Explore the benefits of using an open source sales funnel for customer service

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all right hello everybody thank you so much for joining us for today we're gonna have there live discussion of the customer support funnel my name is Matt I'm the customer evangelist here at help Scout and we make fantastic customer support tools to help you grow your business and with me today are two fantastic co-hosts the first is Molly Rocha can choose from snapping gage hello Molly and Heidi from farm logs hello Heidi can I ask you to introduce yourselves technical problem there oh sorry about that can hear me yes go for it okay hi everyone I'm Molly whoa check I am the marketing manager at snapengage snapengage is a live chat software platform for sales and support teams and we our technology provides tools to help businesses engage and support their website visitors in real time fantastic howdy hi everyone my name is Heidi Khan and I'm the VP of customer success at a software startup called farm logs farm logs creates remote sensing software that allows farmers to increase their crop production while decreasing their expenses fantastic so for the next half an hour or so we're gonna be talking about the customer support funnels what is it what is it mean why does it matter how it might apply to your businesses and how it applies to ours and then at the end of that discussion we're going to answer some audience questions so if you have a question at any point in the next half hour just jump onto Twitter tweet at help Scout use the hashtag support funnel and ask your question there and that will help us find it and then we'll answer those all at the end so that's between at help scout hashtag support funnel all right so let's get started you've probably all heard about the the marketing funnel it's a really common business tool to describe the different stages of that a potential customer goes through until that become a customer and it's a funnel because it's got a lot of people that go in at the top and then as you go further down through the stages some people drop out of that process and not all of them become customers so now I don't know how you feel about the idea of the marketing funnel in a sales funnel I mean it's not fun right at the start so that's a good start but not everybody uses the marketing funnel in a kind of customer centric way and I think we in certainly the customer service world have a sometimes a little bit of a reaction to the idea of kind of forcing people through a funnel and it feels a little bit aggressive and not customer servicing like shoving them through a kind of a meat grinder coming out of the bottom as customers I don't know if you don't think that's what we want to do and so I wanted to be clear upfront that what we're talking about today is not about what we do to customers since no about forcing them through a process for our benefit we're talking about a funnel to use it as a framework for thinking about the customer experience thinking about how we can make that a better and a more consistent process for a customer all the way through that their thirst interactions with the business through to being a long-term hopefully a long-term customer so what we're talking about today is not a series of things that you need to do it's just here is a way that you can think about your business and the way you apply it will differ to the way that we apply it at help scout and to the way Molly and Heidi apply it in their businesses okay so Molly recently you wrote an article for us on the help scout blog about the customer support funnel so why don't you kick us off and and just kind of give us the big picture of what is a customer support funnel sure well the support from all the way we vision it you you know you talked a little bit about the shape of it and to us that inverted shape is really looking at the customer touch points and so from as they come out of that sales stage they're still very much a lot of one-to-one communication and that generally will get broader as they move down through the support phone also customers will start having community discussions with other customers so you'll see that's how we envision the inverted funnel as we like to call it but essentially it's a it's intended to be a framework to help evaluate where our customers are in their lifecycle so from that sales stage into the onboarding process through you know the post sales support and retention and advocacy stages because we all know that the customer journey doesn't end up the sale so for us identifying those stages helps us better plan support resources so we can be proactive with our customer support and also providing them with the resources they need at each of those stages tested let me just bring up the funnel for everybody here so this is this is the funnel that we're talking about and you can find this and the full description on the helps go blog win you can read Molly's whole article so what we're going to do today is kind of talk through the different stages to where what they mean how you might identify a customer in that stage and what you might do about it if there's a gap they're putting that back off but Heidi at farm logs do you talk about funnels are they literal funnels when it comes to farms we do talk about marketing funnels but we haven't historically talked about the customer funnel in the past despite the fact that we do follow these same principles and think about the customer journey in these specific stages so I was really excited to read Molly's article because it does provide a great framework for adding structure to our thinking and our conversations as especially as we work collaborative across the organization to create our customer experiences excellent so I want to talk about an experience that I had this is a long time ago many jobs ago - I was working for a software company in my very first job and I went on a sales call I was like the technical support to this sales call and we went across the Sydney Harbour over to North Sydney to try and sell this terrible software frankly then we were