Editor’s Note: We decided to work with a Talent & People Ops consultant, Mary, to help us make these hires. As a relevant consideration when deciding to hire, we felt we could make these hires without external support. But we wanted to move fast without sacrificing time on sales or Tuff’s client growth and decided to lean on someone who has led this process time and time again.

This post is also written by Mary so you’ll notice she speaks about ‘Tuff’ in a different way than we typically do on our blog.

Because of the nature of Tuff’s work, they spend a lot of time thinking about numbers. What is the conversion rate? What are our strongest sources? What can we do better next time?

When it comes to hiring, you can apply a similar lense. For example, you can also think about candidates being at the top of the funnel, middle of the funnel, and bottom of the funnel.

In February, we opened up two roles on the Tuff team:

• SEO Strategist
• Growth Marketer

For the SEO Strategist role, we were looking for a channel specialist who could help Tuff’s clients increase their organic reach. They work with a diverse set of clients and corresponding business models so they needed someone who has broad SEO experience (rather than specializing in local SEO) and who is comfortable adapting quickly.

For the Growth Marketer role, we were looking for more of a marketing generalist. At Tuff, a Growth Marketer partners closely with their clients to understand the core of their business, their goals outside of marketing, and then get really specific on how Tuff can help drive growth. They needed someone comfortable working closely with clients but in a more generalist role there is flexibility in how they achieve the goals depending on their background.

Here’s what we learned

• Specialist vs. Generalist: There is a difference between hiring for a Specialist (SEO Strategist) vs. a Generalist (Growth Marketer). The SEO Strategist role took 47 days to fill from job posted to offer letter signed. We had a more tailored skill set we were looking for. The Growth Marketer role took 29 days to fill from job posted to offer letter signed. We had clear outcomes we wanted this person to achieve and competencies we were evaluating for but there was room for more diversity in their background (i.e. content, paid search, paid social, etc.).
• Process: Before these hires, Tuff had 3 full time team members. Now, they are at 5. We learned a few lessons about the process, specifically how much to involve team members who also had a lot on their plate in terms of client work. It was important for us to create a Scorecard (more below) at the start of the process to have clear and explicit alignment on the outcomes they needed these team members to be responsible for.
• Sources: We spent $553.34 on LinkedIn. In the end, the two hires came from alternate sources. We break it down more below. We would still spend the money on LinkedIn as it accounted for 80% of the applications and 50% of the interviews. Just not eventual hires.
• Employer Branding: In Tuff’s client work, they are very transparent and open. It’s a value I came to recognize in their work and it opened up doors when it came to employer branding and helping qualify candidates. We ramped up these efforts on LinkedIn when we opened up the two roles, posting about their company retreat that happened while we were interviewing and tagging the Tuff team in hiring posts so people could check out their profiles before applying. The person we hired for the Growth Marketer role was a connection of the Founder of Tuff on LinkedIn.

Specialist vs. Generalist

We posted the role for SEO Strategist using Workable, on February 6.

Tuff’s new SEO Strategist, Derek, signed his offer letter on March 24. This hire took us 48 days from posting to offer letter signed.

We break down the interview process in more detail below (i.e. what is a topgrade interview?) but here’s a breakdown of our funnel metrics:

Here are a few of our conversion rates we found interesting:

• Applications to phone screen: 5.45%
• Phone Screen to Topgrade Interview: 18.75%
• Applications to Hire: 0.17%

Growth Marketer

We posted the Growth Marketer role on February 19th.

Tuff’s newest Growth Marketer, John, signed his offer letter March 18. This hire took us 29 days from posting to offer letter signed.

Here’s a breakdown of our funnel metrics:

And, here are a few of our conversion rates we found interesting:

• Applications to phone screen: 3.01%
• Phone Screen to Topgrade Interview: 30.76%
• Applications to Hire: 0.23%

Let’s compare some of these metrics for the two roles:

As you can see, the biggest difference is in the ‘Phone Screen to Topgrade Interview’ conversion rate.

People interviewing for the SEO Strategist role had a lower chance of moving on from the Phone Screen to the next step of the interview process. We did considerably more phone screens for SEO Strategist (32 phone screens) than for the Growth Marketer role (13 phone screens).

In hindsight, this makes sense based on our experience hiring for a Specialist. There are so many areas of expertise when it comes to SEO. We had a fairly specific skill set we were looking for so as we learned more about the candidate’s background and the type of work they were looking to do, disqualifying a candidate or moving them forward felt clear.

Tuff’s interview process:

Step 1: Create a Scorecard

The Scorecard is the foundation of the interview process we held. It is what we used to evaluate candidates at every step of the funnel. By spending an extra 15-20 minutes upfront at the beginning of the interview process, the Scorecard helps lead to a speedier process, better alignment on the team which leads to better hires, and helps mitigate bias by keeping us evaluating on the objective outcomes and skills we needed these hires to achieve and come in with.

The Scorecards we used for both roles had the same four parts:

• Mission – Why does this role exist?
• Outcomes – What will this person be responsible for?
• Hierarchy of needs – What is need to have vs. nice to have?
• Competencies – What characteristics are most important?

Step 2: Post the job!

While this might seem like the first step, it is so important to have clear alignment from the team that it comes after creating the Scorecard. We used Workable as our Applicant Tracking System for a few reasons. As a small (but mighty!) team, Workable was at a good price point for Tuff and offers a 14-day trial that we used to make sure Workable was the right system for us. Workable also posts your job for free on a number of other job boards like remote.co, where our SEO Strategist hire initially spotted the role.

