“The number one reason customers quit is because they believe the company no longer cares about them.” — Intercom

The 5 Key Customer Support Metrics

According to Des Traynor and John Collins, there are 5 key metrics to a successful customer support team:

The first three are fairly easy to calculate, but the latter two are often overlooked.

The 90% Rule For Response Times

Finding an optimal response time can be tricky, because…

• You have free and paid customers
• You have customers that pay a few bucks a month and others who pay 100s
• Your support team can reply with quality or quantity, but usually not both
• Your support team is finite or you decide to hire more, taking the financial hit

So how do you decide how much time to spend?

“Look at the 90th percentile value. This is the longest wait time for 90% of your customers that get in touch”

Once you know the longest wait time for the majority of your customers (i.e. ~90% of them), aim to reduce it. For example, Buffer replies to 57% of email within an hour.

Following this rule of thumb will ensure your customer retention rates explode, as you make more of your customers happier, more of the time.

Keep Creating ‘Wow’ Moments

• Buffer does it by having a customer happiness percentage of 94%.
• HotelTonight maintains a 24/7 response time of less than 10 minutes.
• Zappos does it by helping you with anything (like a 10 hour long customer call).
• Asana makes everyone in the company do support — CEO to intern.
• GrooveHQ has their CEO spend 20+ hours on support per week.

These moments create a viral word-of-mouth loop. It’s growth 101. Your customers win and so do you.

What will your ‘wow’ moment be?

Step In Before They Step Out

Heard of ‘Next Contact Avoidance’ before? Neither had I.

The crux of it is to proactively help a customer achieve their goals, even though they may have come to you with a single problem.

Running customer support with this mindset will (over time) decrease total customer support time and increases customer satisfaction.

It’s win-win!

AN EXAMPLE

A customer has asked you about a due date feature being built in your project management tool. By asking a few logical questions (or preemptively telling them), you might just find your customer is actually having problems with meeting project deadlines. From there, you can help them structure their work in a more predictable way and help them to avoid relying on due dates altogether.

You’ll become a mind-reader to your customers (the good kind).

Remember, Your Customers’ Success Is Your Success

Customer support isn’t building a product, nor is it distributing one.

But don’t let that fool you. Stellar customer support keeps customers for longer and turns them into your biggest fans.

And you never know, it might just become your competitive advantage.

The post 5 Customer Support Metrics for Startup Growth appeared first on Blossom.

In other words, they need a pricing strategy. It can be the difference between a potential and a recurring customer.

Here are a list of best practices to help you make sure you’re not selling your product short.

Use Round Numbers → Round Pricing Preference

Use round dollar numbers and slip in the number 9 if possible.

Why? Evidence has recently built a case for people preferring to spend more on rounded dollar prices, a counter-intuitive take on the “99c” store. There’s also buzz around the magic of the number 9.

Examples: Cloud9, Nitrous, Intercom.

Use Tiered Pricing → Anchoring Bias

Place your most expensive plan on the left through to your cheapest on the right.

Why? People who naturally read from left to right will see the value they’re getting relative to your largest plans. The most expensive product will function as price anchor that will influence your customers’ decisions for your other plans.

Examples: Blossom, Help Scout, Baremetrics.

Limit the Number of Choices → Choice Paradox

Limit the number of subscriptions, and their differences, your customers can choose from.

Why? People can literally be paralyzed by having to choose. Remove the friction by taking a minimalistic approach to pricing.

Examples: Buffer, Help Scout, Groove.

Position your best plan in the middle → Centre-Stage Effect

Position your best plan in the middle.

Why? People tend to go for the product in the middle of a bunch of similar products. In the middle of your pricing page, place the plan you want to perform the best and you think your customers will like the most.

Examples: Kissmetrics, Baremetrics, Briefmetrics.

Instill a Sense of Urgency By Being Scarce → Scarcity Effect

Provide limited time offers to help convert customers sitting on the fence.

Why? Simply put, “humans place a higher value on an object that is scarce, and a lower value on those that are abundant”. Your customers win by getting your product at a discounted price. You win by getting customers who might have chosen a competitor by a slim margin.

