Infinity on Customer Success: Why challenging times are the ultimate opportunity
Following a £10 million round of investment from Smedvig Capital in late 2016, Infinity have been empowering marketing departments to add substantial value to their company’s bottom line. This post comes from Amber Sherriff, who is Head of Customer Success and plays a pivotal role in retaining and delivering value to Infinity’s clients.
Have you ever heard a company tell the world, “our customer service is terrible”? No, we haven’t either. Everyone says theirs is great and when everything is going well for all involved that might well be the case. But what about when the going gets tough? That’s when you find out how committed a company truly is to its customers.
As a call tracking software provider, our fortunes are heavily intertwined with our clients’. As our recent call data shows, many of the industries we serve faced new challenges due to COVID-19 and have had to adapt to different situations. Yet despite this, we retained a far higher percentage of our clients than the industry average. By maintaining these happy clients, our revenue has almost fully recovered with strong cash flows that position us to accelerate our growth plans. It wasn’t an accident that we achieved this during a tough trading period. It was a testament to the outstanding work of our Customer Success team, as well as the trust placed in our offering by our clients and so I wanted to share a few key pillars that helped guide us through this time.
Find more value to deliver
Every feature in Infinity’s platform was designed to help bring an additional use or value to the end client. But as we serve a wide range of industries, personas, and tech partners, any one company is rarely taking advantage of absolutely everything we have to offer. At a time when some are pausing, refreshing, and asking what tomorrow looks like, we have a perfect opportunity to see what else we can do for them. Our Customer Success Managers have gone to work helping to analyse the data and insights and suggested recommendations as well as identifying optimisations, integrations, or short-term projects for many clients, which will ensure that every penny they invest in Infinity is working as hard as possible.
We are very clear and resolute that success happens by design rather than by chance and in particular it is based on being proactive as opposed to providing reactive support. We maintained the whole of our Customer Experience team during this period and have reworked our processes and playbooks to ensure they are appropriate for these “new” times.
A thoughtful commercial strategy
Pricing and payment is a sensitive subject, but we’re going to address it head on. Every business needs revenue to pay its bills, staff, and overheads, we’re no different. Some companies, indeed, other similar SaaS businesses have been very rigid with payments and pricing during this period. That’s their prerogative, but within reasonable bounds, we have tried to be flexible with clients in affected industries.
Why? We are long-term partners to our clients; we work hard to build ongoing mutually beneficial relationships and shared success. They have stuck with us for years, throwing that away over a month or two’s payment makes no sense to us, either commercially or from a reputational standpoint. By being empathetic and creative, we have worked with our clients to come to financial agreements that suit the both of us, including:
● Adjusting payment terms, such as temporarily switching to monthly payments from annually in advance
● Giving a more beneficial price in exchange for a longer term contract
● Offering a temporary discount and trying to drive advocacy or an introduction into another part of their business
● Pricing based on usage and this has been a key part of our success — sales are down, call volumes are down and our fees flex without question or negotiation
This has helped us both balance our books, while simultaneously strengthening the connections we have worked so hard to build and that have helped us grow.
Forging even stronger relationships
As we alluded to above, our company is built on relationships. COVID has presented challenges to these relationships, but it has ultimately proven how strong they are. Before, we would regularly meet at offices or provide our own success events to help foster a positive community of clients:
While sharing a meal or a few drinks would help us bond, what really cemented it was our focus on truly understanding their strategy, making these relationships mean something. Why should that change?
Our Customer Success team has taken a consultative approach in this period, going above and beyond the product-related advice we mentioned earlier. For example, we’ve helped clients define tactics to keep their place in the market when their businesses begin to bounce back, or helped them identify where and when to spend their budget for maximum results.
Looking to tomorrow, together
This consultative approach doesn’t just stop with our existing product. We have also used this time to conduct far more in-depth feedback sessions with some of our clients, to be cognizant of what they would like from us and our suite of products to help them sculpt and execute their wider strategies.
They have had direct access to our most senior developers, marketers, and figures within the business to give us unique insights on both a micro and a macro level. By involving our clients in this scoping for what our product looks like in the future, we’re showing that we care but also giving them a crucial role in our journey. They’re helping to build something too and will be a beneficiary of our improvements.
Why not see for yourself?
Have you been a bit let down with the standard of service your call tracking provider has delivered lately? Or maybe you don’t have one but would like to benefit from a clear view of what happens before, during, and after every call? Start a conversation with us today to see how we put some of these philosophies into action.