Step 3: Create Interview Plan

Once we had the Scorecards filled in and the job posted, we moved ahead to clarify the interview process and each team member’s role in evaluating candidates.

Step 4: Phone Screens

Goal: Understand motivations and ability to contribute to Tuff client’s + culture. I held the resume and phone screens to help save the Tuff team time by qualifying candidates at the early stage.

Here are the questions we asked for the SEO Strategist phone screens:

1. What are your career goals? What would your ideal role look like in the next 2-3 years?
2. What are you really good at when it comes to SEO?
3. What are 1-2 areas you think you could improve?
4. Tell me about the most structured and then least structured workplace you’ve been a part of. How did you feel about them?
5. Think of someone you have worked really well with in the past. What characteristics, values, or skills did you learn from them and try to replicate?

Step 5: Topgrade Interviews

Goal: Uncover the patterns of somebody’s career history to match with the scorecard.

For candidates who made it through the Phone Screen, we had them speak with the Founder of Tuff, Ellen, next. We asked the following five questions for each job on the candidates resume, beginning with the earliest and working your way forward to the present day. Follow up questions and curiosity are key to keeping this interview conversational.

1. What were you hired to do?
2. What 2-3 accomplishments are you most proud of?
3. What were some low points during that job?
4. Who were the people you worked with? Specifically:
   1. Your manager. What was it like working with them? What would they tell me were your biggest strengths and areas for improvement?
   2. Your team. What did it look like? What worked well? What was challenging?
5. Why did you leave?

Step 6: Focus Interviews

Goal: Assess the competencies we’ve agreed are important for success in the role.

As you may have noticed on our funnel metric breakdowns above, we skipped the Focus Interview at times to prioritize speed. These interviews were assigned to Chris and Nate, the other two existing team members at Tuff. These interviews were focused on competencies and attributes the team had identified were important for the roles and culture they’re building at Tuff.

Step 7: Project

Goal: Get a more in-depth understanding of the candidate’s skills.

Here’s the project we shared with our Growth Marketer candidates:

We didn’t want the project to be too time consuming so set the expectation to spend no more than 3 hours on the project. P.S. Snacks is also not a client of Tuff. We wanted to make sure we weren’t asking someone to do work that a Tuff team member would be paid for. So, this is an example of work they’d be doing if they joined the team but it isn’t work Tuff would gain monetary value from.

Step 8: Hire 🎉

We did it! Through this process, we were able to find and get to know two great candidates who have now joined the Tuff team.

Sources

Tuff’s new team members came from these two sources:

The person we hired for the Growth Marketer role was a LinkedIn connection of the Founder of Tuff. He reached out to Ellen after spotting the role and we entered him into the interview process, uploading his resume into our Applicant Tracking System.

The person we hired for the SEO Strategist role applied through remote.co.

For more context on what sources were stronger for us, here are two charts below. The first shows Applications by source – you can see LinkedIn brought in the majority of our applications.

This chart shows Interviews by source. These are the people who after we screened their resume, we decided to talk to. Again, LinkedIn is at the top of the list.

Conclusion

I learned so much from the Tuff team while helping them hire for these roles. As a growth marketing agency, the team has a natural inclination for numbers and conversion rates that made our collaboration stronger and more successful.

If you have any questions or would like context on how to apply this process to your team and hiring, you can find me at Intention Consulting. Thank you team Tuff for welcoming me aboard for these hires, and John and Derek, best of luck!

Mary Jantsch

Mary is a growth marketer at Tuff. She specializes in Customer Experience, Email Strategy, Copywriting and Chat. She also runs on coffee and peanut butter pretzels.

The post From 1,018 Applications to 2 New Tuff Team Members appeared first on Tuff.

It’s time for end of the quarter reflection. Here at Tuff, we love the transition from one quarter to the next.

It’s a chance to zoom out and take a higher level view of how we’ve been doing on Tuff’s internal goals as well as how we’re performing for clients. We always try to go into the quarter with an integrated plan for our clients and intention on how campaigns, landing pages, emails and more will all work together.

The end of quarter reflection is a chance for us to take a step back and learn from the past few months. And, use those learnings to plan for the next.

We’ll cover:

• Best Reads
• Best Performing Facebook ads
• Best of PPC
• Best Tuff Growth Experiment
• Best Tools
• Best Opinion
• Best Voices on Twitter
• Best Emoji
• Best Spotify Playlist

We also find we get more out of our learnings if we share them with others. So, with Q1 behind us, here’s the best of 2019 at Tuff…so far!

Best Reads

“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” — Isaac Newton.

We spend a lot of time reading about growth and learning from the experiments of others. We’re so grateful for the transparency of other agencies and marketers so we always try to publish learnings from our own experiements as well. Here’re the articles we kept coming back to this quarter:

Retargeting: What is it and how can you use it effectively
When done well, retargeting is an incredibly powerful tool for acquisition and getting the best ROI. We love retargeting and how the team at Bell Curve breaks down retargeting with an easy to understand and easy to apply approach.

