Your first customer service hire faces some unique challenges. As a founder, you have the power to make them a success -- or torpedo their impact before they’ve even gotten started. As an early-stage founder, the best things you can do for your customer success team is use your “founder card” to give them real authority, and remove roadblocks wherever you can. If they’re not empowered to make noise about customer issues, your team will never be able to drive changes in your organization or product. And that means higher churn, lower retention, and an unhealthier business. The biggest danger areas of an early customer team? 1. Customer success hires without authority see all the problems, but can’t fix them. 2. The volume of customer issues never stops -- and it will keep growing forever. 3. Without authority, your customer team will absolutely burn out. Each of these challenges comes with its own problems and solutions. In the next few days I’ll be writing about how as a founder, you can prevent the damage that’ll be done if you fail to empower your customer success people.
