Last Updated on August 31, 2023 by David
Team up and win together.
There are some pretty good reasons for beta releasing products with a clear intention to fix and improve. Back in 2013 when we released Reamaze 1.0 Beta, the amount of feedback we received helped shape the robust platform you see today. More importantly, we still work with over 85% of our original beta customers.
A better term to describe our relationship is “partnership”. Our relationship has moved beyond a simple exchange of service provided and payments received. We’ve created long lasting partnerships by adding real value to the bottom line of our partners’ operational and revenue baselines. Here’s how you can do the same.
Intangible Experiences
The key to building valuable and reciprocal partnerships is by offering experiences a customer can’t find anywhere else. Plenty of businesses compete on features and pricing. Those things are tangible, measurable. However, like partners, customers need to feel they’re being rewarded for their time and effort and a “great deal” simply isn’t enough. When given a barrage of competitive options there must be an element of something intangible for customers to attach onto. Over the past two years, our customer service and customer experience teams’ average response times is within 2.5 hours. On average, the two teams receive 15 customer appreciations per hour. Over the past 30 days, the two teams have been able to address 62% customer issues with their first reply. Over the past 30 days, our CS and CX teams have used a minuscule 11 response templates. Almost every single reply is researched, handcrafted, and candidly delivered. The way we see it, the faster and better we work, the better our partners are able to work. The more seriously we take them, the more loyal our partners become.
Communicated Success
We’ve won and lost customers on singular poor experiences. When asked why they’re switching to Reamaze, the most common answer we get is somewhere along the lines of:
Their customer service was slow and made it difficult for us to troubleshoot/integrate.
According to RightNow, over 89% of customers switch to a competitor product only after a poor experience. We’re not sure how prolific these poor experiences are on a daily basis but you can be sure they’re affecting your customers. The first step to overcoming these negative flareups is to communicate successes religiously. Like any partnership, customers want to succeed. And like any healthy partnership, customers want to succeed with you even more. When issues are resolved, make sure your team is acknowledge the success with the customer and reiterate the mutual effort. If left to a one-sided resolution, customers will soon start to feel guilty about complaining and become much more reserved. When in doubt, perform a sniff test by asking your service team if they’re annoyed by a customer. If they are, they’re not investing enough in the partnership building process. If there’s not enough motivation internally, other processes may need to be established so your service team is working closer with product and engineering to be a product champion. More on that at another time.
Creating the Feedback Loop
Feedback is garbage if not acted upon. Many businesses will claim to welcome feedback but then shy away when rubber meets the road. This is the single most effective way to foster churn. When customers give and give but receive nothing in return, they’ll eventually stop giving. As mentioned earlier, partnerships require reciprocity and maintenance. We dug back to our historical conversations with beta customers and 1 in 3 feedback emails we received were productized into a feature or change you see today.
Not every customer feedback should be implemented because not every feedback or recommendation is a good one. Looking out for the community in general takes precedence. That said, customers need to be acknowledged and rewarded for their ideas and support. If certain ideas can’t be implemented, make sure your service teams are offering alternative solutions, timelines, roadmap insights, and/or workarounds.
The feedback loop is the single most effective partnership building strategy. However, it’s also the hardest to interweave with your other operational strategies. For example, how should service agents or CX managers document ideas? Who should take the lead in following up with product and engineering teams? Who should be evaluating each idea? Make sure you’re taking everything into account.