Growth Is Hard (Part 3)

When I started this blog, I promised to make this an open forum for me to display our blemishes as prominently as our accomplishments and accolades. I know it seems like a lot has been going right for us recently, with some major customer launches, big partner announcements, and significant market momentum. But as I have described in previous posts, we have our share of problems and are finding growth to be, simply put, hard.

As I've publicly chronicled here, we've gone from fifty customers to over two hundred in a relatively short period of time. And over that same short period we've grown our headcount from twenty to more than fifty.

And amazingly, I've never met a person that has experienced company growth like that without the accompanying growing pains. The amazing part is that even when you know what to expect, you cannot avoid some level of disorganization and miscommunication when you are adding people rapidly and building management where there was none previously, regardless of how talented, smart, and dedicated the team may be.

Anybody who knows me is aware that I think and talk about this constantly, and am obsessed with shielding our customers from any chaos we may have internally. But it doesn't always work. Fortunately, the great majority of our customers are well cared for and happy. But we admittedly have a handful of customers that, despite our best efforts and intentions, do not get the service or treatment they deserve or expect. Sometimes this takes the form of an implementation that takes longer than planned. Or a core integration that simply doesn't work. Or a support call that never gets returned. These are all things that, in isolation, are easy to fix and avoid. But when you put hundreds of customers and projects together, there is just no way I know to perform at 100% all the time. And I take this personally because anything short of that cheats the customers not getting our best.

Here's an excerpt from a note that an unhappy customer sent to a member of our team today:

I have read the blog your CEO generates listing the wonderful experiences that other customers have had with your product. I keep restraining myself from clicking on the “comments” icon, and submitting my personal views on the product and relating our experience.

I'm sorry to say that this customer has a right to be mad, and since they didn't want to comment on my blog, I'm doing it for them. Among other things, we didn't properly communicate that they were going to be an early adopter on one of our more recent core system interfaces, which is standard operating procedure for us. And the integration didn't go well. Core integration (especially for account opening) is complex and sometimes messy stuff, even with a standard adapter, and this particular customer's integration was ugly. And then today, after we thought the worst was behind us, a freak connection failure occured with one of their third party decision services due to incorrect credentials. Which never happens because it is so easy to prevent. So, as if regaining their trust wasn't going to be hard enough after the core integration issues, today's one-in-a-million credentials issue will make it that much harder, if it's even possible at all now.

Why in the world would I talk about this here? Partly because it's on my mind. And partly as a reminder that, as well as things are going, and as happy as most of our customers are, we operate in the real world and are not perfect. I've heard people call growing pains like these "the kinds of problems you want to have." Maybe, but that doesn't make them any less hard, or make us any less committed to solving them.

If nothing else, I guess the message is that we take these things seriously, and are not just another vendor who doesn't care. That will be little consolation to the customer above who is unhappy with us today. But I'm optimistic we'll get the chance to regain their trust and prove why circumstances like this are so rare for us.