Category: Interviews

Making a Hit While Serving Customers

Posted on by Drew Neisser

I saw Ben Lerer speak at the recent PSFK conference and was blown away by how quickly Thrillist has grown.  In many ways, its is a classic example of Marketing as Service, with the newsletter being the service and in this case part of the product that meets a distinct information need.  Thrillist has also had a profound impact on the businesses they’ve recommended, gaining the kind of “make a hit” influence that newspaper critics used to enjoy.

DN: Thrillist has grown quite a bit since its founding.  Can you give me the highlights of this growth in terms of subscribers, markets, revenue, profitability?
We sent the first Thrillist email in 2005 to 600 friends in New York and in that first year slogged through the mud and grew to 30,000 subscribers by the end of 2006. By the end of 2008, we had expanded into seven cities and became profitable, bringing in approximately $5 million in revenue. In 2009, we launched in five additional markets and passed the one million subscription mark. And now, just a couple of months into our sixth year, we’re in 18 markets including our first international edition in London, reaching over 2.5 million subscriptions. With the acquisition of members-only online retailer JackThreads.com and the launch of localized deal site Thrillist Rewards, we’re expecting to bring in more than $40 million in revenue this year.

DN: Why do you think the Thrillist newsletter has been so successful?
As with any successful company, the winning formula is always a strong demand and a quality product. We’ve zoned in on a niche group that was previously starved for the kind of information we deliver. They were looking for trusted recommendations on where to go and what to do in their city and the best ways to spend their time and money and we do a good job delivering that.

DN: How do you decide what to feature in each of your newsletters?  What is the editorial review process?
We have a local editor on the ground in each of our markets whose main job is to scour their cities to find awesome things.  It has to be something new, unknown or under-appreciated (i.e. an underground supper club, a maker of custom shoes operating out of a warehouse in Brooklyn, or a restaurant with an off-the-menu three martini lunch special).

DN: Talk to me some more about the importance of curating great content…
When we first started out, one of the stipulations with the money we raised was that we couldn’t spend any of it on marketing. So we focused all our energy on building something that people actually liked and would want to pass along to their friends. We know how valuable our guys’ time is and we don’t want to waste it with anything but the winners, so we always put content first and make sure it’s written for the guy reading it.

DN: Newspaper and magazines have been curating content for years yet almost all are losing money.  Why do you think Thrillist has been able to be successful curating editorial content when these other info sources have not been able to make any money, especially online?
Our voice is extremely targeted to a very specific part of the male demographic. We’re not trying to reach all people in all cities. We’re zoning in on a small sector of the population, speaking to them in a voice that they trust and relate to and delivering content that they want to read, in a way they want to read it. Because of this, we’ve developed a loyal audience that trusts us and acts on our recommendations.

DN: Do you have a customer feedback system in place to help you measure what content is resonating?

We do have a system that collects data, click-through rates, etc. but we mostly find validation by speaking with the owners of the businesses we cover. We have stacks upon stacks of testimonials about selling-out seats, packing restaurants and huge increases in traffic to websites. We also see the companies being covered in additional press outlets and going viral across all social media platforms.

DN: Have you ever recommended something that turned out to be a bust?  If so, how did you handle this?
We’ve definitely recommended some things that were better than others — that’s part of the challenge of breaking stories. But our batting average is high and I think the audience has patience for when we miss because they really appreciate when we hit the nail on the head.

DN: Can you give me a specific example of a new restaurant or bar that you featured and the impact it had on that business
We recently covered a food truck named “Feed Your Hole,” that serves specialty hot dogs and burgers. We spoke to the owner a few days after our write-up who told us they were experiencing lines around the block and that they even had to turn away crowds of people. Prior to our write-up, they were unknown and by their opening day, there were masses of people lining up for their food. This is common feedback for us but its still awesome every time we hear it.

