Great brands are built on happy customers. And just like the brands we serve, our success depends on our customers’ satisfaction.
We believe any brand that works hard to make their customers happy deserves a chance to succeed. That’s why we’ve always made it a priority to meet you where you are: Helping you drive better results from the platforms you’re already using, making it easy to seamlessly integrate with the tools you love, and developing features that will help you keep up.
At the beginning of last year, we realized we’d fallen behind on fulfilling our promise to our customers to put them first. That’s why our 2017 resolution was to prioritize initiatives that would make our customers happy.
Throughout the course of the year, we invested heavily in projects that would bring more value to Yotpo users. In this post, we sat down with the employees who spearheaded these initiatives and look at what’s next.
From launching an affordable plan for small businesses to building better support for enterprise customers, here’s a look behind the scenes at the major changes Yotpo’s made over the past year to provide a better product and experience for users of all sizes.
A plan designed to scale with your growing business
This year, our product and R&D teams worked hard to release our new Growth plan, which was specifically designed to be a powerful, affordable tool for entrepreneurs and small businesses.
These are the businesses that gave us a chance and helped us grow, and it was important for us that they have access to the technology that will help them grow, no matter their budget.
The Growth plan is billed on a monthly basis. The tiered pricing is based on your number of monthly orders and starts at $49/month. The plan was designed to show value very quickly, without any steep investments.
Behind the scenes with Yoav Aziz, Yotpo’s Head of Growth
We heard our customers complain about being priced out of Yotpo, and we knew we had to take action. The two major considerations we had throughout the process were creating a plan that was as flexible and easy to use as possible.
Flexibility: Tiered pricing means there’s an option for every budget, so even entrepreneurs just starting out can get the functionality that will help them grow.
User-friendly: We know a lot of entrepreneurs are super busy trying to run a business, so we had to develop easy, intuitive onboarding for new users.
Iterations based on customer feedback: In preparation for the full release, we rolled out stages of the Growth plan and paid close attention to how people responded. First, there was a new sign-up form, then an easy installation process, onboarding emails, in-app messaging, a new payment set-up, etc. After each step, we made adjustments to ensure the smoothest experience.
More than 1,000 early adopters are currently on the Growth plan, and they’ve given amazing feedback so far:
It’s really nice to see people using the Growth plan and getting so much value from it. The goal was to give customers a robust UGC platform at an affordable price — and the feedback has let us know that we’ve achieved that.
Better support for annual customers
As we ramped up our offerings for small businesses and entrepreneurs, our support team brainstormed ways to improve service for annual customers.
These customers commit to Yotpo in the long run, so we need to ensure they get the full value they expect from Yotpo.
This has meant introducing a number of new initiatives, including live chat support for select client groups, improving response time, and focusing on customer satisfaction.
Behind the scenes with Tsvika Vishnievsky, Yotpo’s Director of Support
Live chat: One of the ways we fulfilled our pledge to improve communication was to introduce live chat support for select client groups. This gives customers a direct line to resolve any issues, and we’ve kept response time to under a minute to make sure that happens quickly. The feedback has been great so far.
Customer satisfaction: We make a point of tracking whether or not our annual customers are happy with how we handle their support tickets. We receive about 1,500 tickets each month, and so far, we have a 94% satisfaction rate. When we get negative feedback, the team uses it as a learning experience so we can raise that number over time.
Better communication: In addition to Support, our Customer Success Managers create the ecosystem that helps keep our customers happy and allows Support to run smoothly. Starting in Q3 of 2017, they implemented new meetings and touch points with our annual customers to hear concerns, offer UGC inspiration, and generally keep things on track.
These touch points — whether by live chat, phone calls, or meetings — bring us closer to our customers, and help us not just meet their needs, but anticipate them as well.
More touch points with Customer Success Managers
Yotpo is dedicated to helping customers grow their brand. Customer Success Managers (CSMs) work with our users to shape a vision for their customer content and what they want to achieve with it, in order to track wins with our clients and set goals for future growth.
The goal for CSMs is not just to check in with customers and ensure that everything is running smoothly. Instead, we’ve made it a point to take initiative in planning the right UGC marketing strategy for each customer and to see that it’s optimally implemented.
From initial strategy development and deployment to ongoing optimization to improve performance, Customer Success Managers are here to provide dedicated, personalized assistance.
Behind the scenes with Ethan Cohen, Yotpo’s Head of Enterprise CSMs
Quarterly Business Reviews: We’ve learned that it’s imperative to go beyond chatting with our customers on a bi-weekly or monthly basis. That’s why we recently introduced Quarterly Business Reviews, which are held in-person, to discuss our recently completed quarterly goals, and to ensure that we are aligned with our customers on future goals — both short and long term. These QBRs are more than just a review of metrics and product updates, but rather a much-needed conversation to look beneath the surface, suggest and share optimization strategies, and make certain we’re providing the most value possible.
Onboarding in a new light: In addition to adding in more meaningful touch points to our customer lifecycle, we’ve also completely overhauled our onboarding and kickoff process. It’s now personalized and customized to align with each brand’s high-level strategy, and depending on the situation, it may also include a dedicated solutions engineer to work alongside the client’s technical or dev teams.
Proactive, not reactive: This past year has marked a hard shift away from a team of reactive account managers and towards a team that serves as proactive social proof consultants. We have focused our efforts on bolstering our brands with specific, customized, and proven user-generated content strategies.
What’s Next
This is just the beginning. In 2018, we’ll be rolling out even more changes and uniting all departments across the company to improve NPS and our customers’ satisfaction.
Customer feedback is the key to building a strong business. Until now, listening to customer feedback and actually getting actionable insights at scale has been a manual and time-consuming process.
Our biggest news is that we’ll soon be releasing a product to help you learn from the voice of your customers to make better business decisions.
