Tag: FastCompany.com

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.

Paul Revere, JFK, Aerosmith and Halligan?

Posted on by Drew Neisser

How Brian Halligan, CEO of HubSpot, Hopes his Fast-Growing Company Can Help Shift “Modern Marketing” to Beantown

Brian Halligan is nothing if not a dreamer. In his dream, the Redsox win the pennant every year, hundreds of thousands of small businesses use HubSpot and Boston becomes the epicenter for “modern marketing” that eschews traditional media in favor of his highly digital, “Inbound” approach. And while Halligan can’t keep his beloved Sox off the Disabled List, he is well on his way to realizing at least part of his dream, building a company that has taken small business marketing to a new, more cost-effective place.

How Halligan and his compatriots at HubSpot have gotten this far is a potent reminder of the need to think big while minding the store, blending a Puritanical work ethic with an Aerosmithian will to “Dream On.” Whether or not HubSpot and Halligan can transform Boston into the Silicon Valley of marketing, which will require an entire community of like-minded marketing services providers to take a ride north on the Metroliner, my interview yielded several location-neutral insights for any entrepreneur.

The future is coming, the future is coming

With Paul Revere-like clarity, Halligan is quick to warn of the impending doom of traditional marketing. Noted Halligan, “My whole thesis in life is that the way people market their products is broken, that TV/radio/print and interrupting people with spam messages and cold calls [doesn’t work].” “I actually think that Madison Avenue is going to crash because no one is watching those ads they’re making anymore and I want Boston to be the next generation Madison Avenue,” explained Halligan, who helped to organize Future M, a conference in early October that focused on “modern marketing,” and featured 50 or so Beantown marketing innovators.

The company on a hill

When John Winthrop famously declared Boston the “city on a hill,” he certainly anticipated the fervent city-centric loyalty of Brian Halligan. “I’m from Boston and I’m a little pissed of that Silicon Valley has out-innovated us in the PC revolution and then the internet,” exclaimed Halligan. Sharing Winthrop’s evangelistic bent, Halligan noted his desire to “revive the area in terms of the internet and around marketing,” building as big a company has he can that maintains its New England roots. Even though Halligan aspires to a West coast-style company like Google or Amazon, he makes it clear he has no interest in selling out to one of these giants and seeing the company leave town.

Not the same old song and dance

Sometimes referred to as “the Bad Boys of Boston,” the band Aerosmith made its mark by blending elements of pop, heavy metal and R&B to create their own unique sound. So too has Halligan and his team created something new by blending a number of tools “into one simple relatively easy to use package for businesses to take advantage of.” Designed to address “a massive shift in the way modern humans shop and learn,” the HubSpot platform includes software for blogging, social media monitoring, marketing analytics, email and lead nurturing. To prove HubSpot has a hit on their hands, Halligan noted that they have about 3,500 customers today up from 1400 a year ago while revenue has grown to $20 million from $7 million over the same period. And that’s got to music to Halligan’s VC backers if not to the rest of Boston.

Ask not what you can do for your company, ask what your company can do for its customers

JFK’s famous call to action inspired an entire generation to lead by doing. This notion is at the heart of HubSpot’s success, enabling and encouraging businesses “to create remarkable content that becomes like a magnet to pull people in.” Halligan calls this approach Inbound Marketing, an approach he preaches about in a book and on a blog of the same name while practicing it religiously at his own company. Noted Halligan, “we create tons and tons of blog articles, we create eBooks, we create webinars, we create a weekly TV show” all designed to draw people into HubSpot often by way of Google without having to buy keywords. Explained Halligan, “a webinar works for years and years whereas with Google ads, you just throw money at it month after month.”

