How Moving From Reactive To Proactive Improved Customer Satisfaction
When Lab Me started in 2018 we really had no idea how to do customer success. We had read all the Hubspot articles and dozens of ebooks on the topic and thought we knew it all.
The reality was that as soon as customers started coming in, I was unable to keep an emotional level around the product. Everything I read seems to boil back down into one simple vision “just be nice to them and help and add value.”
While that sounds reasonable, it isn’t realistic.
Being the founder, I was emotionally attached and that created a disillusioned parallax between the customer and our product. However, besides needing to be there for the customer, I also needed a standard operating procedure. We needed to have help desk articles, FAQ,s and email templates. There is no better way to build those than during the experience itself.
So after running our customer support during the first two years, I was able to build a solid playbook for our first hire. This tremendously helped as I was not only able to onboard them with speed but it reduced overall micromanagement after we started.
I also kept in mind that this person was new to the company (not 2 years like myself) and didn’t know everything there was to know. Keeping this in mind reduced frustration. But what really kept the frustration down was the empowerment of our new team members.
With our first hire, I made sure to let them know that they were the CEO of their role. I gave them permission to issue refunds, create coupons, and add to help desk articles. All was going well, until the day we crossed the chasm.
It was apparent we crossed the chasm (from early adopters to mainstream) by the type and frequency of the tickets incoming. They went from fairly low numbers and very patient to higher numbers and very impatient. We weren’t dealing with early adopters anymore — that's for sure. This took approximately 2 years and 9 months to happen.
At this stage just waiting for tickets, even with all the help desk articles we had made, wasn’t making an impact on our internal net promoter score or morale for that matter.
Sure, we had tons of 5-star reviews, compliments, and praise but it took a lot of effort to get it from unhappy to that. More than we all felt was necessary. So we reviewed our techniques, protocols, and everything else we considered part of the SOP.
After scratching our heads for a while it dawned on me that we were only being reactive. We were waiting for the tickets to come in. After analyzing the types of tickets there was a pattern.
We had tickets primarily around tracking numbers, results pending and test’s not performed. We had added better tracking and package visibility and those reduced drastically however results and test issues still seemed to linger.
So we shifted gears. We started emailing the customer first.
We begin to act as account managers rather than a customer service team. Meaning we contacted the customer first. A pre-emptive strike, if you will.
After a customer would place a purchase we would simply email them, thank them briefly and let them know that we are here for the duration of the process so if they had any questions they could respond directly to the email.
We did the same with failed card charges, follow-up testing, and more. The results were significant. Sentiment changed, people became more patient, and those five-star ratings took half the effort.
So my advice is pretty simple, be an advocate. I’m not sure the way we are doing this is scalable but only time will tell. My guess is that at some point there will need to be a layer of automation (rather than personalized outreaches).
However, as the axiom goes “do things that don’t scale” and that is exactly what we are doing with success.
