Turn your SaaS detractors into your biggest advocates with smarter support

Ideally, you'd always have completely satisfied customers who give you 10 out of 10 and never complain! But that's just not reality.

We all know too well how difficult it can be to please ALL your users, particularly if you're constantly shipping new products. Bugs happen, rollout errors happen, and as we saw recently with CrowdStrike, sometimes you really fuck things up.

That's just part of business — mistakes happen (but if you can avoid crashing the global economy, that’d be better.)

But the reality is that in SaaS, particularly for enterprise-level products with high monthly or annual costs, the expectation for service is very high. Not only do people expect your product to work 24-7 at a high level, but they also expect amazing customer service, easy-to-understand self-service options, and overall great UX.

Retaining and upselling your satisfied customers and having them act as word-of-mouth advocates can be an important part of your company's growth. You're unlikely to survive without that consistent ARR and growth momentum, particularly as a startup.

The detractor dilemma

So what are you meant to do about those detractors, those people who might have negative experiences with your company, who are frustrated and upset, and maybe leaving negative reviews everywhere?

You can't just ignore them because that's a death sentence. When you stop listening to your users, particularly those who have frustrations, you lose all chance of becoming successful in the long run.

But you also can't obsess over them. You still need to ensure that a handful of negative voices don't drown out a lot of positive feedback. As we discussed, you can’t and won’t please everyone. So, at the risk of pleasing no one, you have to toe the line and give enough credence and value to detractors while also ensuring that your happy power users feel fulfilled and excited about your product.

The danger of detractors

Detractors are quite dangerous because they can be quite vocal about their dissatisfaction and frustration. That negative word of mouth means that the detractor's impact goes beyond just their potential lost revenue when they churn. It can also reduce your brand's loyalty and affinity and increase acquisition costs.

This creates more of an uphill battle for your sales reps to climb as detractors influence other customers' potential perceptions, and hurts your retention because they can cause existing customers to question and examine your service under the microscope. This is especially true if they are influential in your product niche or otherwise well-connected; sharing a few bad experiences and stories can offset years of growth and brand-building progress.

But here's the funny thing.

Detractors can become advocates and, in fact, sometimes your most powerful and positive ones.

That's because they can tell a compelling story of how your company overcame a poor experience for this user and went out of its way to provide a great experience, improving the product and ultimately turning detractors into loyal and excited customers. Now, that's not easy, but it is possible.

What qualifies as a detractor?

Let's first describe what exactly we can qualify a detractor as. While there's no universally accepted rating at a broad level, there is a sense of a detractor as someone who has had a poor experience with your service, who would not recommend it, and who, if asked to rate your company on a scale of 0 to 10, might rate it in the 0 to 6 range. This is usually what “detractors” in an NPS survey are listed as, and while that's not always the end-all-be-all metric, it's certainly a very important one and something that many companies focus on.

So, how do we actually find detractors? You can examine your typical customer surveys, like an NPS survey or a customer satisfaction survey, as well as qualitative feedback and churn pattern analysis, to find them.

Using surveys to find detractors

NPS and customer satisfaction surveys (like a CSAT) are sent out regularly to measure your customer’s sentiment. The user is asked how they would rank the company on a scale of 1 to 10.

A promoter is a 9 or 10.

A passive (neutral) is a 7 or 8.

A detractor is anything between 0 and 6 (you can sometimes segment within this broader detractor grouping to identify the intensity of their negativity.)

Because there are clearly established rankings and guidelines, it's easy to see not only a particular user's response but also their responses over time and their trend, as well as aggregate trends not only for your entire business but also for specific cohorts or segments. This is really powerful because it's a fairly accurate self-reported metric that users can give to indicate how they're feeling about your company.

While a 6 out of 10 might not sound like a bad experience, think about what you automatically give to any decent experience with a customer support rep. I will probably not give someone a 5, because a 5 isn't an average score here.

It's not a bell curve. A 5 is a pretty poor experience; usually, most folks give an 8, 9, or 10 if they feel generally satisfied.