The true impact of conversion rate optimization and why it matters to you
We see conversion rate optimizations as plugging the holes of a leaky bucket. By taking the time to discover and fix the holes, you’re going to be more efficient and get the most out of your paid acquisition efforts. In Grace’s words “An uplift of even a 1 percent improvement by channel, device, visitor type at each step of the site journey blend to unveil huge uplifts in both sales and revenue.”

How we Increased Traffic by 1034% in One Week by improving Existing Content (Case Study)
Right off the bat, that stat is jaw dropping. We love this resource because it rings true to something we’ve learned about growth marketing: it’s not always about reinventing the wheel. Sometimes, you’ll get the biggest bang for your buck by making improvements to what you already have spent time and resource on.

ToFu, MoFu & BoFu: Serving Up The Right Content for Lead Nurturing
Not a vegetarian recipe. We like this breakdown and awareness of user intent and treating parts of the sales funnel differently. For automating distribution of your lead nurturing content, we recommend Yet Another Mail Merge.

The 30-Minute PPC Audit Anyone Can Do
Okay, we snuck in one of our own articles. As the quarter wraps up, we take the time to look back at each of our clients PPC campaigns and learn what worked and what didn’t. If you’re running PPC or paid social campaigns, we highly recommend taking a look back to make small, sustainable improvements based on your learnings.

Best Performing Facebook ads

#1

• Type of Ad: Facebook Messenger Campaign
• Audience: Website Retargeting
• Messages: 34
• Cost Per Message: $3.14

#2

• Type of Ad: Instagram Story – Giveaway
• Audience: Watch Enthusiasts
• Clicks: 5,731
• CPC: $0.12
• Conversion Rate: 40%

#3

• Type of Ad: Retargeting
• Audience: Lookalike + Healthy Lifestyles, excluding current customers
• Clicks: 3, 149
• CPC: $0.79

Best of PPC

From January through March we ran 467 PPC campaigns for our clients. Looking back, these campaigns contributed to:

• $1,012,765 managed
• 1,106,538 clicks
• 8,670 leads

Best Tools

Adios.ai
Their description: Adiós brings your emails into your inbox just 3 times a day, so you can get sh*t done.
Our breakdown: Are you tied to your inbox? Or, find yourself context switching when you’re trying to deep dive into an account or campaign? Ellen has been using Adios this quarter to eliminate multi-tasking.

Workflowy
Their description: WorkFlowy is a single document that can contain infinite documents inside it. It’s a more powerful, easier way to organize all the information in your life.
Our breakdown: You might notice a theme here with productivity. By using a fractal document format, Workflowy lets you zoom in or out on a topic. You can choose if you want to go deep on a topic or stay at the surface level.

Mixmax
Their description: Gmail-based productivity app for customer-facing teams.
Our breakdown: We’re loving Mixmax for a number of reasons. As we mentioned above in the ‘Best Tuff Growth Experiment’ we’ve been trying our hand out at cold email outreach. Mixmax helps us understand our open and clickthrough rate and refine our copy. It also connects to our calendar and makes it easy for potential clients to schedule a meeting with us directly from the email we send them.

Best Opinion

We love Mayur’s message here: growth isn’t a hack. This is something we talk about quite a lot internally and try our best to instill in our clients. There is no secret for skyrocketing overnight growth.

It doesn’t exist.

A little controversial, perhaps, coming from a growth team. But, we’re sick and tired of the myth that you can flip a few switches and instantly acquire thousands of new users.

Scaling growth is hard. You need to find the right team who can deliver what is needed on a business level. Not, just churn out as many ads as possible. Not ‘hack’.

At Tuff, we reflect that in our pricing. It’s common for agencies to bill on a percentage of ad spend. The problem with this is that it leads to prioritizing spend first instead of focusing on ROI.

Same with hourly rates, they weigh massively in favor of the agency to spend as much time on a project as they can.

We believe the future of growth teams is in being value drivers, rather than service providers. So, we price differently – not hourly, not a percentage of spend. We price on brainpower, a monthly agreement based on our level of partnership.

The most important thing to us is to increase your ROI so we’ll quickly kill an experiment if we’re not seeing the results we want.

Best Voices on Twitter

Asia Matos:
I help #SaaS companies & #startup founders with #marketing & #growth. CEO & Founder of DemandMaven. Previously at two 10x startups. GIF game strong 💪

Alfred Lua:
Product marketer @buffer @bufferanalyze | 🏊🏻🚴🏻🏃🏻

Jennifer Kim:
All things Talent, building better startups, & future of work. Ex-Head of People/early employee @Lever, now planning next chapter ✨

Katelyn Bourgoin:
3X founder turned growth geek. Seen in @Forbes, @Inc, @CTV & more. I help product teams figure out who their best customers are and what triggers them to buy 👓

Best Emoji

✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨

Our team turned to the ‘sparkles’ emoji more than once or twice this quarter. With spring on it’s way, this emoji helped us invoke a bright and shiny feeling in our Facebook ad copy and beyond.

Best Spotify Playlist

We’ve been loving the ‘Loved by Ellen‘ playlist the past few weeks. Not to be confused with Ellen from Tuff, curated by Ellen DeGeneres.

What’s on your ‘Best of’ list?

What’s on your ‘best of’ list for your end of quarter reflection? Before diving head first into Q2, we strongly recommend taking a few minutes to look back at your metrics and learnings from Q1. What makes the list? And, just as importantly, what doesn’t?

