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I was talking with a VP of CS not long ago, and she said, “Our AMs need Sturdy to tell us what to do next.”
Since VC firms love to ask things like, “Does your product recommend Next Best Action?” and Sturdy just recently closed some funding, my judgment was cloudy…
I responded:
“Do you mean that you need Sturdy to tell your people what to do next? Like if they hear that their account had an Exec Change, then Sturdy needs to give them a playbook?”
“Uhh, no, our people know what to do next. We need Sturdy to find out what to do now….For example, if someone contacts the billing team and asks for a copy of their contract, we want the CS person to get an alert because right now, they might never even know their account is at risk.”
“Now” before “Next”.
I couldn’t help but think of all the different events that are spread out in other people’s inboxes. All of those “Nows” waiting to be found. (FWIW, we know that at least 15% of all customer conversations have some sort of “Now” in them)
More Examples
If one of your Account Managers gets an email that reads, “Hey, this feature is really confusing and annoying!” your UX Designer has a “Now!”
If a customer responds to a ticket, “That’s really disappointing, we were sold this feature, and now we’re learning it does not exist. Lame!” your Sales Team has a “Now”.
If a customer contacts your billing team and asks, “Hey, can we cancel our contract three months early?” then that customer’s Account Manager has a “NOW!”
So, what does this mean for Sturdy? Well, we need to rethink two parts of our product. First, we need to make it much, much easier to sign up for the “Nows” that are important to you. Second, we need to ensure that all those duplicate messages in inboxes, chats, cases, and tickets don’t create duplicate warnings. No noise, just Signal.
And we’re building this right now.
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