Examples: Cheaper plans for early adopters, one-time discount on annual plans, limited time offers.

Care more than the rest → Noble Edge Effect

Be involved in your community and the white knight that saves your customers from the greedy hands of other organizations.

Why? You can do this by growing communities in your industry (e.g. moderating a Medium publication, running a forum, and so on), blogging about what the current state of the industry is and where it can go, and many more.

Examples: GrowthHackers, Inbound.org, Medium Publications.

Offer small discounts upfront → Hyperbolic Discounting

Offer a small discount from the get-go.

Why? People tend to opt for (and place higher value on) a small gain upfront over larger gains in the long term.

Examples: Upfront discount on annual plans, 50% discount on your ‘best’ plan.

Make the checkout as simple as possible → Goal Gradient Effect

Minimize the effort it takes to buy your product by pre-filling forms with information your customers have already provided.

Why? There’s a number of factors which can send a user away from your payment form:

• Needing to refresh the page
• Having to double type your billing and shipping address when they’re the same
• Re-typing your email address when you provided it on the page before

Examples: Checkout page best practices.

Be different → Von Restorff Effect

Create a product that’s unique and pushes the boundaries of your domain.

Why? An item that “stands out like a sore thumb” is more likely to be remembered than other items.

Examples: Slack, Apple, Tesla.

Use social proof → Social Default Bias

Prominently display companies that use your product, case studies and testimonials on your landing and/or pricing page.

Why? If amazing companies are using your product, people are hardwired to think your product plays a part in that and want to gain the benefits for themselves.

Examples: Blossom Customers, Intercom Customers, Salesforce Customers.

Use Simple Language → Speak-Easy Effect

Write your copy with simple-to-understand words that can be read out-loud without stumping the reader mid-sentence.

Why? We have an “innate desire for things we’re already familiar with”. This includes words.

Examples: Slack, Mailchimp, Snapchat.

It’s not rocket science, but it does lead to rocket-ship growth. Try these SaaS startup pricing strategies and let us know what worked and what can be improved!

The post The Psychology Behind SaaS Startup Pricing appeared first on Blossom.

But first things first…

What is customer success?

“a proactive, holistic, and organization-level approach that leverages technology and real-time visibility into customer health to ensure your customers… continually and increasingly receive value from your product over the course of their lifetime as a customer.” — Lincoln Murphy

That is, the ultimate goal of customer success is to decrease churn, and to increase revenue and signups.

How does one achieve this? First, by understanding the 17 key elements of customer success which centre around 3 core topics:

1. Onboarding
2. Support
3. Up-Sales and Renewals

Onboarding

An onboarding flow is the first experience your customers will have when using your product. They’ve agreed to sign up for your app (and potentially pay for it too), so now is the best time to “wow” them.

Depending on your product, this usually involves creating an account, adding users and going through a quick tutorial. Intercom have kindly made a list of strategies for onboarding new users, which is a perfect place to start for ideas:

1. Social login
2. Required tutorial
3. Clear path to completion
4. Generate early value for the user
5. Progressive profiling
6. Opportunity to upgrade
7. Automagical registration

The key part of onboarding is to make sure customers know how to use your product, for their specific context, as pain free as possible.

If a customer struggles to find a feature they want to use, even if it’s in your product, they might cancel before you ever get to tell them. That’s why it’s critical to provide the right information, at the right time to customers. And the first time is what will set the tone.

You can generally interact with customers during onboarding in two ways:

• In-app tutorials: Labels, demo/starter data, a guided tour, a video how-to, etc.
• Email marketing: Using a drip campaign to slowly uncover product functionality over time.

To get some inspiration, Samuel Hulick meticulously tears down the onboarding flows of all kinds of apps, like Slack, Buffer and WhatsApp just to name a few.

Support

Inevitably customers will ask questions about your product. It might be a feature that they can’t find, a “best practice” they’d like to know, or a bug that’s stopping them from doing what they want to.

Here, timeliness is key. If a customer has a problem adding the rest of their team, 2 hours can be too late for them to know how. And if they’re trying out a few similar tools, all of a sudden a problem that can be fixed in 30 seconds, makes you lose that customer.

