Are You On The Deal-and-Churn Treadmill?
Voxly was flying. The fitness facility management startup had signed three major chains in four months. Each new client meant rushing to configure their properties in Voxly's system—class schedules, instructor assignments, studio capacity limits, member restrictions. The admin interface was barebones, but who had time for field validation when Fitness Chain Y needed to go live before their board meeting?
“We'll build proper safeguards later,” became the team refrain. “Right now we need to get these partnerships announced.”
Six months later, same energy, different emotion. A major parks and recreation customer was threatening to leave. Patron complaints were piling up—studios showing as available when they weren't, yoga classes over capacity, missed personal training appointments. The retention meeting had that familiar desperate urgency.
“We need to build that client loyalty integration feature,” the VP of Sales insisted. “If we can show them something new, something valuable, maybe they'll re-sign.”
Deirdre, the Customer Success Director, had watched this cycle before. “What if we fixed the admin interface instead? Added validation so we stop misconfiguring their properties? Built monitoring so we catch misconfigurations and failures before they affect our customers' members?”
The room went quiet. The account manager spoke up. “I doubt that'll turn them around. I put a new battery in my car the other day. It doesn't make my car more valuable. It just makes it do what I wanted all along.”
The CEO nodded. “I have to agree. Changing the admin app doesn't create new, visible value for Fitness Chain X.”
“Besides,” the Sales VP added, “Fitness Chain Z is in our pipeline. We need developer time for their custom amenities feature.”
Deirdre sighed. Things in Support were going to get interesting.
The next day Deirdre began to form a plan. Quietly, Deirdre began adding some information to her weekly executive team updates. New customer provisioning cycle time. First Contact Resolution Rate. Usage and adoption. Support contact volume.
Deirdre started analyzing call reasons for all calls, not just escalated incident root causes. What were customers confused about? Where did they have expectations or assumptions about what the product should do, but didn't? How often did the Support or tier 2 response have to correct data issues or misconfigurations?
She paid particular attention to customers whose contract renewal date was 6 months out. Early enough to make a system change in the standard flow of work instead of a last-ditch emergency.
Product and Development began to notice the information Deirdre was making visible. One small improvement at a time, they started putting safeguards in place. They started with better in-app guidance and feedback messages – things that would help the internal team avoid mistakes and respond faster but didn't change functionality or logic. Things that needed little or no testing.
Sometimes simple interaction improvements made a difference. Button states, progressive enablement, menu and dropdown behavior all could be refined with low-risk, low-cost changes. Gradually they started adding field validations and business rule warnings, using Deirdre's data to identify which small changes would have outsized effects.
Voxly couldn't fix the admin app in time to save Fitness Chain X. But by the time Voxly got close to signing their next major contract, they knew they'd taken steps to make them a long-time client.
Support, Product, and Development together had removed several of the factors that created production errors or made it hard and slow to respond to customer calls. Administrators were provisioning new customers faster. Adoption was deeper; usage rose. Calls from confused customers slowed. First Contact Resolution Rate and time-to-resolution both fell.
Each change had barely registered on the roadmap, but in six months the admin app had become a reliable customer success driver.
Next time you catch yourself pushing admin safeguards and admin app usability lower down the backlog, pause. This is your “Do I want to be like Voxly?” moment.