As we discussed in our non-response bias article, sometimes it can be hard to get people to give you feedback. But that's actually not the case when folks are upset, because folks who are really upset are actually more likely to give you feedback because they're … so fucking angry. It's easier to identify detractors than it is to identify the crowded middle of neutral or lightly positive folks.

Digging deeper to identify detractors

Sometimes, you do need to dig a little bit deeper to identify detractors, especially if you're not running NPS surveys at scale or you're having trouble getting responses. In addition to running these surveys, you should ensure you have a clear methodology for turning your customer support interactions, support ticket data, and chatbot data into actionable insights.

This is a consistent theme that we follow here at Command AI — turning all of that data and user intent information into better insight into how users are actually feeling and to help you identify detractors and go ahead and turn them into advocates.

Finding insights in churn data

There's also a story to be found in your churn data. When you look at your churn data, you can examine it for patterns or trends that indicate if there are specific types of users, be it their title, their profile, their location, or their plan, that indicate a higher likelihood of churn.

From there, you can then identify if there are certain experiences, product features, or feedback that you're getting from that cohort consistently, which might be contributing to their churn and to their detractor status.

Ideally, you use all of this learning to go beyond reactive problem-solving and use predictive analysis or upfront communication to get ahead of these problems with users in the first place. The sooner you can identify these detractors or potential detractors, the better the chance you have of keeping them from churning and becoming highly negative detractors.

Working with detractors

Let's talk now about how you can work with detractors to get folks back on track and get them to become advocates.

To begin, you need to collect a lot of information. You need to run surveys on a regular basis to measure NPS and customer satisfaction trends and gather other data, like your falloff in onboarding, your return rate, and other items to identify detractors.

Collecting information and feedback

Once you've identified them, you want to ensure that you have specific flows designed to follow up those survey responses with more questions. You want to get to the root of the problem as quickly as possible. This means not just asking them on a scale of one to 10 how they feel about you, like an NPS survey, but following up and asking: why do you feel this way? What areas of our product cause issues for you? What could we have done to solve this for you? Are there things that you did like in the product?

You get the point. The more detail you can get at this stage, the better, because what you're trying to optimize for is learning. .

Creating a process for better products

Now, once you have all of that feedback, you have to turn it into continuous product improvement. This requires your team to all subscribe to bringing that feedback into product decision-making. These feedback loops will not just be from your detractor identification. It'll also be from all your other research, user behavior, and more. But this negative user feedback is key.

Getting detractors back on track

Now, let's also discuss how you can give detractors options to get themselves back on track. This is particularly applicable to folks who may have earlier been loyal and positive but are now giving you a five or a six and facing frustration with a specific part of your product.

Or this might be for folks who have had trouble in the initial stages of your product. When you identify these initial detractors, there are several ways that you can try and get them back on track.

Personalized support solutions

First, if you have a robust support team, you can work with them to provide personalized solutions to their specific problems.

You might look at what they're trying to do in the product, understand where they're hitting a roadblock, and develop a targeted plan of support and training to help them get through that. If that's not possible because you don't have the support bandwidth, you might create more robust help documentation, video guides, tutorials, product tours, and more, all of which can help your users unblock themselves.

You'll likely want to combine both to ensure that your early or important detractors get quickly back on track through self-serve and guided, support-driven help.

Using AI to deal with detractors

Another important thing is to realize that the playing field has changed since the introduction of generative AI technologies. As chatbots have gone from decision-tree, basic logic models into natural language models based on huge amounts of training, they not only can answer questions in real-time, but hopefully keep people from ever becoming detractors in the first place.

They also give your users another way to identify solutions early on and hopefully help you get more input and insight into your users by tracking sentiment in areas where your documentation, your help database, and self-serve resources fall short.

Personalized assistance

All of these efforts lead you towards offering a specialized but scalable level of assistance to your users. There are several ways to do this.

