How we used Customer Success to make a new product
There’s an old saying that goes, “Give the customers what they want.” This statement has since been somewhat debunked, with many business giants asserting that customers have no idea what they want and it’s our job to tell them. This is somewhat true, but at what point do you scope recurring ideas and identify that this concept may actually be worthy of a second look, listen, and opinion?
BombBomb has had its fair share of vetoes when it comes to customer requests, but there is one idea we embraced and turned into a multimillion dollar product. How did we know that this idea would ultimately be the moneymaker of our business? We used our Customer Success team to understand the ins and outs and make the decision on that.
Read on to see how we used Customer Success to create a brand new product for our customers.
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The problems arising in our business
A few years ago, it became apparent that using video to communicate with others was a hot topic in the real estate industry. Real estate agents loved that they were seeing more replies, higher conversions, and better results with their email communication using BombBomb. And thrilled they should have been — listing properties, selling homes, contacting prospects, scoring sales, keeping up with trends, understanding market value, and staying in touch with people is no easy feat to do with just text-based email. As a matter of fact, it’s a lot of work. And that’s exactly how we started to learn of the challenges our real estate customers were facing.
For those who are BombBomb veterans, you’ll remember our Convert and Real Estate System days. We knew that real estate agents had a dire need for consulting when it came to using video, so we created Convert and held consultation meetings with real estate agents to teach them about using video. However, this proved to be more work than we thought; it wasn’t scalable, so in its place, we developed Real Estate System. This was a program where our trainers would perform group trainings and webinars for real estate agents, providing information in a mass form. But we knew there was more value to provide, and it was from these programs that these ideas began to form into something tangible.
A pattern in pain points developed with our real estate customers when they began to cite the same reason over and over for their dormant activity in BombBomb: I just don’t have time. They didn’t have time to create a monthly campaign, send one-to-one emails for birthdays and home anniversaries, create their own social content, and so many other things that go into marketing their business and marketing themselves. Additionally, it was hard to stay personal when automated tasks would have easily solved the problem; but our real estate customers didn’t want robotic responses. Customer Success heard this feedback so much that their problem became our problem. We wanted to solve it — quickly, effectively, and humanely.
And thus, Prompt was born.
How Prompt came to be
We took the idea of our real estate customers not having enough time to do the things they needed to do and started developing ideas with that. How can our real estate customers build relationships, differentiate themselves, and see ROI — all at scale? It was a tough problem to solve, but we knew we had the team and the resources to do it. We became obsessed with understanding our customer; we watched their account activity, read up on real estate, consulted with real estate professionals, and did everything we could to learn more about this customer segment with this giant problem.
And if you think our Customer Success team only “listened” on the other end of the phone line, you’d be kidding yourself. Our Customer Success team went full-on secret squirrel; they didn’t just take verbal feedback from our real estate customers. Customer Success listened in other ways: they poured over NPS ratings, cancellation surveys, customer experience replays, data collection, and more. We looked at how real estate agents were using their accounts and studied up on where they began to fall off. We looked at our Customer Care CSAT scores and measured how many videos people were sending, how often, and from what platform. Customer Success took all of their findings and shared them with the rest of the organization.
After several months of conceptualizing, first drafts, trashing drafts, arguing, talking to customers, re-conceptualizing, testing, late nights, early mornings, emergency meetings, and too much caffeine for comfort, our Technology department had created an all-in-one, do-it-for-you product. We called it Prompt, which implied that our product would “prompt” our real estate customers on exactly when to follow-up and with who, what to say, and how to do it — all using video. Additionally, Prompt customers would receive monthly evergreen campaigns to send to their sphere of influence, as well as social media content, one-to-one automations, training, scripts, and so many more resources they could use to fill the gap they had with their current workflow. And this was all done with the goal of helping them be personal with a large client base.
How to approach new offerings
Prompt became a wild success, with many of our real estate customers telling us that Prompt alone has allowed them to score several millions of dollars in sales — all while continuing to build relationships with the people who mattered most to them. Was Prompt perfect? Not even a little. We’ve iterated on the product several times, aiming to make it more user-friendly, accessible, applicable, and valuable. Customer Success is a key department in unfolding the user experience; our Customer Success professionals constantly provides guidance and feedback to other departments when it comes to our customer lifecycle. And Prompt wouldn’t exist without the listening skills, feedback, and advocacy of our own Customer Success department.
Though Prompt was successful and it’s a subscription service we still provide today, we haven’t stopped there. We’ve had many ideas about the different ways that Prompt, or other parts of our product, can be used for portions of our customer base and their success. Should there be a Prompt for the automotive industry? How can we improve the one-to-one video send setup? What other training can we provide that will encourage our customers to do more personal videos? Simple videos? Do we come out with a lighter product? The questions still roll in, and these are discussions we continue to have as we keep listening to our customers on what they’d love to see.
Issues and bugs should be taken care of, but repetitive requests of brand new products or ideas should at least be considered at a higher level. How do you know which requests are legitimate and which are out of left field? Your Customer Success professionals. They are trained to listen to our customers and identify information and needs that are critical to the business, and they are one of your best resources when it comes to customer advocacy. Their goal is to help the customer succeed, and part of that is ensuring that your customers have the tools they need, the strategies that work, and the solutions that make them great.
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There’s so much more to the story, but you at least get the gist and hopefully learned a great deal about customer listening and advocacy. BombBomb prides itself on its ability to rehumanize communication to build relationships, and listening to our customers is just one of the many ways we do that. Our Customer Success team works just as hard at this today, advocating for our customers to help make our product bolder, bigger, and better day by day. Aside from providing feedback to others, our Customer Success team genuinely enjoys talking to our customers for the sake of building relationships. Our customers are all unique, amazing people that just want to build better relationships and communicate more effectively. And we want to accompany them on that journey.
When it comes to identifying new product segments or offerings, it’s clear that turning requests away is not always the method that gets you the best results. BombBomb’s Senior Vice President of Operations, Jonathan Bolton, once revealed that his father gave him a rule to live by when it came to helping customers succeed, and we think it’s something all companies should live by in identifying product offerings. He said, “Don’t tell them no — tell them how much.”
How have you used Customer Success to identify new product offerings in your business? How has your Customer Success team contributed to new features, products, or even workflow changes for the better?