trying to sell and I just sat in on the sales call I really had nothing to do there but I listened to the salesperson just blatantly sell features that we did not have and I knew we didn't have and I didn't say anything and I was young and foolish at the time and so just kind of went back feeling weird about it and then of course that customer when they started they signed up how did us the money in this started using it and found out that I couldn't do the things that they have already been promised it was just it was a terrible experience for them it's a bad experience for the poor support people they've got stuck having to look after that customer and you know that that customer is not going to be retained or in all likelihood so most businesses hopefully are not quite as direct about misleading their customers in that way but as we move through this funnel I think this is a great opportunity to think about what is the customers experience and how are they how are they feeling and what are they what are the information they have as they go through so let's start at the top of the funnel so we've just come through sales in the marketing funnel they've made the sale have a customer now we're into onboarding I mean what does the onboarding stage look like and what should we be thinking about at that station I'm sorry right my computer froze up there for a sec that's K we're talking about a new product I'd share sure so you know in that story that you just told of your first sales experience the onboarding stage is really all about delivering on those expectations that promised in the sales process so for us it's a lot of you know like I mentioned those customer attachment points a lot of continued one-to-one communication and it's also often times where there there will be a team lead or an Operations person who is researching our software and actually going through that sales process but in the end it's their team that's using the software so for us it's bringing other members of their team on board and getting them to love the product just as much as the person who was in charge of the sale so for us yeah that's that's what we do and Heidi you have customers who are probably from a different type of background than most software companies what is a do you see problems in onboarding like what happens if you don't onboard someone correctly for us it's pretty drastic and we learn some lessons along the way of course like everybody does but farmers that you might imagine our very relationship oriented and how they want to do business and so for us is making sure that we have meaningful really meaningful conversations upfront and similar to what mommy said is making sure that we truly understand their business bull's eye says you might imagine all farms are very different and making sure that their expectations were properly set by sales and then the customer success team spends a lot of time really kind of walking the customer through educating them on how to meet those goals and looping back to the expectation setting making sure that everything is aligned and that we're really setting the customer up for long-term success absolutely and I think the important point here is to just to think about what onboarding looks like even within one company it might be a very different experience for different types of customers especially like an even our SAS world where some companies are going to have thousands and thousands of customers coming through and you can't probably onboard those with an account manager or a bit of hand-holding or personal interaction and so you might need to find different ways of making sure that there's all those people coming in through the sales process understand what the product does and conceptually how it works and have a good kind of mental model of the thing it is that they're using are there particular tools that have worked for you for either of you or haven't worked in the effort to change up again the onboarding process sure so one gap actually in evaluating the funnel particularly in the onboarding stage one gaps that we've identified recently is a lack of video that really is kind of a hands-on walkthrough over a tool and like I mentioned a lot of what we do in the onboarding stage is getting other team members on-boarded so whereas the person who was initially responsible for the sale may have gone through a demo with our dedicated sales manager the rest of the team hasn't necessarily seen that so it's developing those tools that we can provide them up front so that we're not as you mentioned having to onboard every single client as they come through for us we started with larger group webinars and we found out that they weren't very successful a lot of customers didn't want to join them because they were one too many and because we're only providing onboarding to our top tier paying customers we decided to transition that a little bit and start doing screen shares so now all of our top paying customers get one on one screen shares that are really customized to their goals and what they're growing and how they're running their operation but then we supplement throughout the year with emails that contain video tutorials and support articles that are relevant to our customers given what they're growing and the time of the year that they're in with their growing season all right let's move on to the next section but before we do I just think it's worth probably pointing out that customers don't necessarily go through these stages in this order every time right and so as we go through we're gonna be talking a lot about how they fit together and the fact that you know you might have a customer who's gone being with you for some time who still hasn't really grasped something which is core to the understanding of the system and really has kind of skipped onboarding particularly if you think about a business who signs up and the person that you work with moves on and there's another person who's now using the product as if they had been around for three years but really just using the specific things that they know about and doesn't understand the system so