If you’re looking to add a decreased cost per acquisition to your end of quarter reflection in Q2, give us a shout. We’d love to get to know you, your company, your goals, and schedule a free growth strategy session with our team.

Mary Jantsch

Mary is a growth marketer at Tuff. She specializes in Customer Experience, Email Strategy, Copywriting and Chat. She also runs on coffee and peanut butter pretzels.

The post The Best of 2019…So Far appeared first on Tuff.

It’s pretty dang hard to get around the internet these days without hearing about chatbots and ‘the future of AI’. It’s a hot topic and something we’re pretty excited about.

I’m pretty strict about what I subscribe to and here is my inbox filtering for AI (so not including emails using chatbot specifically).

We’ve been learning more about what customers need and expect from their online experience, and helping clients run a chatbot test to see how the channel converts. It can serve as a great user acquisition channel, depending on your target audience.

In this post, we’ll briefly cover what opportunities a chatbot can help you take advantage. But, the true intention is to give you a framework and template for running a chatbot test on your own to see if it works well for your customers as well as employees.

Tell me more about chatbots…

Chatbots are Artificial Intelligence (AI) programs that can process and respond to simple queries from your audience like an interactive FAQ. You’ve seen them across the internet, often in the bottom right corner of a web page. It looks similar to live chat but with programmed data on the other end.

When a company is utilizing a chatbot, they’ve taken the time to teach the chatbot the answers to questions they expect a customer to ask.

It works a bit like a flow chart:

Examples of companies running chatbots…

• Duolingo uses chatbots inside their language teaching app and allows users to practice conversation by simulating text exchanges. [Learn more about the bot here]
• Apartment Ocean is a chatbot built to help real estate agents qualify leads and learn more about potential customers. [Learn more about the bot here]
• Pizza Hut allows people to order pizzas and reorder their favorites via a Facebook messenger chatbot. [Test out their bot here]
• Casper, a mattress company, has a purely promotional bot that is active from 11pm to 5am to ‘keep you company when you just can’t fall asleep’. While it can chat on many topics from Stranger Things to Seinfeld, it also takes the opportunity to plug their mattresses from time to time. [Learn more about the bot here]

Why should I run a chatbot test?

Do you ask customers to fill out a form?
Chatbots have helped create a shift toward something being coined as ‘conversational marketing’. You can use chatbots to replace long forms with more intuitive and natural conversations. You can set up a bot to ask those same qualifying leads your forms are searching for. Depending on the potential customer’s answers, the chatbot will send them through the right flow.

Looking to help your sales agents save time and close more leads?
A chatbot can automatically qualify leads and get them to the right agents. As research from InsideSales.com and the Harvard Business Review shows, even if you wait just five minutes to respond after a lead first reaches out, there’s a 10x decrease in your odds of actually getting in touch with that lead. After 10 minutes, there’s a 400% decrease in your odds of qualifying that lead. By automating this crucial step, your chatbot can quickly disqualify leads and get the most promising ones quickly to your agents.

Want to improve your customer experience?
There’s never going to be a future where Artificial Intelligence totally takes over because humans and chatbots are good at different things. Leaning on our strengths and the strengths of chatbots can make for a power team. When a chatbot pilot program was initiated in a telco company, it could handle 82% of common queries in customer service. After 5 weeks of tweaking, analyzing, and optimizing by human agents, its success increased to 88%, according to Accenture.

Let’s check out the data

In the 2018 State of Chatbots study from Drift and friends, they surveyed over 1,000 internet users in the United States and made sure to match their audience to represent the U.S. adult online population. Here’s what the group had to say about their current online experiences:

In addition to helping people get quicker answers, you can use the chatbot data to make changes to your website and try to eliminate the root cause of the most frequently asked questions.

Do you have customers spanning multiple generations?: One preconceived notion I had about chatbots is that they were better suited for companies with younger target audiences. I was excited to find data saying quite the opposite. In that same 2018 State of Chatbots Study, Drift found that Baby Boomers (age 55+) were 24% more likely than Millennials (age 18-34) to expect benefits from chatbots in five of the nine following categories:

I’m in. How do I run a chatbot test?…

We feel really great about the future of chatbots and their ability to improve customer experience and to deliver higher quality leads. That being said, before jumping in with both feet we suggest running a chatbot test to validate or invalidate whether it works well for customers and team.

We’ve organized a super simple experiment to help sales teams run a chatbot test and see if it could work for them:

• Step 1: Develop a single hypothesis about what the chatbot will deliver
• Step 2: Explicitly Identify the metric that will help you validate or invalidate your hypothesis
• Step 3: Get benchmark data for that metric. You may be able to pull this from your current process or will need to build time into your experiment to capture it.
• Step 4: Test chatbot
• Step 5: Compare the two data sets to see if your hypothesis is valid or invalid.

Here is an example chatbot test:

• Step 1 – Hypothesis: Implementing a chatbot will decrease the amount of time it takes to make first contact with a lead.
• Step 2 – Metric: Hours from form filled to first contact.
• Step 3 – Benchmark data: Depending on the size of your sales team, pull the data from at least 10% of your sales agents. If you are already measuring this metric, awesome! Just pull it and proceed to Step 4. If not, spend 10 days (without the agents’ knowledge) measuring this.
• Step 4 – Test: There are a number of chatbot solutions out there. We recommend Intercom’s 14-day free trial because it’s a lean and easy way to get started and they have great analytics. Have the same agents you used for benchmark data spend 10 days using Intercom’s chatbot to qualify and make initial contact with leads.
• Step 5 – Compare: In a spreadsheet, take the data from your two sets of 10 days and compare your metric, ‘hours from form filled to first contact’. Which one has a lower average? Does one have a better conversion rate?

