Sorry, no. Your customers don't want a "relationship" with you.

Here’s a hard truth I’m taking into 2024.

Your customers don’t actually want a “relationship” with you.

They want a relationship with your product (or service).

And they want that to be a one-sided relationship — product gives, they take.

Too often, we use “relationships” to paper over our product’s failures. We jump in-between the U (user) and the I (interface) in order to help the product along. Because as designed, it’s not intuitive. And without our help, the user won’t figure it out.

Yes, customers say they appreciate that the “customer success” team is around to help. They might even engage the team all the time.

But at the end of the day, your customer would rather NOT spend an hour on the phone with you ever Wednesday morning. Even if it’s productive.

Too often, brands use “customer relationships” to offload quality assurance onto customers. All while pretending like this is how it has to be — that being confused and needing help is just how these things go.

But when was the last time you had a standing “customer success” call with Facebook? Google? Apple? Good products you use every day?

It’s a form of gaslighting, really. It’s a veiled way of saying “Hey, you probably won’t figure this out. So let’s talk through it. If you don’t like it, we’ll promise to fix it soon. And no, we’re not paying you for finding all the bugs.”

This is this anti-customer behavior. It might work out for a while, but it will stifle your growth and stress out your employees. It will demotivate your sales reps, and your support team will churn hard.

And it makes calculating ROI tough. The account renewed, yes. But how much time and energy did they require from your team? How much behind-the-scenes frustration did they cause? And how did that affect your team’s morale and work-life balance?

I’m not a fan of sloppy products. I think it’s a good goal to build something that requires ZERO customer support. That allows users to get started and move quickly without having to talk to “customer success” every other day.

This means building your product (or service) slowly, carefully, and strategically. Not over-selling or over-promising. Being honest with customers about what your product can do, and keeping support documentation to an absolute minimum.

Make this your goal in 2024.

No, don’t fire your customer success team.

But if you’re serious about growing and scaling, stop using “relationships” to paper over your product problems.