let's we'll come back to that but I just wanted to point out that this is not a kind of a structured flow that everyone goes through in that order but let's talk about support so you put your customer you've on-boarded them they've started using their product and now they're kind of moving into that long-term day-to-day support interaction with the company trying to get some help Molly what does that look like and what should be work should be looking for to understand a customers at that stage sure so as you mentioned this is kind of going from the getting to know your product to how can I best leverage this product to really achieve the objectives that I've set out to achieve so for us that is an ongoing process so as you mentioned the the life cycle stages and the support funnel aren't necessarily rigid and people aren't flowing from one to the other necessarily in a streamlined flow so this can be a prolonged ongoing support and so we do this primarily through live chats because that's our product and it's how we best communicate with our clients and it also helps us empower our clients to use our tools better but one of the main areas and greatest benefits to what our product offers is all of the integrations with additional CRM and help desks so it's really guiding them through how to better leverage the technology beyond just our tools and into those other workflows that they're using thanks Lynn Heidi what is what is a support stage look like for a typical customer of fun looks now for us they might look at our support page and they might go from there not find what they're looking for and end up reaching out to our team for help via phone Twitter Facebook Google Play email primarily email you don't you just check yeah well I'm gonna have to look at snapengage but yeah reaching out to us and expressing any kind of gaps between what our product is offering and what they're wanting to accomplish and it's our team's job to try to fill in those gaps either with permanent long-term solutions in the product or short-term solutions with our support page documentation and might be improving our onboarding training or sales conversations marketing materials things like that how does the I think that's a really good point that a lot of the improvements it's not things that your support can do better it's that they need to give that information to your product team who can't change something and what's that process look like so for us we used our help desk tool to analyze what the common drivers of support are and you've run reports on those on a weekly basis and look at the trending issues that come up either within the last week the last four weeks we sure that throughout the entire company one of the goals there is to irritate people about the long-standing issues and use that to help get those issues fixed but ultimately getting those things resolved sharing all the information across the the organization is really helpful not only just exposing the organization to customer pain but in highlighting the the biggest things that are holding us back from having a really great customer experience fantastic I think it helps gardened we have a really strong direct customer support team who are just fantastic and dealing with customers and helping them kind of find ways to use a product better and having quite they quite a brew and roll and I think that the thing that we found was maybe some of the areas that we had to improve were kind of look like their problems in support not because of the support people but that's because where the problems come up in the support phase I should say and really because it's a failure in the onboarding process like we haven't given those people the right information to understand how to use the product and so there's generating support in the support phase because we haven't quite addressed conceptual issues or documentation or video or pointed people to the right resources earlier on so when you start looking at this customer experience and its own you can kind of as a support manager I have this problem too of like thinking this is a support problem to solve and not realizing this is where the customer support final comes in really handy the gap is in the onboarding section the gap is not in the support but the outcome and the impact of that gap is felt in the support phase so this is that's why I think this is a super useful tool for really digging into like where is that problem starting and where do we need to address it okay so how do you know Molly how do you know if your support is working well for us we look at customer satisfaction I mentioned that our primary service of communication is chat and we have post-chat survey that our support team reviews on a daily basis and when anytime we receive a less than satisfactory rating we do make sure that we follow up with those clients so it's we take it very seriously and it's a way for us to continue to optimize our support experiences with our customers when you're reporting this is a problem like I've had in past lives as well when both a negative feedback and positive feedback in support can kind of be unrelated to support the support person who's done their job you know they can do their job well and get a bad rating because it's it's really product feedback and the other way around to to be fair you can get fantastic ratings and it's really just because they didn't have any problems because the product did the work that it was supposed to do do you have either of you had any any attempts at kind of splitting out that feedback into things which are really about product things which are about process things which are about the actual supported direction um yes and no for us from a measurement standpoint we haven't although that would be very interesting to do from a procedural standpoint we do we do separate those out through different systems so all of our support tickets are tracked and help scout of course and then we also have JIRA on the product side where we are constantly tracking whether their issues or customer requests and and trying to better close those feedback loops with customers so