DN; What role does your website play in your overall marketing and customer service mix?
We recently redesigned our website but prior to that, it was mostly just used as a tool for capturing subscribers. Most of our partnerships efforts drove traffic back to the site with hopes of enticing new subscribers to sign up. Now, our website is more of a destination for users seeking local lifestyle and entertainment content but we still have lots of work to do. Basically, we know we’ve got lots of valuable content on the site but we’re still figuring out how to surface the right content to the right guys.

DN: You’ve added some new services in the last year or so.  What are they and why did you add them?
In the past, we had covered JackThreads editorially – they hosted a lot of brands that we also frequently covered and so it made sense for us to actually be able to sell these brands to our audience, instead of simply recommending them. Another recent launch is Thrillist Rewards, which gives us a chance to monetize some of the local transactions we’re able to drive every day. Our mission is the same with this as it is with our content: we want to bring guys deals that they’ll actually enjoy and are actually relevant for them. A few of our recent deals are “Unlimited Beer and Ribs at Hill Country BBQ” and “a Strip and a Strip at Robert’s and Score’s.” We are also able to help small business reach our audience beyond editorial coverage and national display advertising.

Customer Experience Done Right

Posted on by Drew Neisser

Every once in a while you’re lucky enough to meet someone who is really doing things right. I felt that way after hearing Gibbs Jones, SVP of Customer Experience at Suddenlink speak at the Satmetrix Net Promoter conference earlier this year. I followed up with Jones and his associate Pete Abel, the SVP of Corporate Communications after the conference, yielding the interview below and an upcoming post on FastCompany.com.

DN: How did the customer experience role come into being at Suddenlink?
Abel: There’s always been a Vice President of Customer Service who is responsible for the overall operation of our call centers. Currently we have six of those, all in the US. There was a person to oversee those call centers. The evolution of the role was from call center manager to a broader customer experience role, which started close to Gibbs’s advent and there was a recognition that there was so much more to customer service than them just calling the call centers. We knew that and by putting that all under one title we could better drive results in an area that is really important to our CEO.

DN: How close is the CEO to the customer experience process?
Abel: Our CEO frequently discusses the importance of customer service on our quarterly earnings calls. If a customer manages to get his email address and sends him an email, he personally responds to that customer. He wants the customer to know that he’s accessible like anyone else in the company to deal with any issues they’re having and to make sure they’re having the best experience possible.

DN: How do you monitor customer satisfaction?
Jones: We have three ways to measure the customer experience. First, we are part of the JD Power study and work with them to understand their perspective, what’s driving the customer experience.

Second, we have a relationship net promoter survey, which helps us understand the customer’s overall feeling about Suddenlink as a company: what level of service we provide, the professionalism of our employees and if customers would recommend us to friends or family..

Third, and most comprehensive, is our transactional net promoter survey. Each time a customer contacts us for assistance, we send an email to them that asks questions specific to their recent transaction and gives them the opportunity to score us on different attributes and describe their experience in their own words.

DN: Are performance reviews tied to customer satisfaction?
Jones: We’re getting ready to launch a career progression plan for our CSRs, which allows them to get promoted within the CSR role giving them additional pay and recognition for doing a great job. We find a lot of value in the positive comments and are working on getting all of those back to the CSRs and technicians.

DN: How do you address the detractors?
Jones: For anyone having trouble with a service or feature, we pick that up as part of the survey and it comes back into a special group in our call centers and they follow up with the customer within 48 hours. We proactively call customers back. When you first approach someone and tell them you want them to be a CSR to talk to our angriest customers you get some funny looks. But it’s actually become one of the most popular jobs because customers are blown away that you actually took time to read the survey and the fact that you followed up creates immediate promoters because it says that you care.

DN: Give me a specific example of something you’ve fixed that’s improved customer satisfaction?
Jones: We changed our arrival windows in most of our markets. Most of our customers have access to our windows now. We changed to two-hour windows from all day windows because when we saw the data we realized it was better for the customer.