Bummer…

Real time chat makes everything better. Using tools, like Intercom, you can message customers directly and send/receive messages from them instantly. It’s personal, fast, and allows your customers to stay within the context of your app. It also gives you the power to send a specific message to a customer when they have completely a certain task based on parameters you define.

Don’t forget, real-time messaging is scalable.

And, it’s possible to automate the personalization of customer support. This is vital to your customer success, because being personal builds a stronger rapport between your product and the customer, which in-turn drives more sales. Combining this with live chat makes it possible to proactively build personal rapport with your customers.

Bringing up a customer’s first name when greeting them can be the difference between making them feel like there’s a human on the other side, or a robot.

And, if you’re getting stuck or are just curious, you can see how Intercom uses Intercom to support customers.

It’s important to understand the difference between “Teaching versus configuring”. In most cases, it’s preferable to spend time on the former (teaching), because the latter (configuring) is merely something a support document or FAQ can handle.

This brings us to a great point. From a configuration perspective, both app settings and FAQs should become web pages so that customer can self serve these problems. This includes questions like “How do I set up X integration?” and “How does this product compare to close competitors?”.

It’s win/win. Happier customers, and support staff that aren’t overwhelmed with the same questions.

Up-Sales and Renewals

At Blossom, we message all of our customers (with a 15% reply rate, on average) and call all organization owners (with a ⅕ success rate, on average), using a combination of Intercom, Google Hangouts and Skype. We send out messages instantly, during the onboarding process, and make the calls either immediately or within the next day or two.

By building these relationships with customers from the get go, we make the conversation around up-sales and renewals much easier.

Using the existing relationships and interactions, you can up-sell to a customer’s specific situation. To take it one step further, you can automate up-sell messages (for example, using Intercom) to be sent out when a customer hits a certain threshold. For example, if your plans are differentiated by the amount of users that join, when one user beneath the next plan’s threshold is added, you can send out an in-app message to let the owner know that they should consider upgrading their plan soon.
Moving customers up a plan is great, but the opposite can happen.

FACT: Customers will cancel from your free and paid plans if you’re a SaaS startup.

But, there are ways to get value out of it. It has been suggested to make cancellations either easier or harder. One one hand, if your customer has the ability to cancel in-app, they feel more at ease. One the other hand, if a customer has to message you to cancel, you can start a conversation with them to see what’s stopping them from continuing with your product.

Whatever path you choose, make sure to improve your product by appropriately filtering the feedback you receive. You might even win that customer back..

Customer Success Tools

To get you kick-started, below is a lightweight customer success tool stack (all have free plans):

• Intercom — live customer chat / analysis
• Hangouts / Skype — voice and video calling (free calls to the USA with Hangouts)
• Notify — social media brand monitoring (Slack integration)
• Slack — team communication
• Mailchimp / Campaign Monitor — drip campaigns
• Gmail — email client

Super-power your customers.

Now that you’re up to speed, you can develop your 90 day plan in your new role as customer success manager and read these books.

It’s time to go forth and make your customers successful. Just don’t forget to give them superpowers.

“Don’t aim for success if you want it; just do what you love and believe in, and it will come naturally.” — David Frost

The post The Secret to Customer Success in SaaS Startups appeared first on Blossom.

However, once you have a decent sized user base you immediately run into the problem of what do with all that feedback. *The suggestions you’re getting quickly outpace your ability to act on them, and clearly you shouldn’t act on all of them anyway.*

I don’t have the silver bullet answer of course but I’d like to suggest that the get satisfaction model of counting up the ones with the most votes and acting on them in that order *may not be your best move in all cases*. Consider the following:

* *Really small changes/tweaks can make a big difference.* At my last company we ran significance tests on single word copy changes, and some led to dramatic percentage increases in funnel outcomes.

* *Small changes that make a big difference are often non-obvious/intuitive.* That is, many iterations are often required (hill climbing) before you really nail something.

* *Adding features can lead to interface clutter.*

* *Product polish has non-linear effects.* If you absolutely nail a product experience (polish) it can go word-of-mouth viral (induce non-linear effects).

In other words, you are often faced with a real choice given your resource constraints: you can go in the direction of being a *jack of all trades, master of none* (delivering many minimum viable features people are asking for); or, you can go in the direction of the *master of one (or few)*.