maybe we can't deliver on a customer request right away but at least we're keeping them in the loop of where we stand on it so we we do put timelines on those customer requests so that we make sure that we're following up regularly great Hadi anything anything from your support team do they have any way of kind of identifying this is something that we need to fix in support versus this is really not about that support experience itself yeah so for the most part I think we're very similar to nollie and snapengage we are primarily measuring our customer service satisfaction when we do that after a support interaction and we do try to make it very clear about the question that we're asking we want to know about the support experience specifically in our message that said we also go through and classify every single support ticket and run reports on that to understand the exact type of issue was it really a supportive shear was it a feature request or a blog or maybe a usability issue and to understand what our major drivers are okay that seems like one of those ones where if you're at the scale we can do that go through that that work is probably paying off over the long period because you realize yeah you identify problems that you wouldn't have seen otherwise okay so support support team obviously it's a big chunk of customers experience okay today but at some point that customer has bought the product and you want to buy it again or they signed up for a service and you want them to continue paying for that service and so that's that's where we move into the retention phase only what does what does a retention phase look like it it's not engage and what is it what does this stage generally mean in the funnel sure so for us retention is ongoing communication and regular touch points we do you know obviously our our team can't support the depth of clients we have with one-to-one communications on a regular basis so we do have different tiers to your classifications of clients based on you know their plan levels with our products and so we do regular customer success reviews with you know our higher tier plans and then for our you know more basic plans business level plans we will do our best to continue to optimize our self-service support materials so that's a good question actually self service materials how do you know how do you optimize them what does that mean so if we if we find we're getting a lot of requests on the same topic let's say people have a lot of requests about our Google Analytics integration and we'll tend to see patterns of you know this keeps coming up we know as a team we need to improve those support materials for our clients so that they we can empower them to find the information mean more easily so that they don't have to come asking us every time all right Heidi retention you know in your situation is that like once a year thing that you're trying to kind of make sure that person's happy enough well once a year we try to make sure that they renew that's for sure but all throughout the year we're doing similar things - I think what snapengage is doing and having continuous check-ins both through customers success management and account management and for us account management is kind of the go-between facilitator of conversations between sales and the customer experience department but what that actually means in real life as it plays out is that customer success managers are checking in with our customers continually making sure that they're set up to use features that are relevant to them based on the time of the year and it also means from the account management side that they're checking with our customers and making sure that our customizers or customers our customers are recognizing the value that they're getting out of the features based on the goals that they had and signing up for farm logs in the first place yes so that's that try to make retention a kind of full full scale efforts like that at all points during the year and I think we always we've all seen what happens if you deal with some companies where they really only care about retention at the point where you've already decided to leave and that's just not a good experience for anybody the support teams role in retention is an interesting one I think often a support team is the people who will see first those signs of possible problems like they'll notice those customers who are used to email every week and now don't email every week or they'll see that first email come in which is like so if we wanted to export some of our data hard with a3 it's easy for a support person who's busy and has a hundred other tickets to get to to answer that question move on but I think an effective use of this kind of support is to think now we can we can train our support people to identify those things and either you know connect them with someone else who can who has more time to have that conversation or just to directly open up the conversation and ask them yeah here is the answer to your question about exporting can absolutely help you do that but I would love to know like what do you need to do with that data how can we help you use that and understand it and that just way into talking about what is the issue that's causing that the need that's let's move on to our final section there advocacy now this is one this is one that's always fun you know I've told this story a couple of times now but it's up comes last time I wasn't there but a couple of our help Scout team were there and came across one of our customers Brittany shout-out to Brittany she knows who she is who was just really passionately explaining help scout to another potential customer and talking about how much she loved it and how much easier it had made her life and when you see that happening for real and you realize how advocacy is an actual thing it's not just people who are on Commission trying to sell to me right this is a person who's genuinely had a problem and that it's solved by our product and that's fantastic so that's advocacy I think in short Molly what does ever look like for you and how should we be thinking about it sure