DN: Do you have other examples?
Jones: We have a list of 30 or 40 things, large and small, that we fixed or are investigating how to fix. For example, in the comments in one of our regions, customers were calling in to get their DVR fixed and we sent a hit to their box and content disappeared. After seeing a few of those each week we figured out there was something systematically that we needed to fix. The CSR’s had access to a refresh code that they shouldn’t have, and without our metrics we wouldn’t have known it.

DN: How does social media fit into all this?
Jones: It’s another way to gauge the customer’s experience. Our approach initially was to listen and understand what they were saying and from there developing the right platforms and forums. Social media is another great customer touch point. It allows us to engage them directly and try to get problems fixed.

DN: Which department does social media fall under?
Gibbs: It’s in the customer experience department. First and foremost, it’s a way to hear what our customers are saying and fix those things that need to be fixed. We’ve had some marketing engagement with social media. It’s a service channel that marketing has used as well.

DN: Do people ever re-tweet about their satisfaction after the issue has been resolved?
Abel: One example is a gentleman who tweeted about a service problem. We got in touch with him and worked out the problem, and he then sent out a follow up tweet saying, “hey, great Twitter service, I’m glad you’re using this to solve problems.” We found out later that he’s an investor in Twitter and other startups and he has close to a million followers on Twitter.

DN: Over the last two or three years, has customer satisfaction increased?
Jones: If you look at our longest running customer service surveys between 2007 and 2010, we saw the number of promoters (customers rating us nine or ten) grow from 54% to almost 60%. Our detractors (someone rating us between 0 and 6) declined from 26% to 16%. So, our overall net promoter score has increased from 28 to 43, as measured by an independent research company. In our industry many companies don’t have a positive net promoter score at all. We spend time every single day on the things we can do to improve the customer experience, which should then drive the score up.

DN: Has this increased the bottom line of the company?
Abel: During a tough economy, one where we’ve seen other cable operators achieve slower growth than they were accustomed to, in the past year alone we saw the total number of households we serve grow by nearly 7,000. We believe that’s an indicator of our customer service because we don’t have the biggest marketing budgets or financial resources. The fact that we were able to grow the number of customer relationships is an indicator that (customer service is) paying off.

We also had a record year in the total number of units of service sold. We’ve added nearly 230,000 new units of service sold to customers, which is by far a record year for us. Revenue has grown very steadily too, up 8.7% between 4th quarter 2009 and 4th quarter 2010. All of those core financial metrics are improving and when we compare those to our peers who publicly report their results, our financial operating results consistently meet or exceed them, and when you look at them in aggregate, we beat their percentage growth year over year.

Turning Marketing into Math

Posted on by Drew Neisser

Jon Miller, Co-founder of Marketo and currently their VP of Marketing, is changing the way marketers market, starting first with his own company.  My first interview with Jon is the basis of a case history that will appear on FastCompany.com shortly.  The following is the Q&A from my follow up interview, which is also rich with insights.

DN: You mentioned Salesforce has integrated a Twitter tracking tool.  Are you using that and have you found its made much of a difference?  How else are you integrated social media monitoring into the overall process?
Social media is a vital component of our offering.  As the number of channels continues to proliferate, businesses need technology that allows them to listen to a prospect’s online body language, no matter where they are, online or offline.  Our marketing team uses Marketo to listen, score, and segment prospects based on what they say.  We’ve had some great successes with this – for example, one prospect tweeted that they were looking at solutions; we engaged socially and turned them into a customer within four weeks.

DN: As a result of using your own product, have you asked/forced the development team to make improvements and/or enhancements?
Absolutely. Our product development team and our marketing teams work very closely together. Marketing is always talking about what can be improved or providing ideas on new features that should be added or that would be useful.  The marketing team also constantly engages with customers on how they use our product to drive revenue, and what they are looking for next in the solution.  This provides a very valuable source of input.  So the marketing team is the first touch point as we continue to build out our product roadmap.  This is a product that has been built by marketers for marketers, so they are very vocal about how they would like to see the product grow and we encourage that.