Good Grade Hunting

Boston boys Damon and Affleck took Hollywood by storm with their Academy Award-winning debut. HubSpot generates good will and great leads with it highly praised “grader” tools. These free tools rate a company’s performance on keyword search, website, blogs, Facebook and even Foursquare. Offered Halligan, “if they get a crappy score, they say, ‘who are those HubSpot guys?’ and they end up in our funnel,” watching a demo, trying the software and ultimately buying. The idea according to Halligan is to “free up as much knowledge and content as you possibly can and use that knowledge to pull people into your business and try to convert them into customers.” Halligan also noted that their customers see meaningful results in 4-6 months, averaging 13% increases in sales leads that compound on a month to month basis.

More than a Feeling for Culture

The band Boston exploded onto the rock scene in the mid-seventies but after two multi-platinum albums, management issues got the best of them. Halligan is keenly aware that rapid growth brings its own set of problems and works diligently to keep the band together while bringing in fresh blood. Explained Halligan, “when you grow this fast, everything breaks—many of the systems you put in place break and you are constantly revolving and reorganizing.” Not wanting to be “just another band out of Boston” that imploded, Halligan and his cohorts put extra effort into clarifying and cultivating their corporate culture and mission. “When we do annual reviews of employees, the culture is part of that review—there are seven points in our culture and we grade them [on each],” noted Halligan. It is little wonder both employees and clients seem to sing the praises of HubSpot.

Final note: With over 80% of advertising still going through traditional media channels and a sizeable percentage of that flowing through New York-based agencies, shifting the epicenter of “modern marketing” to Boston won’t happen overnight, if at all. That doesn’t bother Halligan who has accepted this mission as his “life’s work,” and whose accomplishments to date justify further consideration. As such, I’d encourage you to read more of my interview, as I am in the end a New Yorker, too busy weeping over the Yankees’ demise to belabor this further.  This article first appeared on FastCompany.com

8 Questions for Aspiring Leaders

Posted on by Drew Neisser

Six years ago Scott Harrison wouldn’t know a Bayaka from a bialy. He was a nightclub impresario helping to sell $16 cocktails to a cool crowd of Millennials while showing off his sponsored Rolex. Now Scott heads charity: water, a non-profit organization he founded that has delivered clean drinking water to over 1 million people in its first four years and aspires to help 100 million in the next ten years. How this happened is a story of personal transformation and exemplary entrepreneurship, offering up 8 questions for any aspiring leader to consider right now without fail.

1. Is this what you really want to be doing?

If you have to think about this question, then you probably know the answer is no. Discovery one’s calling is often a journey upon which only the bold embark. Finding his nightclub gig wanting, Scott Harrison began his journey as a volunteer photojournalist in Liberia and for two years took “pictures of the some of the sickest people in the world, who were getting treated by volunteer doctors.” Added Harrison, “So coming back off that experience, I was 30, pretty ambitious and bold, deciding I wanted to reinvent charity.” Explaining his need to start fresh, Harrison offered, “I didn’t think I could work within the system and make the impact I wanted to make.”

2. Are you providing a clear vision?

The vision thing seems so obvious that it’s simply overlooked by aspiring leaders, the way the rest of us simply take clean water for granted. For Harrison, the vision involved creating a new kind of transparent charity that puts 100% of public donations to work, in this case delivering clean water to those who don’t have it. Noted Harrison, “Its not guilt based, this is all about presenting people with an amazing opportunity to serve people who need your help.” The opportunity will require raising a whopping two billion U.S. dollars in the next ten years, “a crazy growth rate of 63%” that even Harrison admits is unprecedented. Crazy or not, Harrison’s vision is as clear as a mountain stream.

3. Can you reduce your business to a simple story?

A crystal clear elevator pitch is often discussed but rarely realized by even the best of entrepreneurs. Most organizations, especially non-profits have a tendency to “lead with complexity,” noted Harrison. So charity: water keeps it very simple, “If you give money, we can bring clean water to a community,” offered the succinct Harrison. Supported with visual storytelling that engages on a visceral level, “as you get interested with a simple story we then let you discover the complexity as your interest level increases,” Harrison explained. This progressive approach has helped charity: water attract thousands of donors from sophisticated millionaires to 10-year olds, all with a shared understanding.