well similarly we had a similar experience recently we just hosted our first user conference back in May of this year and it was a chance for us to bring customers together who are really passionate about our product and as a support team it's really refreshing to hear that feedback because oftentimes you're only not only but the majority of your conversations can tend to take a negative tone or I want more tone and so to hear people really championing your product and your brand is it's so reaffirming of what you're doing so a user group or from that conference we've developed a user group that where we we use them for our beta testing so as we work on and release new product features and they're kind of our first user test group it makes them feel good it allows us to get the feedback that we need from them to better enhance the product as we release those new features and it makes them feel like they have a voice in our product roadmap so it's a win-win for our customers and us yes I think that's that's huge something what makes somebody an advocate is it's not just that yeah this product was useful to me I think that's that element of like it was useful to me but also this cost this company actually values my contribution to their growth and to their success and they do something about that like that shows me how they care about what I think him so Heidi assume you have some customer advocates like how do you look after those people and how do you work with them sure so we actually built a customer advisory team some of our most engaged customers who are contacting support a lot and showing that they were really excited about where our company was going and our product and how we're meeting their needs so we developed a team out of them and we run ideas by them remotely have them help guide our marketing other things like that but we also found that the best way to build relationships with our customer base was to get face time with them so we bring that team together at least annually to our headquarters to our user conference kind of like snapengage is doing and even in their own communities we meet them and get groups together and that allows us to spend an entire day together they can share their stories with each other they share their stories with us we give them an early insight into our product roadmap get their feedback and just further foster the idea that they're really invested in they're a part of farm logs we're also piloting a community discussion board with them so that they can keep in contact with each other throughout the year and our hope is that if that goes well we can expand that to all of our customers and at that point our customer advisory team will be our brand evangelists within the community to the rest of our customers I think there's a lot of crossover between advocates the kind of things you do to kind of create advocates and some of the things that will also end up increasing retention which is like to say involving those customers in the upcoming roadmap even if you're not pública done for everybody but the targeting people who are really invested in the product and sharing a bit more information with them makes them feel more connected but also more likely to be a longer-term customer because they kind of know where they're going with you so let's talk about retention a little bit and advocacy that combination does this in either of your companies is this something owned by the support side or by an accounts team or a success team well how does it look well for us we're a small team so the lines between those roles tend to get a bit blurred you know sometimes we were developing a customer success team but it's still in its early stages so they may not necessarily have the resources to jump in and help a client that's you know not on their list you know assigned clients so we we try to empower our support team to act in that role as client success manager when they need to and then well sometimes even get the original sales representative involved back in the process because they you know had that initial relationship with them it makes the customer feel special that we've brought them back in and it's just it's a better customer experience all around that's a great point I think something that we maybe we haven't made clear enough yet this kind of support funnel you can work for companies that are very small line companies that are very large the way you apply it will be very different obviously so I'm just gonna bring it back on the screen for a second so here's our funnel I think if we if we think about bringing it all together so there's the four stages of the customer support funnel and this diagram makes it look nice and clean and clear and of course reality refuses to be anywhere near as neat as that and there's no hard edges to any of this and when you look at a particular customer they could be at multiple stages at the same time they might be kind of circling around between onboarding and support trying to understand what they're doing you might have someone who goes all the way through to become an advocate who then leaves but you still got that same card company as a customer and you kind of need to take them back through onboarding again and you kind of lost an advocate that you have the opportunity to rebuild that so so this isn't a tool I guess for sorting people into buckets as much as there's a way to construct you're thinking about how do our customers use our product over the long term how do I know so Heidi how do you when you're talking to a customer or someone in your team's talking to a customer what kind of signals do they use to understand where that customer is if we're thinking about them in terms of this funnel so I think for us they're a really new customer and they're just getting educated on the product we would say they're primarily in the onboarding phase for sure if they've been using our product for quite a while and they're running into issues they understand how it's supposed to behave but you might have a bog or something like that that's preventing and the product from meeting their expectations which were