How To Improve Digital Customer Experience
For Angela Bucher, customer enablement is all about the value you create together. With a decade of experience working in ever-changing fields like customer experience and customer achievement, she's dealt with all phases of SaaS: from early-stage growth (wearing all the hats) to investments in large series (driving the scale). Now, as the Senior Director of Customer Support at Unbounce, Angela's teams watch throughout the entire journey of a customer, from prospect to product acceptance and beyond.
In this discussion Learn:
- What can you do to enhance the your customer experience, by focusing on personality types, communication preferences and the use of multiple channels
- How to measure the experience of your customers and work
- How can you reduce the amount of churn by implementing an effective customer onboarding procedure
- How to create an scalable, personalized onboarding experience
Creating a customer experience plan that benefits your business
Amber: A lot of businesses are searching for a universal approach to creating a successful digital customer service program that usually begins with a web site. With the ease of accessing information has changed the expectations of customers and expectations, it is important to offer the most optimal service to customers across every platform as a part of your brand. How can companies go beyond their websites?
Angela A: For certain businesses that aren't doing well, customers only interact via your site directly. They may not be aware of all the sources or channels available to customers. The expectations have changed-think about what we used to get from phone and internet companies (and often do). Nowadays, we expect fast, knowledgeable and PROACTIVE services. Today, clients require numerous ways to communicate with us, and we must be able to adapt to their requirements. In addition, we must also be aware of their personalities as much as possible-are they chatty? Are they bored by details? What can we do to adjust to change the context of our service, language, and transfer of information to give them the most enjoyable service experience?
Amber It appears that Unbounce has done a fantastic job in establishing ways to allow customers to connect with your employees. Through the years, Unbounce has created a range of channels for the engagement of customers, such as your CTA Conference and knowledge-base blog, video content, and an online academy. As you've continued to grow your programs, what impact have you seen on your customers' experience?
Angela is able to do this by creating a number of different channels from online to offline and by focusing our content to provide actionable information that helps customers build their businessesand boost their conversion rates We've managed to establish a brand is loved by marketers and attracted by, and an engaged marketing community around all over the globe.
Our aim is to not just offer the most effective building tool for landing pages, however, we also strive to be the leader in Marketing and Conversion Intelligence, which is why our customers turn to us for industry-specific best practices, and AI-powered tools that allow customers optimize their website to drive more conversions.
Amber: So with this strategy of becoming the leader in Marketing and Conversion Intelligence, how can you make engaging content for your customers across the channels you use? What are the ways to measure its impact?
Angela This method is really as high up on the funnel as you can be: having a robust social presence, artifacts of your expertise in your field, or having something similar to the Community that we offer on Unbounce where marketers come for help and advice on conversion optimization.
A way to measure the efficacy of specific campaigns or content is by how many New Trial Starts (NTS) the campaigns generate - NTS is the measurement we make of people who have been signed up to a no-cost trial. They can be attributed to any specific campaign, or even our blog, the community.
To determine quality, we have the ability to evaluate these leads also, and we can use this information to improve future campaigns as well as the data we use to define that high-quality. Also the data we gather from it helps us learn.
We also seek out the feedback of our customers in a variety of types (NPS as one), such as request for features, and more recently, market-fit surveys for products along with other survey types conducted by our Product Marketing team. This is another way to be sure the content we're distributing is in line on the right target market.
Amber I think that's fantastic. There's a trap to get into in which the content we make is produced in a silo and I would say that your last point is key to ensure that your team is listening to the needs of the customer through several forms to determine the type of information they require.
When it comes to looking at the effectiveness of programs What goals should a company look at when deciding to improve their customer experience on the internet? Are there any benchmarks that have you used previously?
Angela: Customer Efficiency Score, also known as CES, is a huge one for benchmarking. What it means to Unbounce can be that it allows us to can set targets to make the customer's experience more effortless.
We believe that low-effort interactions with our customers result in loyal customers, and this has the biggest impact on retention as well as expansion. We're reading "Effortless Experience" by Matt Dixon and are working to implement the techniques from this across Customer Success.