Both are certainly viable strategies and have led to many successes. And I suspect that there are certain situations where one or the other makes more sense.

However, my hunch is that many startups fall into the former category (jack of all trades) almost accidentally because they don’t have the will/vision/stubbornness/whatever to buckle down and do the latter. That is, they are not making an explicit choice, which may ultimately not be in their best interest.

The reason is that delivering features people ask for is the path of least resistance. Not delivering them requires you to essentially ignore (or at least gracefully put off) huge obvious feature requests and *focus diligently on stuff that seems much smaller, and to the untrained eye, perhaps trivial*.

And that’s the key. Are these small things really trivial or are they part of a larger product vision where you end up with a truly polished product? It’s often hard to tell, and sometimes really a probabilistic bet. You really never know if you can nail a product experience until you do.

It’s a counter-intuitive strategy and often involves working on some features that no-one even notices but makes their experience smoother or a series of “advanced” features that 5% of your users will use but a different 5% for each feature (meaning that almost everyone adopting has a smooth experience).

It’s also counter-intuitive because it seems harder to defend from other companies. You’re not adding more features to a feature chart. But what’s not easily understood is your small changes are actually hard to copy because *you’ve made a ton of small decisions that others won’t implement the same way*, and so the copy-cat will end up with very different funnel results.

*Bringing this all back to product feedback, you shouldn’t ignore that one-off request/comment just because it is one-off. It may be a real piece of the puzzle.*

The post How do you act on all that Product Feedback? appeared first on Blossom.

We looked at all the products in the space and thought, “We can do it better”. So we did.
– most founders

It’s a common refrain, and I suppose this is what all founders should think! After all, if your product is inferior in every way to even one incumbent product, why do it at all?

Still, this is always an invalid “idea” for a business.

To see why, consider a home builder who says “I looked at all the other houses in this city and thought, ‘I can do better’”.

Better for whom? A 19-year-old bachelor who never cooks, skipped college, and has no money? A millionaire with a wine collection? A family of six? A family of rats?

So when someone says their product is “better”, my next question is always: “Better for whom?”

You quickly realize there’s no such thing as “better”. There’s only such thing as “better for a specific market segment”.

What spurred this blog post was someone who wrote exactly what I quoted above, in the space of project-management (PM) tools. It makes sense — almost everyone dislikes some aspect of their PM tool (which might also explain the proliferation of such tools).

You can already imagine the pitch, a variant of the generic “it’s better” like “All the things you love about Microsoft Project, but none of the things you hate”. Uh-huh. Who’s “you?”

Here’s some examples of pitches which would make sense. Who knows if they’re good ideas, but at least they are actual ideas, actual proposals, in that they define “better”:

• PM tools assume you already know about project management. My PM tool is best for people who have been thrust into a PM position but need help on nomenclature, process, best practices, and how to get the most from their tool and their team.
• Modern PM tools are too simplistic because they follow the 37signals and Lean Startup mantra of building the simplest possible thing. But that means they’re no good for large, complex, distributed, multi-user projects. Older PM tools understood that use-case, but they’re clunky install-only implementations where online collaboration, mobile and even the Mac is a bolt-on afterthought. My PM tool is best for large, complex projects with modern technology requirements.
• PM tools were built in the installed- or web-based-eras. My PM tool was built from the start for the iPad only. It’s the best if you need to manage projects from meetings and on the go.
• PM tools are built for a small, fixed set of workers. My PM tool is best for distributed, open projects with thousands of members but which still require central management.
• PM tools assume your set of tasks, goals, and projects are relatively fixed. My PM tool is best for open-ended projects where requirements change constantly and the tool should change with it and even measure the change.

The other thing you should notice about these “better for whom” statements is that they naturally point the way to the next steps in the business:

If you know your audience, you can create targeted advertisements, go to specific conferences, and even cold-call them on LinkedIn. You know what words to put on your homepage. You know which features will especially tickle their fancy. You know what to highlight to differentiate from competition.

Or if you’re still in the ideation stage, it gives you the basis for customer development, both in finding potential customers to call and in what you’re verifying when you get them on the phone.