Continued reading about Chatbots:

• How Chatbots are Revolutionizing the Sales Process
• The Future of Self-Service
• The 2018 State of Chatbots Report
• How to Use Chatbots to Push Customers Down the Sales Funnels
• Announcing Operator: The Bot For Better Customer Experiences

Ready to run a chatbot test?

If you’re interested in testing out a chatbot for your sales, customer success, or customer support team, we hope this experiment helps. We’re also always available to talk through ideas and implement an experiment tailored to your team and goals. Check out a

with Tuff.

Mary Jantsch

Mary is a growth marketer at Tuff. She specializes in Customer Experience, Email Strategy, Copywriting and Chat. She also runs on coffee and peanut butter pretzels.

The post A Step-by-Step Guide for Running a Chatbot Test in 2019 appeared first on Tuff.

Better customer experience is a key growth advantage. In order to retain the customers you’ve worked so hard to acquire, you have to deliver.

With great power, comes great responsibility. Whether you want to attribute that quote to Voltaire or Peter Parker’s uncle in Spiderman, it’s true for anyone delivering customer support or working directly with customers.

Step 1 to building any product, agency, service, marketplace, etc., you need customers. You wouldn’t be able to offer a product or service without them. The people on your team who interact day-to-day with your customers can’t be placed in a silo where their only responsibility is to hit reply and send on customer queries. If this sounds like your customer support team now, you’re going to lose these customers.

A Marketing and Support partnership is incredibly powerful for a number of reasons. Below, we have a few detailed out with support from Kevan Lee, the Director of Marketing at Buffer and Dani Arnold, the former Director of Support at OpenTable.

#1: Support Should Inform Content Strategy

“In terms of partnership and influence, there are a couple ways where we’ve experienced a really great connection between marketing and support. The first is with knowledge share. For us, this comes in many forms, perhaps the most common is support informing the types of content we write about. We want to write content that solves problems for users, and our support team knows those problems better than anyone.” 

— Kevan Lee, Director of Marketing at Buffer

You support team is inundated on a daily basis with questions from customers. Use this to your advantage by implementing process for your support team to share these questions with your marketing team. This will make for the best content because your customer team has already validated that your customers are on the search for it. Creating useful information for your customers is a great experience but it also helps with organic search rankings if your customers are already searching for this information.

Trello is a great resource where your marketing and support teams can create a shared board and track the questions coming in. For example, Buffer is a tool that allows you to schedule social media posts across multiple networks with one click. Imagine the support team kept getting the question ‘How often should I post?’ alongside questions about setting up the schedule. By creating a card in Trello and tracking the number of times this question comes up and linking to the customer support email, the marketing and content team could then use this as a resource once they start writing.

#2: Collaborate on Creating and Updating Customer Personas

Both the marketing and customer support team can benefit from building customer personas. Both teams gather data and feedback from customers and can build profiles that help the company define its audience. Where the marketing team is likely to lean on data and analytics from tools like Google Analytics and Facebook Ads, the customer support team can supplement these customer data points with qualitative information — they can put a voice to the numbers.

At Tuff, when we start working with a new client to help them with customer acquisition, our first step is to do a deep dive into their support channels and communication to learn more about their current customers. What is the first question someone asks in live chat? What words do they use to describe their problems? How technologically advanced are they? These questions are important and your support team has all the information you need to answer these questions.

When you create customer personas, you can’t just share it once and set it aside. To continue using it as a resource, work the language into your meetings and conversations. A customer persona is represented by one person, say “Sally” to represent a larger customer base. When your customer support team is starting to get an influx of questions from “Sally” customers, they can let the marketing team know which then will let them better target “Sally”.

#3: Share Responsibility of Social Media Channels

“The second way to partner is with shared responsibilities. At Buffer, marketing and support share a social media engagement inbox; marketing gains a ton from the interactions that the support team has on social media posts, blog content, etc., and we’re able to form connections around a common part of both our jobs.”

 — Kevan Lee, Director of Marketing at Buffer

Using social media as a two way street, rather than a megaphone, can improve customer retention. A natural part of your marketing teams content strategy is going to be sharing that content on social media. You can’t just put your content out there and walk away, you need to be there to engage and discuss any questions or thoughts. Your content and social strategy will get better when you’re listening to qualitative the reactions people have to them rather than just ‘clicks’, ‘likes’, ‘shares’, etc.

By sharing social media responsibilities and regularly discussing this strategy, your support team can inform your marketing team on the reactions certain content is getting as well as provide feedback on how to improve.

#4: Supercharge Your Sales Cycle With Quick Feedback

“It’s really about shifting from “the cost center” to being seen as a partner. [Our support team] started reporting on other teams’ impact on our volume internally to help us with forecasting. But when we started to notice trends in regions, or specific sales reps or products, we decided to expand that reporting, we offered suggestions based on what we heard from the customers directly. This bloomed into quarterly feedback sessions, and the more facetime my team had with other areas of the company, it became easier to have them included and thought of as projects were developing rather than afterthoughts and na-sayers.” 