properly set then they're definitely in the support phase but I would also say like as you mentioned it the the lines are very blurry and like in those cases where much working in retention mode as we are in support and always thinking about the next steps in making sure that we're prepared to give them such a great experience that they're going to you know be in in retention and in advocacy mode as well and we're studying them up sure there was long term successes with our product and moley I think you mentioned you've mentioned this to me at least the process you go through to kind of identify where are the gaps that we have in our in our system and what should we be doing can you tell us a little bit about that sure so we we tried to look again this is a framework so when we look at clients in our onboarding phase we try to find and really any phase of the funnel we try to identify commonalities where there may be again common questions coming up where support documentation may be missing or lagging behind and so it's making sure that we have the proper feedback loops in place internally for reporting that from the support team through to the product team and also to the sales team as well so they are setting those expectations that we've talked about some times and so making sure everybody's on the same page but when we look at each stage it's looking at the touch points within each stage so whether people are communicating through chat or phone or email or self-service documentation and trying to fill in those gaps yeah I think that's a that's a good model to think about you can do that even if you're a very small team you can identify like what can we do at our scale what do we have what do we have a firm ability to do so I guess that the big outcome is like your company works so hard to get people into the top part of that marketing funnel to get them to the point where their customers and especially the small team if like so much effort to get them that far and I guess what we want to do is make sure we're not letting those customers kind of fall out the bottom of the marketing funnel into a pond of customers and just like them to float around in there until they until they leave so even even if you're doing fantastic frontline support there can still be gaps like you can you know I don't see them so we want to I guess put forward the idea of using this customer support framework as a way to think about what might those gaps be where could out where could we weaken and of losing our customers or just not helping them as effectively as we can so let's move I think we have a few questions that we can answer and I'll just we'll just kind of run through those if you've got a question still if you're listening and you have a question there's probably still time to quickly jump on and tweet and help Scout with your question and we'll try and get to that to a first question who who owns the support funnel like he's the person that should be in charge of that experience hi do you want start them so I would say most things probably need a primary owner and at Harlem's that's me because I oversee customer experience at farm laughs but I think everybody plays a role in that and everybody needs to be ensuring that they're setting your customers up for a long-term success and so when you break things down and look at the different stages that Molly's broken down in her article you can kind of figure out who is playing into each stage and maybe give those different teams or different individuals key metrics that they should be monitoring on their side whether that's making sure that they're getting the right like qualified leads into the funnel at the top so that they have a great experience when they come on the bottom anything like that or you know improving usability of the product you know maybe that's something that the designer you back moans but I think everybody in the company should have some ownership of the different pieces and just since the customers overall experience with the company Maleeha but how about you sure I'm gonna echo the same thoughts I don't think any one individual or team owns the entire support funnel different teams and individuals may own different sections of each stage different parts of that process but there does need to be buy-in from the entire team so that everyone's on board and making sure that you know that the sale is not lost at the sale and that we're working just as hard to get those customers here's the advocacy stage as we did to get them that original sale yeah I think I think party you might have mentioned this earlier before the cold that I think the one thing that their funnel does is provide a little bit of kind of business rigor and measurability to a part of the business that's often not really measured and that can help that can help kind of make it more visible to other parts of the company so when you're talking about like there's ownership of in the designer youxi and there's ownership on this maybe on the south side having this kind of structure and he knows it point to you like you know what you consider this a customer support problem that it's actually more of a issue that we're having with the product or it's an issue that we're having with mismatched expectations coming in through marketing having that structure lay down probably makes that little bit easier it's a second question what do you think about the idea of retention teams Heidi I haven't thought about this a whole lot so I'm just gonna kind of wing this up the top of my head I apologize in advance I would say for me um I've never had a great experience going to a retention team when I've needed support because I wanted the company to care about me leading up to that point and I think for us what has worked for us at farm labs is focusing on retention at all different stages leading up to that point and making sure that we're setting folks up for success and if at the end of the day somebody I wants to leave we will double check and make sure that we did everything that we could to retain that customer but we're not going to hold our customers hostage respect