While working on my latest software project Podline, I’ve been thinking a lot about how I plan to onboard customers and deliver the service offered by my SaaS business. And that’s what I want to share with you today.
Podline is an integration that people can add to their existing podcast hosting platforms. If they have a podcast and want to communicate with their audience, adding a Podline voice messaging embed or a link to their website is a great way to do that — and it’s the only way to do that.
In a way, it’s quite the ask. Podline is not like basic hosting services or analytics tools with automatic integrations. Instead, users have to add Podline to their platform themselves, intentionally and with a little bit of effort. It’s easy, just an iframe embed or a link, but I still need to educate my customers on how to use it.
Experience this article as a podcast, or as a newsletter:
So, to improve the customer experience of setting up Podline for their podcasts, I’ve been considering a “white glove service” approach. This idea comes from Paul Graham’s essay on doing things that don’t scale. It involves helping people by taking over tasks they’d normally have to do themselves in the early stages of your business.
Because I work in the podcast industry, I know what it takes to build and set up a podcast. It’s not just about the technical aspects or creating content – you also need to establish a business ecosystem around the podcast itself. This includes having a place where people can go to learn more about your podcast, look into older episodes, and subscribe if they enjoyed it in the first place.
Many podcast hosting services like Transistor or Anchor offer the option to set up a website. I’ve had experience running two podcasts before, so I know how these things work. And I just realized how crucial this is. It’s vital for me to understand what my customers expect from a podcast landing page and any potential integrations. To be able to render a white-glove service, I need to know what it looks like.
If you’ve never experienced white-glove service, how can you provide it?
I recently learned that this seems to be a common problem in the customer service industry. Many customer service hires just don’t know what this kind of service looks like.
And many founders don’t know either.
This is a thought worth exploring. Some founders see a problem and create a software solution, like an MVP with fancy graphs and dashboards. However, they may not understand how this fits into their users’ workflow or the larger context of their work.
White-glove service works best —or even at all— when you understand the full job to be done. For a podcast host, that job is to create a space where people can chat, find out more, and engage with the podcast. The goal isn’t just to set up a voicemail system or integrate Podline; in my case, it’s to build stronger bonds with the community and make it easy for people to reach out.
To offer early onboarding services and create great experiences for your initial customers, you need to understand more than just the steps to integrate your product. You also need to help them contextualize it within their existing job. Onboarding in SaaS should be tailored to more than just the SaaS. Often, using software products is mostly about learning the product itself. But it needs to go beyond that. Instead of walking people through features, focus on integrating the product into their existing workflows. That’s where the white glove service approach comes in. It means stepping back from your product and looking at people’s tasks and goals.
If you don’t know the specific “job to be done” your product serves, you need to ask and figure out where your product fits in the bigger picture. Don’t expect people to do this work themselves. There might already be a solution in place for their needs, so understand what or who you’re replacing.
Find out who they report to and what tools they use. Learn about any automations they have for input and output data, which might be handed off to someone else with a different task. Understanding these things is crucial. And if you get these things right, your early customers will build massive trust with you that can jumpstart further growth just from word of mouth.
So, white-glove service is all about knowing these details and guiding your customers through this experience.