Surely your product is “better” than the rest… for someone. Who?

The post Better for Whom? appeared first on Blossom.

An easy way to discover great retention strategies is to look at products you use regularly. Try to think about those little details that make you come back to your favourite apps. There is always something to learn.

Alright, here are a few real world examples of products that found smart ways to retain and even resurrect customers that would have been lost otherwise.

1. Path: What are you up to?

When you browse your friend list in Path, you will see that all of your inactive friends are greyed out. Path also tells you when they were seen the last time. What’s really interesting though is the ‘?’-button right next to the ‘last seen’ indicator.

Once you tap on the button Path shows a few pre-worded messages that you can send to your inactive friend e.g. ‘Take a photo!’ or ‘What are you up to?’. That’s a very low-friction way to ‘nudge’ people back into the app.

Another interesting thing about Path is that it automatically publishes your location when you arrive at a new neighbourhood. This way users can create relevant content without even requiring an explicit interaction.

But that’s not all. Path adds the ‘?’-button to automatically shared stories. This means asking friends to share a photo during their holiday is just one tap away.

Sensible defaults.

Update: It looks like the most recent version of Path removed the ‘Last Seen’ indicator and the ability to nudge people from the friend list. I’d love to know the reason behind that move, and how the feature performed while it was live. If someone knows more please ping me.

2. Twitter, Quora & LinkedIn: Email digests

In the last few months both twitter and LinkedIn drastically improved the usefulness and design of the emails they send out.

Twitter sends newsletter-like digests of tweets that might be interesting to you depending on whom you follow and interact with. It is such a great source of relevant news for me that I wish my newsreader had a similar weekly digest feature.

While LinkedIn also sends out personalized news emails I feel they are not as relevant to me as twitter’s digests. Probably because twitter has a better sense of what I’m interested in but on the other hand LinkedIn does a great job with profile update digests. They regularly inform you about profile changes of people you are connected to e.g. when someone switched jobs, updated their description or added acquired skills.

Quora, a popular questions and answers site sends weekly email digests of answers that might be interesting to you. So even if you don’t have a specific question at the moment, you’ll get reminded of quora and get something interesting to read.

3. Kippt & Bitbucket: Product announcements

Another straight forward way to reactivate users is to send them news about your product. Kippt, a gorgeous social bookmarking service does a great job in that regard. They send out announcements about new features and integrations with other services. Emails like these not only can bring back people that were holding out for a certain feature, it’s also a great way to remind your customers that you are actively working on making your product better and better.

Recently Bitbucket, a source code hosting service by Atlassian sent out an announcement about their site redesign. In their blog post they also used the opportunity to mention a list of other features that they’ve added in the past to emphasize their ongoing commitment to Bitbucket.

When you spend time and effort to specify, design, implement and ship a new feature also make sure to communicate the benefits to your customers.

4. Buffer: Reminder email about refilling your queue

Buffer, an app that helps you to schedule posts for twitter, facebook et al sends a gentle email reminder when your queue of prepared posts is running low so you can fill it up again.

This feature is a great example for an automatically triggered lifecycle email. It not only makes me come back to buffer again and again, it actually increases the value of the product for me. It helps me to tweet on a regular basis. Like a personal assistant.

Easy to implement, high impact.

5. Diamond Dash: Benjamin just beat your high score

To reactivate players who might already have abandoned the game, Diamond Dash encourages people to send challenges to others via Apple’s Game Center. But that’s just the beginning. You will also get notified once someone beats your highscore. This is a very effective way to get someone to re-engage with the game, especially if you just got passed by an old friend from school.

Additionally, you can’t play the game all the time. Once you played for a few minutes you will run out of lives. Here is where it gets interesting. You can ask friends to send you a life. Actually the dialogue for requesting lives automatically pops up in front of you regularly. This mechanism encourages people to constantly remind their friends about the existence of the game.

From my point of view Diamond Dash’s retention system is very well designed but borderlines on being incredibly annoying.

Great to learn from but use with caution.

Do you know great retention hacks? Please let me know.

The post 5 Smart Ways to Resurrect your Customers appeared first on Blossom.