them as human beings and know that if they're parting ways like there's probably a good reason for that but we did everything that we could as a business to meet their expectations and hopefully exceed their expectations so I don't I don't at this time see a place for retention teams in an armed organization I guess that's kind of my philosophy on it the top of my head yeah it's me it feels like it's a it's not a stopgap measure that's out there it's right at the end when the the problem has occurred so much earlier that sure you can probably save some of those customers but you know you're never gonna have the same impact that you would by going back and addressing the issues that are leading to people wanting to leave but I think in large companies it probably makes sense because the volumes are so high that they can they can kind of get win back some of those customers and then get them back into the kind of customer support funnel and try and make it a barracks for them but yeah generally speaking I think that's kind of a last-ditch effort let's moved on to another question do you have any tips actually this is a good one for you Molly you have any tips for really small teams who need to kind of handle lots of these phases all at once there's only a few people I'm sure so like I mentioned we are a relatively small team when you look at our customer base so we support a lot of customers and like I said we we don't we don't place rigid lines around roles everyone plays their part and everyone has common buy-in that every touch point with the customer is an opportunity to improve their experience with our brand and so as long as everyone is on the same page with that I don't think you know you need to necessarily assign stages to different departments and teams but as long as everybody has shared by in that the customer experience is first and foremost and you have those proper feedback loops in place and consistency in those touch points a team can work really well together a small team can work really well together in addressing all customer concerns and getting them through that funnel that's a good point that's me so I in a previous job I was the support department to start with and then it grew over time and I think the thing that I had to do was just constantly renegotiate with myself and then with my small team like what can we do and what can't we do and one of the benefits of being really small is that yeah you can you can just go above and beyond for a customer because of such represents a small amount of effort compared to the wind that you get especially when you're trying to get as many customers as you can and you have you have a person there's not many policies there's probably nothing to stop you from just going no I'm just gonna do it for you even though we wouldn't usually do this for all our customers because we can't scale it up to hundreds of people but for five people if we go and do a little bit extra and do that for them so I think you have benefits of being really small you know that you have a lot more flexibility bugs yeah there are some things you just won't be able to do until you're a bigger company and so as long as everyone's clear about that and you're kind of like yeah that's not something we can do for me this is what we can do I think you're successful okay here's a question for Heidi so any tips for relaying user experience and pain points back to product teams and really initiating those feedback loops and strength you know how would you recommend someone set that up so for us we rely a lot on data I think we and support tend to be very like qualitative data driven we've hear comments a lot and we feel the pain of our users were typically pretty empathetic people but I think when it comes to throwing that information and over the fence to a product team or an engineering team those words tend to be much more data-driven and so we've had to figure out ways to kind of track those issues and so we can say you know 23% of our support requests last week were related to this usability issue and you know we'll share that in reports that we send out every single week and then we kind of back up that data with the more qualitative data that we also have so we'll you know include like a user story about it or if somebody was so upset about a usability issue that and it colored their customer satisfaction rating like they might say oh the support was amazing that I'm so mad about the experience that I'm having your product that you know XYZ will include that to kind of back up the data that we were we're seeing so that other folks are still feeling the user pain but they can also make really sound business data driven decisions like they would in any other part of the business so it's kind of a combination of the data and then putting a story around the data that helps people understand it Molly I think you mentioned something about this to me or any bit are there specific techniques for motivating those advocates that you've kind of generated to really go out and actually you know get other people on board like how do you encourage them to do something that's directly helpful to you that's a little tricky you don't want to necessarily go ask somebody to be selling your brand so one thing that we're actually testing out right now is a sort of referral program with our sales team and and also our customer six best team we have a lot of clients who come in wanting to talk to somebody who's used our software for a while so they can you know even in similar verticals so that they can gather first-hand experiences of how it's benefiting them so we're trying to put together lists of clients who we have classified as advocates so that they can and actually reach out to them so that other kind we can put them in touch with other clients who may be or other prospects who may be in our sales cycle and that helps them feel validated as a customer that we value their opinion enough to have them talk to one of our prospects and it helps our prospects connects with our clients as well that's a great idea Heidi have you done anything in terms of helping advocates help you