Three Keys to Customer Delight
Critical ingredients to unlock your business
At Redbooth we’re reinventing team collaboration. As we’ve achieved product/market fit, we’ve shifted our focus to the next level — unlocking customer delight. We’ve found three key sources of customer feedback that are critical to the success of any SaaS product.
Key #1: Your Top 5 Support Reasons
We’re using the standard ‘stack’ of services for a SaaS business, including Zendesk for support. we configured both product components and root causes to better understand why our customers contact us. Our Customer Support and Product teams collaborated to create the list of components (key areas in the product).
Support also adds a root cause for every ticket. We’ve struck a nice balance on components and root causes for a detailed understanding while preserving trends. We created a report in Zendesk Insights showing the total number of tickets by component/root cause combination created in a given week.
Every week, our Product and Support teams meet and discuss the Top Five issues. When we can solve them right away, we do. We also track trends in the Top Five in a spreadsheet. It’s an important ingredient to our (quarterly) major iteration plans, which I’ll cover later.
We’ve standardized the components list across our bug-tracking, too, giving us the bonus of understanding whether customer pain-points are being driven by bugs, missing features, or frictions in our product experience.
Key #2: Your Feedback Forum
Your customers are full of great ideas. They don’t just want help when things go wrong. They actually want to help you make your product better. All you have to do is give them a place to share their ideas, and enable them to reach it from your product.
Some people swear by UserVoice, we use UserEcho. Our forum is public, anyone can find it and join it here. We got the ball rolling by emailing customers and inviting them to participate. And, it’s taken off from there.
Picture this — we have 465 people all trying to help us improve our product! They’ve shared 362 ideas and voted 936 times. It’s a treasure trove of information about how they use Redbooth and what’s valuable to them.
Even better, we can involve these users in the design and development of the features. They’re willing to share their input into requirements and eager to participate in beta programs.
We track the top ideas from week to week so we can understand how customer needs are evolving over time. It’s another tab in the customer feedback spreadsheet I described.
Key #3: Net Promoter Score surveys (in your app)
We collect relationship Net Promoter Score (NPS) to give us a constant sense of customer sentiment and loyalty. And, the trends in the score help us gauge if we’re on the right track. Customer comments give us actionable insights into key satisfiers and dis-satisfiers.
Like many companies, we started with quarterly email surveys. But, we were hungry for more, so we integrated an NPS survey into our application. We investigated Wootric and Delighted NPSaaS and ultimately decided to build our own engine. It took us about a two weeks, and the results are terrific.
Adding NPS to our application increased our response rate 4-5x
We’re now getting scores from hundreds of active users every week. We’ve integrated them into our Chartio reporting to understand the trends in scores and ensure that the survey responses. We expect some normal variation and look for multi-week trends that tell us we’re headed in the right direction.
We track:
- NPS Score
- Percent of Responses by Type
- Number of Responses
- Response Rate
- Comments
Every week, we review the dozens of new comments and categorize them. We tabulate the data in a the final tab of our customer feedback spreadsheet so we can understand trends in satisfiers and dis-satisfiers.
Bringing it together
We track all three keys on tabs in a Google Sheet. As we wrap up a calendar quarter, we review our business results to determine our top priorities. Then, we analyze the customer feedback spreadsheet to identify specific opportunities that align with our vision and priorities.
This approach has helped us retain and expand our customers, cutting our net MRR churn by 50% and accelerating our growth. And, it’s driven greater efficiencies, contributing to 5x growth in our LTV/CAC ratio.
The great news is that three simple sources give you a much deeper understanding of your customer and better ability to delight them. Match that with a clear vision and an understanding of your operational metrics and the sky’s the limit.
Special thanks to Carlo Beckman who leads our Customer Experience team, Màxim Colls and Pau who built the in-app NPS engine.
Jon Sonnenschein has been an Operating Partner for Bregal Sagemount, a mid-market Private Equity firm, since 2017. Prior to Sagemount, Jon achieved six successful exits in Silicon Valley, including one as CEO. Jon earned an MBA in Marketing and Management Strategy from The Kellogg School of Management and a BA with Distinction in Economics from The University of Michigan.
