No-glove is better than white-glove.

From the CEO’s desk with Matt Lhoumeau at Concord

I recently spent three hours on a Zoom call with a customer who was ready to walk away. Not because our product failed – but because we weren’t really listening to them.

This was a huge moment of truth for me.

Here’s what I realized:

You can’t control your competitors’ pricing.

You can’t control market conditions.

You can’t control a customer’s internal politics.

But you can control whether you get on a Zoom with them when they’re frustrated.

This customer needed our product to do something very specific, and we helped them build it. But it was the act of listening – really listening – that sparked the turnaround.

Three months later, this same customer is appearing on webinars, telling other companies why they love Concord.

Every founder talks about “customer obsession.” But when’s the last time you PERSONALLY got on a Zoom call with an unhappy customer? How often do you share your morning with a client, just to understand their world better?

We operate in a market with a lot of feature parity. It’s tough to differentiate when everyone’s functionality tends to blur together.

But what doesn’t converge, is the feeling a customer gets when their CSM knows their kids’ names. When support actually solves their problem on the first call.

When the CEO spends three hours with them, and takes their feedback seriously.

You can’t differentiate on features forever. But you can own the relationship.

That doesn’t scale? Neither does churn.

Matt Lhoumeau is the CEO and co-founder of Concord, a leading provider of Agreement Intelligence solutions. Concord empowers growing businesses to make smarter operational decisions by unlocking actionable insights from contracts, and is trusted by over 1,500 companies worldwide.