Angela Bunner from ClickUp explains how three pillars—support, engineering, and design—drive their customer experience. The company uses Canny feedback boards, social listening, and customer advisory boards to fuel rapid development cycles. ClickUp's freemium model gets users in fast, then upsells them as they adopt more features.
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1, 2, 3, 4.
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Customer experience is really focused on 3 main aspects. I think when we look at how do we drive that customer experience to be the best, we look at 3 things: support, engineering, and design. And that's really best-in-class support, responsive to your, your users, innovative engineering that's using the latest technology and reliable and design that's not only meeting the needs of your users today, but also thinking about how they're going to be doing things in the future. And this is especially true in software, right? But these principles can be applied across industries, whether it's software products, hardware products. I think everyone can attest to Apple and how they build the best customer experience throughout their entire, you know, customer base with that. philosophy in mind. All right, so what is it that customers are looking for in your product? I've kind of broken it down into these key characteristics because when I think about what makes a product successful and what customers are looking for, you know, these are the key things that you are going to see again and again that are making products successful. Firstly, being a dependability, like obviously it needs to be reliable, you know, that you can count on uptime and to the data to be accurate. Personalization is so key these days. Like, everybody's got mobile iPhones, you've got your, you know, um, Hulu-type accounts where every— everything that you're doing from an end-user perspective, people want to be able to personalize it for themselves. Not only for themselves, but products need to be flexible for different types of teams so that you can collaborate and solve different use cases. And that's really a key feature that we've really embraced in ClickUp to provide that type of platform. Ease of use. Number one thing that I talk about all the time is if it's not easy to use, you're not going to get the engagement and it becomes irrelevant, right? If it's SaaS, if it's software, it becomes shelfware. If it's hardware, it just becomes out of date, right? It's all about how do we make it easy for users to use so that you drive that product reality and growth. Has to be accessible, whether it's on the web, whether it's mobile, in all different mediums. Again, your end users expect that accessibility and availability. I also think customizable offerings or templates of solutions are really key. Even though you have a standard or flexible platform, users want products that also give you best practices that out of the box you have something to start with, but you can also then take and then tailor it to your own. So it's a combination of being customizable, but also something that can be, you know, provided with templates to get them going. And then fun, like I mentioned before, like the market and the end user experience today across industries has really got to be fun. It's got to be an incredible design so that it's sexy. It's something that's going to engage your users on a daily basis. And that's really what's going to drive that success. The other aspect of product growth is constantly listening to your customers. And at ClickUp, we do this through several means. Firstly is we have a message board called Canny where our users can go on and submit new feature requests. They can see what other people are recommending as workarounds and ideas. And it's also a way for our product team to give the user base visibility into what's in the roadmap. Our social media is really active, and we've got folks that are constantly monitoring it so that we aim to respond to requests or engagement out there with 99% of posts that are out there we're responding to. We also have customer success managers who are basically business partners to our larger accounts to make sure that The product is being adopted. We're monitoring usage in areas where folks, you know, maybe aren't utilizing the product as much as they can and pushing them to, you know, use the product more, whether it's with, you know, one-on-one sessions, with education, online resources, etc. And then we've also got customer advisory boards so that for specific areas of new product innovation where customers are willing to step up and say, hey, I want to be a partner I want to help you build out new features, new areas, new use cases. Listening to customers, strategic customers is really important. So that helps you and your product be more innovative and moving the product forward into new areas. How do you move forward is really important too on how fast, right? Customer satisfaction obviously isn't static. You've got to be constantly thinking about what your users need. And those message boards, the customer advisory council, social media, there's a lot of input into how you're going to change that roadmap or how you're going to shape that roadmap. And in order to really be effective, you need to have rapid, agile development cycles. One of our core tenets at ClickUp, like I mentioned, was growing 1% every day, which means we're constantly improving not only internally our processes and our organization, but our product. We've got to grow and improve on a weekly basis. We're always making improvements to try and move the product forward. And with that agility, we're ensuring that our users always have, you know, the latest features. How do we engage users in the first place is by providing what we think is a unique way of engaging users on a free plan. So that our end users can quickly get into the product, play with it, find value out of it. And in technology, especially these days, like that model is not new, but in the productivity space, it is relatively new. And that is how we've driven really quickly the growth that we've had at ClickUp, because once the user is in the product, they start seeing the value. they can then start growing the usage and start collaborating with their team members, and that engages other people, right? So it becomes, like I said, a flywheel of growth where you try it before you buy it and get your users hooked and then decide, you know, users then realize like, wow, if I could do it more and upgrade to a different plan, I can do even more, you know, features or add more people on my team. It really becomes a growth engine that is just, it expands on its own, right? In order to build successful products, it's also a partnership between your teams and your active users. And when you see that feedback's taken seriously, like your users get, they trust you as a vendor. And I think that one of the examples that I wanted to quickly talk about was whiteboards. We recently launched this as a new feature in ClickUp, and it was really with the help of our users and those that were on the bleeding edge of productivity that said, you know what, we've got projects, we've got task management, documents all in ClickUp. But one of the things that we're using external tools and we want to get in part of the ecosystem is how we manage whiteboards, how we are collaborating and brainstorming, diagramming. Before the work and the tasks are actually created, or while you're executing the work, needing to collaborate in this type of whiteboard space. That is how we built, we built the whiteboards module with the customer focus group, listening to customers, beta testing. We hosted roundtables where they could share their features. And really with that community, we're able to quickly build a product and we're continuing to iterate on that. And it's super exciting to see, you know, new things all the time in the product based on customer feedback.
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