Providing contextual help

The best way to do this is to offer help in several different ways, because different users like to be helped differently. Once you’ve built your detractor cohort you can:

1. Offer self-serve experiences. If you have an in-product resource center (something like our HelpHub interface) you can personalize the resources it shows to specifically address detractor painpoints. This works much better if you know why detractors are detractors — see below :) For example, you can allow users to trigger tours from your resource center that explain confusing parts of your interface or introduce new use cases.
2. Target them with proactive nudges that appear in moments when the user appears confused (in Command AI this is called a “behavioral trigger”). The nudge can contain hints or embed helpful content, like a video or article. Another example of a behavioral trigger that is specifically designed to intercept soon-to-be detractors is the “rage click” behavioral trigger, which detects when users appear frustrated.

Survey, survey, and survey

Now, the second way is to ensure that you're running lots of robust surveys, both long and short, to ensure that you're gathering all this insight about why users are detracting.

Most companies stick with email-based surveys. The problem with these is that (a) completion rates tend to be low and (b) users often forget a lot of what made them detractors in the first place.

In our experience, in-product surveys solve both of these problems. You just have to be careful to keep them concise and short, and use technology like rate limiting (what we call “Air Traffic Control”) to ensure you aren’t bombarding users with too many. Aside: this can easily happen if you give too many people on your team the ability to send users surveys.

Detect intent

Surveys are great, but they can’t capture the full spectrum of the user experience. The best way to learn what is confusing or frustrating users is to look at their own words. The best way to detect their own words is through an interface like chat or search — something that users use in the flow of their work.

For example, our Copilot chat bot will summarize “deadend” chats: queries that didn’t lead to a successful answer (based on explicit user feedback, or just the sentiment of their response). These are a great data set to tease out patterns. From their first experience with your product, you can build a detractor user journey that identifies the common failure modes users experience, so you can address them early on, either with assistance technology or with underlying product changes.

Going above and beyond

I think the final and perhaps the most unique way to offer a path for detractors to get back on track is to really be willing to go above and beyond to serve them. Now, I think there are a lot of founders out there, especially those who are in the early stage, who believe that they should only follow their initial power users — and that's right up to a point. You want to make sure that you find product market fit. You want to pivot quickly if you don’t! All of that is great.

But as you get beyond that, it becomes fairly important that you're able to actually serve not just your happiest and most loyal users but also ensure that you reduce churn, keep people happy, and reduce detractors' negative drag on your business by going that extra mile.

This might mean having a dedicated Slack channel for your users to communicate directly with your founders or with your support team.

It might be having a specific level of support or AI tools that users can access for free at any time they need to ensure that they can get answers quickly.

It might be investing in a level of customer support team that means live availability is always there.

Every business will be different, and not everyone needs to have a 24-7 phone line, but you certainly need to make your customers feel like you're available, have the answers, and are willing to work with them on solving their problems.

Commit to continuous improvement

Overall, you've got to consistently ensure that your detractors are genuinely excited about the way you're listening to them, updating the product, taking their feedback, and actually seeing value come out of it. That's the only way you'll actually turn them into advocates. It's not enough to measure passively, and it's still not enough to actively listen. You have to actually improve the product and solve their problems.

Communicating product improvements

Now, that not only means maintaining that high level of service throughout, but actually incorporating it into the product and communicating that clearly.

You might go as far as to message specific detractor cohorts based on the features they've had issues with, and to note when you've made those improvements. That is a great way to turn them from passively disengaged, frustrated users into active and loyal users who believe you and your team are willing to go above and beyond to address their pain points and solve their problems. That's really powerful!

Conclusion

To conclude, let's review some key ways to best identify detractors and turn them into advocates.

First, clearly identify them and create cohorts based on your quantitative feedback data from surveys as well as all your qualitative interactions that your customer support and product teams have with users.

From there, ensure that you listen to your users and seriously incorporate their feedback into your product decision-making.

Then, as you improve the product and solve problems, make sure that you clearly message and communicate with them in a way that inspires confidence, appreciation, and gratitude. This helps turn these detractors into advocates and hopefully evangelists for your product.

If done well, you can turn your detractors into a goldmine of information. They can help push your team to fix areas of the most problematic product and can be a net positive for your business in the long run.

Remember, the goal is not to have zero detractors. The goal is to quickly turn every detractor into a neutral or a positive user, and, preferably, to avoid having them become detractors in the first place.