front of them,’” Hyland says.
He also wants employees to get to know customers and understand them so customers come into Hyland and present their solution to employees, and it’s also recorded so people can watch it later. They talk about the decisions they make, why they buy Hyland’s product, what have been some of the positives they’ve gotten from it, what some of the pitfalls have been, what they would like to see in the product and what they would like to see from the company. It’s not mandatory for employees to attend or watch it later, but many of them do because they realize it’s important to hear from customers.
Another way Hyland focuses on its customers is by creating user communities where customers can come in and learn from each other.
“Sometimes people feel that’s dangerous and all the bad stories are going to get out, and yes, you’ll have some individuals that will take advantage of that, but more often than not, people are good, and they’re just trying to find answers and share best practices,” he says.
Between these avenues as well as simply working with customers every day, Hyland can see when trends are starting to develop that need addressed, but the word trend is important.
“You learn through experience and mistakes that getting crazy off a one-off experience doesn’t really help,” he says. “There’s usually two sides to every story. It’s really if you’re getting a consistent wave.”
He says there are certainly situations that you need to correct right away, but more often than not, if you’re seeing many customers telling you the same thing, that shows you it needs to be addressed.
“Feedback is coming from different avenues, and you’re getting a sense that this is a problem and we need to address it” he says. “I think knee-jerking to one particular issue, I’ll leave that to the government. I don’t think that’s really smart. You can certainly address the issue, but is it a trend if it happens once? No. That’s a mistake that a lot of people make, and they’ll get all fired up and start blaming and moving a bunch of things around, and you need multiple data points before you shift focus. … If you have multiple avenues of feedback from partners, from customers, from user groups, then you know you have something to address.”