At the center of this plan is to decrease customer efforts as the most successful way to avoid disloyalty. It's still pretty early days of this plan at Unbounce, but we have achieved significant progress in the year 2020 and have really exciting plans to maintain the momentum through 2021.
Amber: Could you provide me with an illustration of an CES sign?
It's very comparable with NPS however it's not built upon the NPS product itself but rather on the interaction a customer has with someone on Unbounce. The program is activated after the interaction and will ask for the effort needed for the interaction and if the problem was solved.
Implementing a scalable digital onboarding program
Amber: Let's shift to a different mode. We live in an era of uncertainty due to the pandemic that is sweeping the globe. How have COVID-19 as well as remote work affected your customers satisfaction approach?
Angela: Super strange times. We at Unbounce are extremely fortunate to be in the circumstance of working in a digital business that has remained stable in this moment. However, our initial action was to make sure we were able to assist the businesses suffering the most, and try and take some of the stress and uncertainty off their plates.
We did create a strike group to bring everyone together in support of these clients, and our team did an incredible job with it. We plowed through the changes quickly, got coupons and discounts distributed to the companies that were most affected; made choices about free accounts for sectors like healthcare to ensure they can continue helping and developed specific programs in order to inform other struggling industries using the lessons we gained. As an example, when the gym moved online and offered virtual training and exercise classes, we shared what other businesses can do to achieve the same thing. We came together , and ended in retaining the majority of our customers , while also growing.
In the intervening time, we moved forward with our own plan of action as staying determined to drive the most successful customer behaviours in our product that yields our customers the longest-lasting and loyal customers and also advancing our product's worth using things such as AI and machine learning. In fact, during the height of COVID-19 we raised our first major funding round of $52M. We're now in better position to continue to expand and speed up our strategy.
Amber : Now we will discuss one of the crucial components of an education curriculum Onboarding.
With the growth of companies their capacity for individual training and onboarding may end up being impossible to sustain. According to Preact's study on Churn, ineffective onboarding contributes to 22.9 percentage of churn churn that is within a firm's reach. This is why it's essential to develop a plan designed to grow and deliver consistently high results. How has Unbounce faced the issue of growing your onboarding program? What are the most efficient strategies you've used?
Angela This percentage isn't surprising to me. It's sometimes referred to as "failure to launch" and almost always results in one of the greatest impact on churn. This is especially true for early churn.
The most efficient strategy is one that has a bit of variation, as well as being open to new ideas However, there's no any one strategy that is perfect. In the past, I have mentioned that there are many different methods and channels that will work for all people, or in the appropriate time, so we need many methods of communicating with our diverse customers.
In previous companies I've tried different "nurture" processes, such as personalized contact in a specific timeframe and a greater number of emails. email, and so on.
Additionally, in the past, as a way to manage onboarding on a larger the scale of business, I've implemented "one to several" or group training to mimic 1:1 onboarding while keeping the turnaround time in addition to the number of employees required for delivery less expensive and more sustainable. Another benefit that resulted from implementing this method was the fact that it gave customers the opportunity to gain knowledge from one another -- what problems they faced or what queries they had and got answered, and on.
In Unbounce, we regularly run webinars that focus on specific actions or workflows is a tactic we utilize, which we get really good engagement from. This is something we'll continue to do to supplement our onboarding programmes. Instead of hosting all of the sessions be one-to-one, the way we can help with the scale of webinars is to invite many clients at the same time. This may seem obvious, but this is a proven technique.
In brief it is possible to find a number of solutions to tackle this issue, and I always recommend testing new ideas as well as having a way to determine if they've worked efficiently or not.
Amber: What are your thoughts regarding self-paced learning for onboarding? Is it a substitute for in-person training?
Angela: What I see more and more often is the necessity for a balance of both self-serve options and in-person. Returning to the simple customer experience, providing choices for customers (as long as there aren't too many , and not difficult to locate) is the ideal balance we hope to strike.
