Automating Your Customer Success Touch Points with No-Code

0:00let's dive into our first talk of day three i'm gonna welcome in a minute jane portman to the virtual stage jane is the co-founder of user list and she's gonna be talking about automating your customer success touch points with no code jane is the host of two podcasts including the ui breakfast podcast which crossed two million downloads recently she's the mother of three kids she has a tattoo on her wrist which says bdtp for better done than perfect and i guess jane and i both have uh you know something that's meaningful to us on our wrist um today you know here's a little summary of your talk she says nobody has

0:37ever ever has time to do customer success unless you have a team member and especially if you're a solo founder automation can help do the heavy lifting jane shares customer success automation recipes from easy to advanced and these come from first hand experience so jane portman welcome to the microcomp stage hi rob hello excited to be here where is this uh yeah there's a pdtp that's awesome twinsies yeah well awesome i'm gonna head backstage and i'm just gonna let you take it from here you can dive right in awesome awesome so customer success for sas is something that everybody says we should do everybody knows for sure we should do it's like

1:20eat less exercise and you'll be fit the same way all sas founders should be doing customer success but unfortunately it's a never-ending battle really you never have time you always have priorities other priorities and this yells problems you can't yet afford a dedicated team member you don't have time to do it proactively yeah sure you have time to go through your support inbox maybe even have a special team member to do that but there is no system for proactively finding those touch points for your customers as a result you're probably doing nothing at all and that results in poor adoption and high churn there is so much money on the

2:06table and hopefully in this talk we can help you use some of those easy opportunities in in the form of set and forget which has customer success or automation and no code as the theme for this conference is absolutely sort of an equivalent to that because no code is the glue that holds all your customer success tools together that passes over information from your crm to your messaging tools to your survey tools to everything to your team slack and today we're going to dive into some of those opportunities firsthand i'd love to dive into the anatomy of customer success automation first you need to identify the touch

2:52point to figure out that best moment to get in touch with your customers then goes the glue zapier or similar and then the action is what you're to do how you're going to get in touch with your customer the glue that holds it together can be zapier of course is the most popular no code automation system on the web can be integromat which uh so we know can be a little bit more advanced than zapier it can be your crm with some native integrations or a combination of crm and zapier it also can be native integration between tools directly but we're not really caring about tools

3:33per se would love to establish the framework and to decompose the action it can mean different things it can be an email sent to your customer when something happens it can be an in-app notification inside your product can be messaged through any other channels sms posts etc it can be a survey tool that pops up a survey inside your product or it can be a nudge to your customer success team to do something manually to talk to your customers and as you see in this schemes there will be red there will be black areas which mean something happening there will be gray areas which mean the automation glue or

4:18the condition there will be little red areas like here which mean the actual manual work that you have to do and you will see that most of these little graphs today will be primarily not red and those little red things are the manual thing menu involvement that um really is the top of the iceberg that you can do manually to keep the relationship personal while the automation does they have lifting for you and all these opportunities those customer success touch points will come into your slack inbox or into your customer's support inbox and this way you will have to do this reactively not proactively so let's start with some of those

5:04recipes and let's start with the easy ones first opportunity that is always on the table is to nurture and greet new demos and what typically happens is a new demo arrives in your calendar tools such as calendly or cevical or whatever scheduling system you use and then you just wait and do nothing until the call and the best and there is lost opportunity right there because the traction is really pretty high when the user is interested in a demo so there are two things that can happen when a new demo appears one is you can or you absolutely should in fact send that lead to your crm or

5:46your email automation tool and then nurture this lead with email automation tell them how they can prepare for the demo and maybe tell them more about the product and this way you can spend less time during the call going over the basics another thing you can do is to send information about that demo to your support inbox so that the customer success agent can greet them manually why is it better to send to inbox directly because your inbox is sort of a to-do list for your customer support agent and even if they don't do any proactive work the email is just landing there and they have no other way but to

6:27deal with it they also can simply respond to this email and this will just minimize the steps they have to take and everybody likes to have a personal check-in after they booked a demo with you another automation is based on zapier lead score and not everybody knows about that but this is an automated lead scoring system which is built right into zapier and provided by them they help you identify high value leads and customers and the way it works um i'm gonna show you on the next slide any new lead or new customer comes into your crm you can run them through that zap here lead scoring system and if the lead

7:12score exceeds a certain value you can then notify the customer success team either via slack or again through the customer success customer support inbox so that they can manually reach out to the most promising accounts so you probably if somebody uh registers from a microcon micro soft uh email address um you probably want to know about this and this way you can spot promising leads right away another one is reactivating cancelled accounts pretty much on the table when a new cancellation happens you can send the information to support inbox so that they can so that you can drop them a personal email once again or you can alternatively or

8:02simultaneously send this information to your email automation crm and first you can automate this uh initial question like why you cancelled and then after two three months you can send them a magical reactivation email and this recipe belongs to cory hines what he does he sent he says that this email has the highest response rate after a few months that a trial has expired uh they they send an email to them them saying name one biggest reason why why you failed to sign up for our tool and it's typically the objections that are very very easy to combat and this way you can very easily recover

