In the early days, when a customer would email or tweet into support, we needed to cross reference them with our database to figure out who they were. We started with a gmail inbox of support requests and our DMs were open. If a customer emailed in asking to cancel their order, we’d have to figure out a few things. What did they order? Who are they? Are we cancelling the right order? After a few back and forth messages, we usually figured out the former questions. But sometimes, we’d cancel the wrong order.
We had this problem at a number of companies. Most recently: Sidestep. We helped artists sell merchandise by allowing fans to pre-order merchandise. We worked with Beyonce, Adele, Fall Out Boy and more. Then they’d pick it up at the show and skip the line. When a customer emailed in, we didn’t really know who they were. Were they a repeat customer? Someone trying it out for the first time? Have they cancelled orders in the past? For each customer that emailed in, we had to dig around to learn more about them. After 5–10 minutes each, we eventually figured that they either didn’t exist, or we assumed we had found their info. It wasn’t an efficient system.
So why didn’t we build something better? Well, when we had 12 or 13 people, we were swamped with other things. Building features in the product, fixing bugs, customizations, fulfillment, sales, marketing, on-site logistics, and so much more. There was room for support, but we were strapped on resources. If we were a much larger company, we’d have a team dedicated to solving this problem.
We struggled with knowing our customer. We had dashboards and queries telling us all sorts of things, but there was no single source of truth. What we needed was one place where we could eliminate the need to cross reference customers and would see everything about them.
Enter Pickle. Pickle aims to solve this problem by being the single source of truth about your customers. Right now, I bet you have a database of customers who’ve signed up. You’ve got a list of payments in stripe or paypal and tickets in helpscout or zendesk. You might have tweets, youtube comments, App Store reviews, etc. How do you bring all of this into one place? How do you know that John upgraded his account in stripe, reached out via support about a bug, showed a video on youtube, complained on twitter, and has been a customer for 6 months? Without having all of this in one place, you’ll be pulling your hair out when you miss out that John is leaving for your competitor.
This is what Pickle aims to solve. If you’re interested in helping your company know your customer, sign up below—we’ll take care of you.
