Blockchain is advancing and changing at breakneck speed. It can feel like every day there is a new coin, a new technological announcement, and a new regulatory hurdle to overcome. Companies within this space have at times grown so fast that they struggle to scale their infrastructure and teams to keep pace.

The first thing customers at a large unnamed crypto-company see when trying to get help.

Customer support is often the first thing to suffer when companies struggle with rapid expansion. At its worst, consumers have fallen victim to scam ICOs and lost cryptocurrency holdings stored in exchanges that have been hacked.

At best, blockchain companies have slow, inhuman customer support. Many resort to automated solutions (chatbots, help articles) and remove the human element altogether.

Need help from Coinbase? Afraid you’ll have to talk to a robot. 🤖

Customer Success… the key to mass adoption?

Early adopters have a higher tolerance for buggy software and poor customer support. They’re willing to overlook these issues in order to experience the bleeding edge of technology.

Blockchain companies looking beyond early adopters to mass adoption will be contending with consumers whose tolerances are far lower. Successful technology companies such as Apple, Shopify and others have set the bar high when it comes to helping customers succeed.

Consumers expect at the very least reactive customer support, which means the ability to talk to a real live human when they need help. However, blockchain companies can go above and beyond to proactively help customers succeed. We believe customer success will be the key to overcoming the lack of trust the average consumer has with blockchain technology based companies.

How to implement customer success

Investing in customer success can sometimes take a backseat to other organizational needs. The impacts are not always as immediately felt as say hiring another engineer to speed up development. Customer success is a long term play. You’re investing in your customers so that they come back again and again, refer their friends, and speak positively about your company generally.

Here are three tips to implement customer success at your company.

1. Be available everywhere

Avoid making customers jump through hoops to get help. You can certainly redirect them to potential useful documentation, but if they want to talk to you, let them! A customer with an issue who cannot get it addressed is likely to seek an alternative rather than wait 2–3 days for a reply.

Live chat software can help with this. Tools like Intercom, Olark and LiveChat are great options for connecting you with your customers who need help.

Visitors to Etherparty’s website are given a warm welcome and timely assistance.

Your marketing channels such as Twitter, Facebook and Telegram are not simply a stage from which you give company updates. These are all two-way communication channels that can and should be used to support and engage with your customers. Invest in a tool like Hootsuite or Buffer’s Reply to make managing these channels simpler.

If staffing is a problem, have everyone in the company spend a few hours a week providing support. This can have an added bonus of aligning employees in design and engineering with the needs of customers, allowing them to come up with creative solutions to problems they face.

2. Go beyond help documentation

You should without a doubt have a robust, searchable help center that can provide answers to common questions and instructions for how to use various part of your project. ZenDesk, HelpScout, Intercom and others all offer plug and play help centers for your business.

Companies can and shouldtake this a step further by providing resources to help their target customers beyond simply using the product.

For example, Shopify provides resources to help small businesses succeed online. Hootsuite trains up social media experts through its Academy. Become a resource to help your customers succeed and they’ll keep coming back.

3. Great user onboarding

This is where so many companies fail. They make the sale and drop the customer in the app or product and just leave them there, expecting them to find their own way. Imagine having no design experience and opening Photoshop for the first time. That’s how your customers feel without a supportive onboarding experience.

The first step is to define what success looks like. In the case of Etherparty’s Rocket, success looks like signing up, paying, and then configuring and launching a crowdfund. In order to ensure customers are successful in this, we anticipate points in that process where they may struggle and offer timely advice and support.

We use Intercom to offer proactive assistance to customers during parts of on boarding that we know to be challenging. Anticipate pain points and offer assistance in the same way in your own product!

A tool like Intercom can be used to provide assistance to a customer when they perform a specific action.

And email can be used to re-engage a customer who leaves and does not return for an extended period of time.

Customer Success at Etherparty

Etherparty believes that a great customer experience will drive mass adoption of our smart contract based solutions. We have invested heavily in building out a customer success team with buy-in from the entire company. Individuals launching a crowdfund with our first product Rocket can expect timely and friendly customer support and great resources to help make their crowdfund a success

To learn more about our upcoming crowdfunding platform Rocket, visit LaunchWithRocket.com.