— Dani Arnold, former Director of Support at OpenTable

Once you’ve gained a new customer, moving forward, the majority of their interactions with your team are going to be with the customer support or success team. Depending on how your company acquires customers, their first questions as a new customer are a huge opportunity. If they talked to a sales agent on the phone, what questions went unanswered? If they signed up from a Facebook ad, what made them click? What is the problem your product or service is helping them solve?

Having your marketing and support teams working closely together, brings these questions to top of mind. If your support team is aware of the marketing teams goals, they can bring this into their work and how they communicate and learn from customers.

#5: Work Together on New Product or Feature Releases

The support team is there to do just that, support. It’s their job to be prepared for an influx of customer questions, remain flexible, and support customers.

At the same time, you can be strategic with when your marketing team releases a big announcement or launches a new feature or product. Maybe your support team is typically at full capacity on Thursday mornings. Depending on their weekend coverage, Monday morning might be better than Friday afternoon.

Whoever is managing any announcement to your customers from the marketing team, needs to include meeting with the support manager a number of times in the process. While timing of the announcement is a helpful to partner on, there are also a number of other areas to cover: what language do customer typically use when talking about this? What other questions might come up from announcing this that we can answer pro-actively, etc. It will also let your support team do some work in advance and have answer to expected questions already written up and ready to go. This is a great way to wow your customers.

Over to you…

Consistency when interacting with a company is a great way to promote an exceptional customer experience. By breaking down silos between teams and encouraging close collaboration, you’ll get this. If this isn’t happening already, have a member of your marketing and support team meet on a bi-weekly basis and start practicing these 5 tactics.

How does your marketing and customer support team work together? What’d we miss?

Mary Jantsch

Mary is a growth marketer at Tuff. She specializes in Customer Experience, Email Strategy, Copywriting and Chat. She also runs on coffee and peanut butter pretzels.

The post 5 Ways Your Support and Marketing Teams Can Work Together For a Better Customer Experience appeared first on Tuff.

What is customer retention and why should I care? Most people are familiar with the leaky bucket metaphor.

You have your trusty bucket that you’re rapidly filling with a hose. Things are going well, the bucket is filling up with water, until you start to notice the water is staying at the same level.

Then, all of a sudden, you’re losing water. Upon inspection, there are holes in the bottom and sides of the bucket. You might try to plug one of the holes with your finger, or, wrap a rag around the bucket but no matter what you do, the water escapes.

This is customer retention.

Or, rather, the relationship between marketing and customer retention gone wrong. Too often, companies are more concerned with acquiring customers and rapidly filling the bucket that they overlook what happens when a prospect becomes a customer. It’s the responsibility of everyone at the company to complement acquisition with retention.

To go further than metaphors, Bain & Company has found that “a 5% increase in customer retention can increase a company’s profitability by 75%”.

In the following section, we’ll share proven strategies we’ve utilized at Tuff and in past positions to increase customer retention and earn the right to growth.

How to improve customer retention

1. Know your target customer like the back of your hand

When you’re working day and night on a product or have your website imprinted on your brain, it can be easy to slip into subjective decisions and designs. You might prefer a certain font or color scheme and think it’s the right choice because it looks better to you. Sometimes, if your customer base is similar to yourself, this can work out okay. However, it’s a big risk.

It’s incredibly important to understand your customer(s) and the job they’re looking to have done. There is an unconscious bias called implicit egotism that explains a tendency of people to prefer things where they have a self-association. For example, if you have testimonials on your website, it’s important the people you have selected to highlight resemble your ideal customers. In order to do this, you need to take the time to identify your target customer and craft an experience tailored to them.

2. Explicitly communicate how you solve their problem

Buffer: “Fully manage all of your social media accounts in one place. No more wasting time, no more logging into multiple social accounts.” 

Evernote: “Organize your work and declutter your life. Collect everything that matters in one place and find it when you need it, fast.”

Mailchimp: “Give your customers a clear call to action. With MailChimp, you can create beautiful landing pages that make it easy for people to buy your products or join your list.” 

These three companies are leaders in their respective industries. Visiting their home pages, you can quickly scan and find these statements. In all three instances, they’re explicitly speaking to the problem a potential customer might have. With Buffer ‘no more wasting time’, with Evernote ‘declutter your life’, and with Mailchimp ‘make it easy for people to buy your products’. 

Our friends over at Buffer have written more on this in a post called ‘People Don’t Buy Products, They Buy Better Versions of Themselves’. 

3. Education > Sales

Your success is tied to your customer’s success. A relevant business metric here is Lifetime Value (LTV). The deeper a customer’s work depends on your service or product, the less likely they are to leave you. There’s a saying that ‘you shouldn’t celebrate a product update, celebrate adoption’. And this, really, comes down to communication and education. Do you have targeted in-app messages? What is your onboarding email series like? When is the last time you ran a survey to learn more about your customer’s needs?

4. Prioritize reducing friction over quick customer support

Education and LTV are much easier when you are building and improving a product to increase the core value to your customers. There are a number of companies that have had success through ‘surprise and delight’ gestures. These tend to get more coverage on blogs and in the news and can have a more viral tendency. According to research from Dixon, Toman, and DeLisi published in The Effortless Experience, the true driver of customer retention and loyalty is the ease of getting a problem solved. Is it extremely clear how a customer can get in touch with your support team? Are you letting them pick the support channel that works best for them or forcing them into a channel you’ve decided is best? 

