Only Hugs, Smiles and Fuzzy Feelings!
About this post: Every month, our Customer Success Team reports on team happenings, support stats, feature requests and customer feedback. The goal is to help our team understand our customers’ pain-points and successes. Ultimately, this post is about giving our customers a voice inside Unbounce. We share these posts so other companies can see how we do things, maybe steal what works, and (hopefully!) tell us what they do better.
What’s New?
3 New CSers!
Improving our Community Forum
Dev and CS: Working Together Works for Everyone
More from A/B test ALL THE THINGS!
Numbers and Shout-outs:
Welcome Laura, Princess, and Victor!
This month we’re welcoming three new additions to our ever-growing CS team. Laura will be joining us here on the Vancouver team. And while Princess and Victor will be on the left coast for a month, they’ll be heading back East after 4-weeks to be the inaugural members of the Unbounce Montreal CS contingent.
Laura comes to Unbounce with a background in customer service and account management. She’s a tech enthusiast and PoliSci scholar turned customer advocate. Princess (yes, that’s her real name) is a self-described “customer aficionado, marketing enthusiast, and aspiring techie” who speaks a whopping four languages (so yes, soon you can get live support in French, Spanish, and Tagalog). She also takes the crown from Johnny as the CS team member with the least active Twitter account. Laura and Princess both start in the Vancouver office on September 8th, followed on the 15th by… Victor, who brings over 8-years of customer support experience to Unbounce. He’s a true renaissance man who has published poetry, plays in two bands, and is an origami master. He’s also a certified programmer analyst.
Growing Our Online Community
Our community forum was created shortly after Unbounce was envisioned as a way for our founding team to solicit feedback, share news, and for our customers to get their support questions answered. As we’ve grown as a company, our focus for support channels has changed to email, live chat, and phone to match customers’ demand. The community still exists, but as we ramped up the other support services, it started to fall by the wayside, becoming the fourth and slowest support channel. We still get some great feedback and we’re still able to help out customers in the forum, but there’s a myriad of issues with how it’s structured (not least of which that it looks like a website designed in the 90s). Over the last few months we’ve discussed how we can provide our customers more value with our community. We definitely still want to help our customers when they reach out through any medium, but we took a look at what the community did best, and came to the conclusion that it functions best as a place for people to share and exchange ideas. So, we’re getting ready to make some big changes to foster that. We’ve been with GetSatisfaction as a forum solution since way back in 2009, but we were using an outdated version of their product that didn’t give us the freedom to track what we need to track, manage threads the way we need to, and, perhaps most importantly, organize the community in a way that’s conducive to browsing it. That’s all part of a larger forum engagement strategy (that you’ll hear about in coming posts), but step one was getting the technology in place, which we’re finally ready to do (a big shout out to Liz from GetSatisfaction for all her help with the upgrade process). If you’ve visited our forum before, get ready, because, like Winter, change is coming.
Dev + CS = True Love 4ever
In a lot of organizations there’s a disconnect between the Dev and CS teams. It doesn’t make any sense, because Development’s role is to build the product that customers use and CS are on the front lines, listening to customers, but it’s an issue in so many software companies. The Dev/CS relationship isn’t perfect at Unbounce, but we all recognize that it’s important, we’re working on it, and we’re all open to communication. The importance of the last point was driven home last week when we hit a major roadblock trying to get our new Script Manager feature ready for an alpha test. Simply put, Dev hit a road block that they just couldn’t think of a workable solution for and our CS Technical Team Lead, Johnny (who’s on the receiving end of that group hug up there), ended up coming up with something that no one had thought of. In a lot of places, it just wouldn’t have happened. Not because there aren’t technical support specialists that have awesome product input, but because in a lot of places CS and Dev just don’t work together like they should. Thankfully, we do, so the Script Manager is in the hands of a small group of customers and on its way to a larger release soon.
A/B Test ALL THE THINGS!
Onboarding and Engaging customers: two things we’re always trying to get better at. On the engagement front, we implemented a retention email to re-engage customers that haven’t logged into Unbounce in a while. The main idea is to spark up conversations, understand why these customers were slipping away, and seeing if there was anything we can do to retain them or give them a better experience. We went through a few iterations on the email copy and decided to A/B test the subject line. The hypothesis behind the test was customers are more likely to open up an email with a subject line that is relevant to their current situation than a subject line that may be of benefit to them. This email was going out to customers with one thing in common, they all haven’t logged into Unbounce in a while, so here are the two emails we tested out along with the test results.
“Can I help you get more out of Unbounce” vs “Hi there, long time no see!”. The second subject line did a lot better with open rates which validates the hypothesis. That’s the one we now use and that’s why we A/B test ALL THE THINGS!
Who’s Looking for Help?
What do Customers Need Help With?
Billing Issues 21%
+1% Compared to July
Page Builder Issues 19%
-1% Compared to July
Custom Domain Issues 12%
+1% Compared to July
Feature Requests
*
Most Requested Features
Responsive pages
SSL
Better spam protection
Shared content between pages
Customer Feedback
Some Customer Lovin’
“I have to say that so far the customer support has been awesome and this is a huge bonus and reason why I would work and/or recommend you guys.”
“Your customer service is OUTSTANDING!!! Truly wonderful. I’m actually happy I had the software issue. Otherwise, I’d never had become such a huge Unbounce fan. Way to go!”
Questions or comments? Don’t be shy and post all your thoughts below, we’d love to hear and learn from you!
Ahmed Radwan
Customer Success Data Analyst