Who do you consider to be your main competition?  And why do you think you have a competitive advantage over them?
We maintain a significant advantage over our competition, including vendors like Eloqua, in a number of areas.  First is the power and ease of use achieved with Marketo.  It is a radically better user experience that allows companies to be up and running complex campaigns in a matter of weeks, so they quickly realize the time to value.  Next would be our scalability, as your business grows Marketo grows with you.  Our customer base ranges from small start-ups with a one-man marketing shop, to multi-national companies running complex global campaigns.  Finally, I would add that our vision and thought leadership plays an important role in driving our market lead – sales and marketing leaders that are thinking strategically about how they can apply innovative software and techniques to drive an increase in revenue tend to gravitate to Marketo.

DN: You spent a fair amount of time explaining the problem–is this an important part of your sales process? Or do prospects already know they have the problem?
We really get a mix of potential customers who are aware of the problem and are looking for the right solution and those who know there is something wrong but haven’t defined it just yet.  For the prospects who have yet to define the problem, it becomes an integral part of the sales process, because you need to know what is broken before you can go about fixing it.  Again, this is where our vision, thought leadership, and content marketing plays a key role in engaging with the customer, as they come  to see us as trusted advisors.

DN: Growing as quickly as you have in two years, do you have a corporate culture? is this an important part of your ability to grow quickly too?
We definitely have a corporate culture.  I would have to say that collaboration is a big part of our corporate culture.  Like I mentioned earlier, our marketing team works closely with our product team, but it doesn’t stop there, all departments within Marketo are encouraged to provide their ideas and feedback with each other.  We work closely together and are passionate about what we do, and the passion of every employee here has really been an important part of our tremendous growth over the past few years.

DN: Does Marketo have a “brand voice” and if so, what is that?  Can you point me to some pages that express your personality?  I get a sort of no nonsense feel from your website but not a lot of hand holding friendliness.
Marketo is all about innovation, unmatched quality, precision and professionalism.  We are also very passionate about our customers’ success and satisfaction.  As we continue to grow, you will see a larger focus on our customers and their stories on our website because they really speak the loudest for us.

DN: How do you measure customer satisfaction?
Our success is driven by the success of our customers.  We are constantly in contact with our customers checking in and seeing how things are going and providing additional value anywhere we can.  The number of customers who are willing to be references for us, and speak at our events is another great measure of the success they are achieving.

DN: Do you have a mechanism in place for customers to give feedback and or product ideas?  (like a Get Satisfaction?)
We launched our Marketo Community last year.  It is a great place for customers to go and share ideas, give feedback and interact with each other.  When someone submits an idea other customers can vote on it as well and we certainly take those ideas into consideration when we are building our product roadmap.

DN: Talk to me about content marketing and what you all do in this area?  I know you mentioned some stats on the phone but do you have a staff of writers that create all this content?  Do you have an editorial calendar that is guided by SEO?
We have very talented marketers who are excellent writers.  Most of our content is created by our marketing team.  Our blog posts, cheat sheets, definitive guides and more is all written and created by our marketing team.  They are the experts and they know best what other marketers want and need the most. We have one of the best marketing teams in the world.

DN: You called the category Revenue Performance Management–do prospects know what this means?  and what are doing specifically to build awareness of this idea other than me writing this story;-)
Revenue Performance Management (RPM) is a new category, so part of helping companies to join the revenue revolution is educating them about what isn’t working about the old sales and marketing business model.  We have a comprehensive thought leadership program designed to educate the market and engage in a dialogue on RPM. For instance, we started with Phil’s Revenue Performance Management Blog, and have spoken at a number of different sales and marketing events on this very topic.  We also just kicked off a 14 city tour across the US to drive awareness that includes an executive roundtable discussion about the whole idea of revenue RPM.  While it’s keeping me on a plane every week, the turnout to these events so far has been phenomenal – it’s been standing room only at every one, and the conversations have been fantastic.  The road show is just getting under way, and hitting major cities around the US – I encourage readers to check out our schedule and come to an event! www.marketo.com/rock-your-revenue.