5. Throw out the traditional support metrics

As a support lead, it can be really tempting to dedicate more time and energy to tracking and optimizing support metrics like response time, happiness score, etc. These are, of course, helpful to know but long term your customers want a product that works well and solves their problem. The traditional support metrics are more straightforward and depending on the culture of your team you may be receiving pressure to focus on them. But, you’ll have a larger impact, ideally reduce the volume of incoming support queries, and help create a product people need and want by focusing your energy on a solid customer <> product team relationship. This is key to great customer retention.

If you don’t have a process for tracking customer feedback and sharing it with your product team, stop reading this article right now and start building it. Open up Trello and create three columns for: ‘bug report’, ‘product feedback’ and ‘product confusion’. Add a new card to the ‘bug report’ column when there is a repeatable issue with your website, a new card under ‘product feedback’ when a customer writes in with explicit feedback or a feature request, and a new card under ‘product confusion’ when you get the ‘how do I…?’ questions. 

Empower your support agents to prioritize asking an extra question to learn more about your customer’s needs rather than focusing on response time.

6. But, still focus on great customer support

It might be a little extreme of us to suggest throwing out traditional support metrics. They have a place and are helpful information but they can’t be your north star. One actionable strategy we’ve seen have a huge impact on retention is related to tracking customer feedback. When you are tracking customer feedback in one location, you have an automatic checklist of customers to follow up with when your team has acted on their feedback. The customer took their time to explicitly let you know how your team could improve, send them a personalized email to let them know you heard them. When a customer feels heard, they’ll stick by you through anything.  

Bonus tip: Help Scout makes tracking feedback and following up super easy with their workflows. 

7. Test a chatbot

There’s never going to be a future where Artificial Intelligence totally takes over because humans and chatbots are good at different things. Leaning on our strengths and the strengths of chatbots can make for a powerful team. When a chatbot pilot program was initiated in a telco company, it could handle 82% of common queries in customer service. After 5 weeks of tweaking, analyzing, and optimizing by human agents, its success increased to 88%, according to Accenture. Chatbots can help you offer 24/7 support while also freeing up your support agents to handle the more emotionally-driven and empathy-requiring conversations. 

We’ve written more about how to run a chatbot experiment here. 

8. Use social as a two-way street

Your social media channels need to be more than a megaphone, amplifying your own message. Think about that person you know who is constantly talking about themselves, forgetting to ask about you or how your day was. Your customers want to be heard. Topo Designs, an outdoor apparel company, has someone on their team whose responsibility is to respond to comments and mentions on Instagram. All day long. The ROI might be a little harder to prove but this is how you build  loyal customers and advocates. 

9. Set customer-centric goals

It’s important to set goals and it’s even more important to keep them aligned with serving your customers. 

For example, your digital marketing team might be running a few Pay-Per-Click campaigns. It can be easy to fall into the trap of measuring success based on the number of clicks. And while clicks are really important, converted clicks are even more important. It means you’re helping the customer find the thing that solves their problem. 

Set all goals to rely on the customer’s success. 

10. Be intentional about how you speak about customers

This strategy takes more than one day, it’s a cultural adjustment. But, one you can immediately address and speak up agains. The way you speak about your customers is going to have an effect on how you treat them and how your company as a whole supports them. Do you hear people around your office talking about ‘that dumb customer’ or how they had to ‘deal’ with someone? You wouldn’t be in business without your customers. Even if it’s subconscious, speaking about your customers with anything but gratitude and respect will carry over to your teams interactions with them and how your team prioritizes customer needs. 

11. Marketing + Customer Support = BFF4L

This strategy here is really the big kahuna. All of the previous 10 strategies will be easier to implement when you de-silo your teams and make it easy for them to collaborate on behalf of the customer. 

Your marketing team is at the top of the bucket, filling it with water (customers). Your customer support team is inspecting the holes (reasons a customer is leaving).

While holes may be inevitable, they will get filled much quicker and better when these two teams work together. Empower the teams to work together through embedding a customer team member in marketing meetings, have your marketing team deliver support for an hour each week, no matter how you do it provide positive affirmation about the collaboration. 

At Tuff, we partner on both acquisition and retention strategy and implementation because we want to offer a damn good, leak-free bucket.

Mary Jantsch

Mary is a growth marketer at Tuff. She specializes in Customer Experience, Email Strategy, Copywriting and Chat. She also runs on coffee and peanut butter pretzels.

The post 11 Customer Retention Strategies You Can Implement Today appeared first on Tuff.

Sitting down at the four-person table next to the window, you take a minute to scour the menu. Torn between the fish tacos and margarita pizza, you go with the fish tacos because you’re craving cilantro.

You continue making conversation with your lunch date when the waiter comes out bringing you a cheeseburger. It wasn’t what you expected.

Usually, you can work around a wrong order but you’ve stopped eating red meat. You sit there thinking about whether or not to speak up when the waiter comes to check on you and you say “So sorry, this isn’t what I ordered.” She looks back at you, shrugs her shoulders and walks away.  

Imagine that, a waiter knowing you didn’t get what you expected and ignoring you. This in-person experience happens all the time online. Customers will leave a negative review, tweet about their experience, even email the company directly and it goes unanswered. They’re doing this because their expectations were not met.