It is inevitable that there will be the customer who wants the white-glove treatment, personalized support and care as well as longer to learn about new technological advances. This is typically seen in the larger, more enterprise kind of client who recognizes and appreciates the importance of a good relationship management.
That said, there is also a significant portion of clients who prefer the simple and straightforward training. They prefer to take their own and are looking to view the lower price point the training usually has.
At Unbounce We offer a variety of options for education for self-guided as well as personal:
- We run education and marketing campaigns that are specific to the functionality needed to enhance the user's landing page such as our analysis of landing pages and copy analyzer
- We established targets that new trial users get an email within 15 mins in order to minimize the chance of failure to launch
- We run targeted email nurturing campaigns, some of which lead to a 1:1 session with an CSM or someone in Sales
- We also have in-app help for those who are self-serving.
And I can't overlook the underlying factor the incredible support team, who be willing to go the extra mile to help a customer.
Amber: Striking the right balance between self-paced and interactive on-site training can be the most effective method to allow your clients to access assistance when they require it. With that being said, with scalability being so dependent on the usage of technology, how can you establish the feeling of a personalized training experience for your customers at a large scale?
Angela The concept of group training and webinars that I have mentioned is one of the best strategies to expand customized onboarding. That said, this should not replace a really good online onboarding process. It's similar to an "choose your own adventure!"! We design all of the various options for onboarding and you're able to pick the option that is most suitable for you -- what's highly personal and scalable in this case is that each client has the option of the amount and time!
Impacting your customers for longer-term growth
Amber: The best customer training programs result in the customers being able successfully engage with your brand for a long time. In the process of building out these onboarding programs what elements are key for accomplishing this?
Angela When I imagine myself in these types of scenarios, I would like that the software to function in the first place. I'd like it to be easy-to-use and when I need help I need it quickly and understandable.
If you're selling a product such as ours, on top of everything else, the conversions our customers get are the most reliable indicator of health and happiness. It is possible to influence this in a few ways, one is that we are moving away beyond purely time-based objectives for front-line staff and having them concentrate on training our customers on how to most effectively optimize their landing pages.
We believe that the next generation of marketing optimization really rests with the concept of conversion intelligence. The term "conversion" refers to the pairing of the expertise of our clients combined with AI-powered data that take some of the work associated with optimization off our clients as well as continuing to aid them in creating the most effective content that converts.
Amber The moment we have a better understanding of what makes an effective customer onboarding what are the best ways of quantifying the effectiveness?
Angela: Probably Customer Satisfaction, or CES...the knock-on impact of those having a stable and healthy business is obviously retention and growth. While one of these factors alone doesn't mean that you have a silver bullet. it's essential to make use of every input in your measurement and your decision-making. Especially if you see any dips in your measurements, it helps to discover the cause of it and try and find what caused it, and attempt to solve the issue.
While NPS is an crucial metric at a high level however, I believe it should be employed as a check-point for your business overall, but when NPS dips, you have all these other ways to cut data into pieces, as well as going deeper to study.
It is also my opinion that individual KPIs are another method to measure the effectiveness of certain aspects of onboarding, especially in the event that any type of experiment is taking place. It's also important to me that we can show our employees the results of their work as well.
Amber: Angela, thank to you very much for sharing your expertise today. Before we end things we'd like to know if you have a lesson or tip that you'd love to share with those looking to improve the experience of their customers on the internet, what would it be?
Angela: Only one?
- Do not stop listening your clients.
- Data access is set to allow you to be free.
- Employees who are happy is the basis for satisfied customers.
About Unbounce: Unbounce is the world leader in marketing and landing page optimization software empowering marketers to design and develop landing pages without the need for a web developer. The platform for landing pages helps marketers significantly increase conversion rates leveraging the Unbounce Conversion Intelligence(tm) technology. It was founded in Vancouver, B.C., Unbounce is a people-first business, one of Canada's most appreciated corporate cultures. It has facilitated more than one billion conversions worldwide.