CMO Insights: A Social Media Weigh In

Posted on by Drew Neisser

After The CMO Club Summit, I caught up with Hope Frank, Chief Marketing Officer of WebTrends to get her take on social media.  As “the global leader in mobile and social analytics,” Hope’s company not only uses social media to market themselves but also  monitors social as a revenue stream making her uniquely qualified to weigh in on this hot topic.

 DN: What are Webtrends primary objectives for social media?
We use social media to distribute and facilitate conversations pertaining to WT digital marketing thought leadership, primary research and analysis of buzz and trends online.We also use social media to extend the reach and impact of traditional marketing efforts to grow awareness among key influencers and prospects.

DN: Do you use social media for customer service?
Yes. For monitoring and problem solving as well as for gathering consumer insights.

DN: How important is social media in your overall marketing mix for Webtrends?
It is essential and deeply integrated. Growing our communities, developing and curating compelling content,  experimenting and innovating on social media platforms is part of every effort we execute.

DN: Since the tracking of social media is part of Webtrends’ product/service offering, how important is it that Webtrends be on the forefront of social media practitioners?
Our Digital Marketing team is empowered to lead by example, to solve big marketing challenges, to iterate and to loudly share our stories. We have direct access to the world’s best global tools and experts, it is amazing! We are fortunate indeed to be in this position.

DN: What has worked for you in social and what hasn’t?
We see the largest impact of social media when we execute integrated ideas that launch with compelling content/experiences then leverage our media engine,  then mix social to amplify the message and increase the value. We have also seen great success running self-contained programs in Facebook where we purchase ads that drive to FB apps. We’ve been able to then take FB campaign learnings and apply them to broad based marketing efforts.

It’s cliché, we all know using social media as another “channel” to push out messaging and brand/product news fails. In the early days when we could only support pushing basic messages out and not integrating or engaging deeper, we experienced limited success.

DN: As evidence of WebTrends ability to monitor social media and turn this into social currency (in this case, PR), Hope provided the following links to all the “brand elevation and buzz analysis” Webtrends achieved during the #RoyalWedding.  The Mashable infographic is quite cool.

 

CMO Insights: The CMO Club Summit

Posted on by Drew Neisser

Probably nobody in the world talks to more CMO’s than Pete Krainik, founder of The CMO Club.  I caught up with Pete last week after The CMO Club Summit in New York City and asked him for the inside scoop on CMO’s and social media.  Here’s our Q&A:

DN: There was a lot of conversation at The CMO Club Summit about social media.  Why do you think this is the case?
CMOs care about customer engagement and having a reason and vehicle for listening, having a conversation, and sharing their Brands.  Social media is simply the best way, for many brands to do this.  Every Brand has different products/services and customers so the conversation’s centered on new and game changing ideas they can build on for their industry, customer base and products.

The other big reason is about marketing mix optimization.  Every dollar and resource focused correctly is worth significantly more than before. More targets, more marketing vehicles results in more interest in getting it right.

DN: Do you expect this conversation to grow over the next 12 months or are CMOs approaching Social Media fatigue?
The conversation will grow but move from social media to social marketing and social branding.   I’ve noticed within The CMO CLUB that more and more 1-1 conversations with CMOs to think through synergies for sharing resources together.  Moving from company specific apps, communities, programs to a community of Brands approach.  Very interesting times ahead.

DN: The CMO’s at the event seemed to be at various stages of the adoption curve when it comes to social media, why do you think that is the case?
A number of reasons.  For larger, more technical B2B Brands, a smaller number of customers are leveraging social media so the call to action and priority is different than for B2C Retailers and CPG companies.  Also some companies focus on innovation leadership while others are fast followers, etc.  Finally global companies have issues of rollout and priority by region, product lines, etc.