As hard at it can sometimes be to address a comment where your company is shown in a negative light, this is a huge positive and opportunity. Knowing what is being said about your company online shows you what to celebrate, what’s going well, as well as how you can improve.

Why respond to negative feedback?

There are three key opportunities when responding to negative reviews and comments online:

• customer retention
• free advertising
• actionable feedback

It’s not enough just to listen though, it’s critical to respond. This reinstills faith in the original customer as well as shows customers following along that you’ll listen to their feedback, creating a feedback loop. We all know that it’s cheaper to retain a customer than acquire a new one. By facing negative reviews head-on and graciously resolving outstanding issues, you are helping your bottom line.

Responding to the reviews, tweets, Facebook comments, and more serves as free advertising. Tuff also manages pay-per-click campaigns and the R.O.I on these are a bit easier to prove. But, these responses are important messaging. You have the opportunity to show everyone that your company is professional, that you hold yourself accountable and you care about delivering a great customer experience.

The final opportunity is the most important. When a customer takes the time to leave a review about your company or send a tweet about something they think could have been better, they’re giving you actionable feedback. For the one person speaking up, there are probably many more who had a similar experience and kept it to themselves.

Whether you own a restaurant, offer a service like plumbing or are building an online product, you’re designing the experience for your customers — not for you.

These three factors: customer retention, free advertising, and the opportunity to improve are reason enough. It turns out, though, that negative reviews aren’t inherently a bad thing. Studies have shown they can help instill credibility and trust. Consumers get it, they know people are going to have a bad day or even that their taste is different than Sally who hated the french fries. A company with thousands of only 5-star reviews seems a little shady. Negative reviews might even highlight something positive for the next person.

PowerReviews set out to examine this shift in consumer expectations by surveying more than 800 American consumers. One thing they found is that “82% of shoppers seek out negative reviews; among shoppers under 45 this number jumps to 86%”.

Finally, negative reviews aren’t as common as you might think. While it’s critical to respond to these, it’s not going to take a huge chunk of your time.  In a study about Amazon by Max Woolf he found, on average, products with at least 5 ratings have an average rating of 4.16.

How to respond to negative feedback

When a customer takes the time to review your service or product, they’re looking for you to give them you E.A.R. This is the formula we teach at Tuff for graciously responding to online criticism.

Empathize: Put yourself in their shoes. What emotion would you be feeling if you were them?

Acknowledge: Specifically, address their comments, match their language and reuse some of their words.

React: The first two pieces are absolutely key. If you’re able to effect change and address their problem, do it.

If you take a look at Yelp, you’ll notice there are a fair few missed opportunities with unanswered negative reviews. To demonstrate E.A.R. in action, we’ve pulled 3 unanswered reviews to show you how we’d respond.

Examples

Empathize: Penny, I am so sorry to hear that you and your group had a bad experience when dining with us. I got into this business because of my love for food and I know how disappointing it can be when you are excited to try a certain dish you’ve heard great things about and then it’s no longer on the menu.

Acknowledge: With ramen being off the menu, the fried chicken being solid and hard, and the waiter not offering a dessert menu we definitely could have done better.

React: We rotate our menu depending on seasonal ingredients and will work to make that clearer. I’m also going to check in on the quality of our fried chicken and coating to learn more about what happened to your dishes. Thank you so much for taking the time and if you return to Jackson, I’d love to have you come in and try again!

Empathize: Hey TamarA, oh gosh! I imagine that was quite frustrating, especially since it sounds like you’ve had better experiences in the past.

Acknowledge: We really dropped the ball on your latest visit. I apologize for the patronizing service, we try to hold all employees to the highest standard.

React: As a manager, I take responsibility for the waiter’s actions. It’s my job to make sure they have the proper training and resources to perform their best. Would you be up for giving me a call at XXX-XXX-XXXX? I know we’ve already taken a lot of your time but I’d love to learn more specifically about the service so I can help our staff improve.

Empathize: Hey Doctor L, thanks so much for taking the time to review us. It sounds like we let you down with the food preparation. As a San Francisco resident, I know how crazy prices can be and we should do a better job providing context on the cost of the upgrade and the impacts seasonality have.

Acknowledge: We work really hard to make sure we’re serving the freshest ingredients. I appreciate you going into specifics with the bacon and chives. It can be tricky at times to appeal to all tastes and having details on how you would have preferred the bacon texture and fewer chives is really helpful.

React: I’ll mention these notes to our culinary team and explore with other management team members how we can help clarify the upgrade charge. Thank you!

Summary

You need to make sure you’re replying to online negative feedback about your business. There’s a perception that it can be all-consuming but it is critical for three reasons (among many more): customer retention, free advertising, and actionable feedback.

When met with these comments, remember to approach the conversation graciously and without ego. The person took the time to help your business improve and you should view this as an opportunity.

As you respond, remember E.A.R: empathize, acknowledge, react.

If you’re struggling with how to respond to negative feedback, we hope this guide helps! If you’d like to learn more, talk about customer retention strategies, or go through specific examples of negative feedback, we’re all E.A.R.’s. 

Sign up for a free growth strategy session with Tuff.

Mary Jantsch

Mary is a growth marketer at Tuff. She specializes in Customer Experience, Email Strategy, Copywriting and Chat. She also runs on coffee and peanut butter pretzels.

The post Respond To Negative Feedback Online: A Complete Guide appeared first on Tuff.