I would say we have in a couple of ways what we've done is kind of create meetups in in areas where our customers who are our big advocates where they live and you know well he went on a road show this summer and we like went on a tour and stacked a bunch of our different customers businesses and had luncheons there they got to share our information about how they run their business and how they are our software but it was also an opportunity for us to make more connections the folks in the community and so they were really kind of doing the selling at those events but then we were there to kind of piggyback on that and build relationships and and come back and have a meaningful start to have relationship with them yeah I wonder if the something you can do is just telling your advocates like what is the most useful thing that they could do because you we used to get this a lot and I think you got this with helps go to these people who are who love health care and want to be helpful and like I tell everyone about it and sometimes just having specific things that they can do you so that you can say like you know what would be super helpful as if we can use you as a reference for other people in your industry like if you could if you could give us permission to be able to say hey go and talk to this guy because he uses help scout and he's in your area and gathering that permission that can be helpful or in other cases it might be we would love you to do a customer story with us so that we have something we can put on the website I think maybe the answer is often just making sure that you know what is actually going to be useful to you and so for the people who do want to help you give them something that's going to be effective because it's nice to have advocates and whatever they do is obviously fantastic for the ones who actually genuinely want to help you giving them specific things to do that they will enjoy and that will be useful to you too is super powerful okay let's see I think we've got one more question here yes Molly you mentioned customer success reviews and I think Heidi you're 10 do that too what does that actually look like how is it structured so for us it depends on the level of client they are and what plan level they are with us because again we can't do you know quarterly success reviews with every single one of our client so we in those top tier categories we have assigned client success managers who depending where they fall in that list they may get quarterly reviews with their success managers they may get annual reviews so we kind of goes through a classification system there with regular touch points and then also within our tool we have a tagging program where if a customer's logged things for their account we can automatically display a chat window that automatically connects them with their assigned Account Manager so they're not having to be transferred through our system and having to explain what they're looking for to multiple people hiding anything in terms of reviews for your customers so the book of the reviews that we do for our customers are actually happening in account management which is a team that is separate from our customer success team we're very purposeful about that just because we don't want our customer support or our education team to be responsible for revenue we want to solely exist it's to help our customers be successful their product neck count management actually lives under our sales organization that said we do continually review how how successful customers are with the education that we're providing them and we give them opportunities to evaluate the training that they received from the customer success team and additionally I mentioned the trends that we see in customer support if we've paying customers who are continually not understanding how to use certain features that is really a reflection of customer success training and we have to go back and realign customer expectations and figure out how we can better set our customers up for success starting with training the very beginning in the onboarding phase tested alright that's the end of our of our chat they're just final words from from both of you probably would you encourage people to use a customer support funnel and how should they start yeah absolutely I would encourage everyone to use a support funnel but as it relates to your business every business is going to have a different application for it depending on size or vertical your types of customers your product so don't use it as a rigid structure I guess would be my advice rather use it as a framework for how you can better approach and fill in gaps and transitions within your customer support lifecycle stages I would really just echo what what Molly said I think the most exciting part the funnel for me is providing a framework for conversations across teams especially and I think in terms of identifying gaps that you might start with I always start by looking at support tickets and figuring out where those gaps are coming from and then taking that back and kind of mapping it to the support funnel is a really great place so I think to start if you wanted to get started on something like this fantastic I think I think this is a really useful tool for people to use and again if you want to read more about how its applied you can go over back to the help Scout blog and read my ways article on the customer support funnel there I thank everybody for attending today and for listening in and for asking questions the recording of this talk will be available and make that available to you so if you want to share that with anybody or if you had something that missed it please come back and grab it there thank you to Heidi and to Molly for their time and efforts here explaining the customer support funnel with me and next month Cub Scouts gonna be doing another webinar we're going to be talking about switching helpdesk so if you're interested in that keep an eye on the hub Scout blog and Twitter feed and emails and we will let you know about that one and otherwise have a great day thank you so much thank you thank you