4. Do you know your weaknesses?

Successful entrepreneurs are rarely geniuses; in fact many think of themselves as being too naïve to realize why their idea won’t succeed so they just plough ahead. Naïve or not, they must have a keen understanding of their weaknesses and Harrison is no exception. When explaining why hire #2 was a water projects person and #3 an art director, Harrison revealed, “I’m not an executer and I’m a terrible designer.” With these two critical positions in place, Harrison was able build both his brand and his family, as hire #3 Vik also became his wife. Four years into it, Harrison now laments little with the exception of bringing in systems late–systems that could help him manage hundreds of thousands of donors and related CRM activities.

5. Do you aspire to create an epic brand?

If you are too busy trying to make sales to think about your brand, think again. Perhaps the most instructive of all Harrison’s initial goals was his desire to build a brand, something many non-profits considered to be a dirty word. As he put it, “to solve a problem as big as the water crisis, we would need to create an epic brand.” Modeling brands like Apple and Nike, brands that sold “gazillions of product to people, charity: water would be selling gazillions of dollars of clean water and hope,” Harrison explained. To achieve epic status, charity: water put special emphasis on emotional storytelling via high quality photography, beautifully produced videos, and a gorgeous Web site that is easy to navigate, all produced without a marketing budget.

6. Have you figured out how to scale your business?

A lot of entrepreneurs never build a structure that scales, preferring the hands on approach that keeps them at the center of the action. But for Harrison solving the problem of scale was essential to his vision, “We can only do this by getting millions of people involved through the inevitable math of networks.” This is why Harrison and his team created mycharitywater.org and launched it in beta September 2009. In 11 months, more than 2,800 people have started personal campaigns to celebrate their birthdays, mountain climbs or Mohawk shavings and helped raise nearly $3 million. Noted Harrison, with people raising an average of a thousand dollars per personal campaign, “We only need two million birthdays in a decade to get to our ten year, two billion dollar goal.” And while Harrison says “only” without hesitation, keep in mind he’s gotten this far with less than 25 staffers!

7. Do you have a strategy for each social media channel?

Without a lot of serious strategic forethought, most businesses have jumped into various social media channels with little regard for the roles each might play in their business growth. Admits Harrison, charity: water wasn’t much different jumping into Twitter at the outset, becoming the first non-profit to have over one million followers. “Twitter is great for awareness and getting people to watch a video but outside of benefiting from the amazing Twestival (charitywater.org/twestival), we haven’t tried to raise money with it,” explained Harrison. “Facebook traffic [to their Web site] stays a little longer, engages a little differently, so there’s a big focus now for us to build that community,” Harrison added. With 56,000 fans now, charity: water hopes to grow its fan base to over one million, perhaps by integrating Facebook Connect into mycharitywater.org in some manner. (To become a fan, click here.)

bayaka8. Who the heck are the Bayaka and how can I help?

Most entrepreneurs understand the role of passion in motivating internal staff and external stakeholders. Scott Harrison’s current passion is the Bayaka people in the Central African Republic (see the video). Explained Harrison, “They’re hunter-gatherers, but the logging industry has forced them into the villages where they’re being treated like slaves and denied access to clean water.” With the goal of drilling fresh water wells for all 16,000 Bayaka and another 70,000 other Central Africans this September, charity: water needs to raise $1.7 million. And here’s how you, my thoughtful reader, can help. You can join my campaign with the goal of attracting 16,000 $20 gifts, one for each Bayaka (if Scott can be ambitious, so can I!). Because charity: water tracks where each donation goes, you’ll be able to see with complete transparency your donation in action. As Harrison concluded, “This isn’t our story, it’s your story, it’s everyone else’s story.”  (Note: this article first appeared on FastCompany.com)