DN: What role does social media play in the marketing of the CMO club?
Given the club is an exclusive “heads of marketing only” community with the mission of facilitating the world’s best CMO conversations, Social media has been the single more important vehicle for the growth of membership. Two out of every 3 new members in the club come from referrals and recommendations from heads of marketing in the club.

We not only use social media for communicating new posts and events from members, but the members only site itself is a community site vs. website. Everything from member blog posts, member Q/A, New CMO jobs on the market, vendor rating programs, plus content in the CMO CLUB Thought Leadership Library is contributed from members.  Social media is used to share member insights, build subgroups of interests, and listen to members.

Our weekly poll question of members has gone from 75 to 150 members per week responding, then sharing and discussing results. The value of the club is to help CMOs connect with peers, share insights, and stay sharp and competitive as heads of marketing.  Social media and our social community platform is the catalyst to make it happen.

DN: Pete closed by noting that the October 2011 CMO Club Summit in Los Angeles will have a large section focused on “CMO worthy” innovations in social media.

CMO Insights: Growing Role of Social Media

Posted on by Drew Neisser

At The CMO Club Summit last week, Grant Johnson, CMO of Pega Systems joined a panel discussion on “new innovations in customer acquisition and retention.”  After the panel, I caught up with Grant and asked him about the role of social media in Pega’s marketing plans.  Here’s the Q&A:

DN: From a marketing perspective, how important is social media to Pega right now in the overall mix of options?
Since our goal is to allow people to more easily engage with and access the Pega brand however they want, social media is becoming increasingly more important to us as a part of an integrated and multichannel marketing mix.  It’s a small spend today, but we’re spending more time and effort focusing on this, and the activity has ramped up fast.  For example, you can find all Pega news items and links to a variety of content on Twitter, where we now have nearly 1,100 followers; you can view Pega videos and educational content on YouTube; you can engage with Pega employees and peers on our Facebook page and in our Pega Forums; and you can also subscribe to our content via RSS feeds.

DN: What needs to happen at your organization for social media to become a larger priority?
The biggest challenge with social media in most organizations, including Pega, is measuring results back to customer interest and loyalty.  There’s a lot to filter through in order to separate the noise from the signal. We listen closely to our customers and have the ability to focus more on this as their needs dictate. We use mechanisms such as “likes,” “downloads” and “views” to understand the impact of social content that is created, but ultimately we’ll need to be able to better drive customer activity and engagement as a result.  Pega has historically been highly customer focused and as with many of our other initiatives, we will always adapt to their needs in order to continue helping them meet their business improvement objectives.

DN: For Pega, does social media play a role in customer service?  If not, do you see that happening any time soon?
Yes, social media also plays an important role as a medium for customer support and feedback at Pega. Our customers are very vocal in our forums about areas that they would like support in or new features they would like to see in our products. We also have an internal community called the Pega Developer Network, which allows our customers to collaborate and get help specifically with regard to their unique implementations, so as to increase their product understanding and the value of our support. We see this activity growing more in the future as social media channels become more and more common.

DN: How do you think social media could impact Pega’s business down the road?
It’s already impacting us in a positive manner, serving as a real-time and dynamic channel to communicate with customers and prospects. Today, Pega provides social media capabilities within our products, allowing developers to use social media tools to collaborate on business processes and case work. Pega also provides social media capabilities in our CRM products, including the ability to monitor social media such as Twitter and bring that feedback into a customer service setting where it can be addressed. We see two emerging trends in customer service that could impact us even more down the road: first, social media is helping us better service our customers across channels, and crowd-sourcing and self-service is becoming a reality; and, second, we believe that the ability to listen, analyze and act via social media – to actually fix broken customer service processes more quickly – will improve service delivery and customer satisfaction in the future.