8:54uh cancel trials with very little effort and what's best this kind of reactivation email is um sent automatically so all you have to do is see the subjection in your inbox and respond to it webinars there is so much you can do there and the typical webinar software uses reminders and uh and post webinar emails to send some information but you should definitely go beyond that first you should send those leads to see to your crm and then just treat them as your regular leads a good tip there is to do that after webinar ends for example we use livestorm for our webinars and they have different types of

9:42triggers and the best way is to send those leads to your email automation tool right after the event ends not not when they register so that when by the time they start receiving emails from you they already know what's going on and once again you can apply the zapier lead score trick and send reminders to slack when there is a promising lead among those webinar registrations so that you can again greet them and nurture them manually pre-recorded demos are sort of a subset of webinars and you can use the same webinar software to implement them they're great because they can help you save time they can help you capture more leads and

10:31they're great for capturing those introverted customers who are never gonna get on a demo we've done uh we've implemented this a few months ago and never really looked back it has reduced the number of demos in our calendar agreeably that can be a good thing or a bad thing but ultimately it's a great time saver but we ended up doing our own implementation using the email automation tool when a new demo signs up you can send delete to cerium use this regular autoresponder to deliver the demo video then you can nurture them with email automation and it once again if the zapier lead score is great you can send

11:17the reminder to slack to investigate manually we find that on this screen that manual implementation using a single single form field helps to reduce the friction and improve conversions previously we used to do this pre-recorded demos with live storm which also worked great but they have a number of fields you have to fill out on a separate screen and we just think that kind of funnel really doesn't help conversions let's move to the advanced part and this includes certain developer work to integrate your customer data but then you can use that to do a ton of other no code things so the way this works is you send

12:06behavior data through an api or some other way to your crm like userlist then you can segment users based on that behavior data and then when users join a certain segment you can do a variety of different things and segmentation is always at the core of all the automation we run i'd like to introduce you to overall general graph that's applicable to all sas companies that run on a free trial model and you can see that each segment typically has their own goal for example for the trialing users your goal is to activate them with basic onboarding when joining paying customers your goal is to focus on customer success and promote

12:54advanced features when they join the segment advanced users your goal is to nurture them with customer loyalty campaigns with expired trials you go to is to reactivate them and you just link those segments with your campaigns or whatever other automation you do you can also do this manually if you want but really our goal is to reduce the workload same picture for the freeman model model the goal for free users is to activate them and then once they are activated you just put them into ever running um upgrade campaign until they convert to paid and then goes the same customer loyalty and advanced features first the anatomy of a classic user and

13:40boarding campaign looks like this it's super simple and we found that behavior based doesn't necessarily have to mean if user does something you send them something it's actually if they don't do a certain thing then you offer them help for it for example the first couple emails you would send to everybody and then if they're not using feature a for example you can offer them help for a you can offer them a specific call for example or either and then if they're not using feature b you can offer them help for feature b this is really as easy and it keeps the irrelevant emails to the minimum

14:25then come the customer loyalty campaigns and the special sauce with the customer loyalty campaign is that nobody does them nobody does them well and very few people really care about it maybe that's because sas founders always have other things to worry about probably so but and it's also not clear what the roi is but really building customer loyalty with existing customers is one of the simplest tasks and it has great ri in terms of turning them into fans and i'd like to bring up this principle by gary weinercheck in one of his old books called jab jab jab right hook and the idea behind this is that you should

15:10balance um what you ask and what you give in your emails of course you should be striving for forgiving something and you all but you should definitely balance that information with asking for stuff because when you ask for something people also increase their commitment there are some things you can give for example different types of calls training resources events terms deals discounts gifts or swag whatever and you can ask for feedback in form of service or just just simple plain tell me and respond you can ask for referrals and you can ask for testimonials so your idea is to build a single customer loyalty campaign that

15:59once in a blue moon would target your best active customers with this kind of requests i'd like to decompose a couple of those recipes um which are particularly helpful one is automating your swag and um i just i just had to talk with somebody um from sparkloop learning that they have their printful integration so they went farther than this but for a mere mortal swag automation looks like when a user joins segment meaning they meet a certain condition you can send them an email offering swag and then you can use one of the two ways depending on your setup first you can order suggest them to make an order using a

16:51100 discount unfortunately sometimes for example we use cotton club and they still ask for a card even with 100 discount with shipping so we can't really ask our customers for a card even if it's a zero balance so we developed another process we asked them to fill out a form with their details such as size and shipping address and then our customer success manager fulfills the order as they come in so you can choose any of these but this really automates the entire flow except for the fulfillment and even that can be automated and another thing is to automate service which is amazing because it helps you

17:36keep them always relevant you don't have to initiate them manually and you can act on the results well this is of course advanced stuff because really it is not very easy to send your results back to cerium but if you can that'd be a great uh that'd be a great type of automation so the flow here is uh for the user to join a certain segment once again then you can either email them a link to your survey tool or show them a survey inside the product for example one of the tools is refiner then the user fills out the survey and then you can send results back to your

18:18crm then depending on the server results you can again in the automated fashion ask promoters the the best customers for testimonials or referrals or and then you can send yourself a notification to investigate and get in touch with the high risk accounts closing up on today's talk if you can just find one recipe and go home implement that that's already going to be a win because we're all busy and we know but still just setting this up once will liberate you and it will bring you roi for months and years to come and maybe you can get into a taste and keep doing it and don't think that others have figured

19:04out uh seriously you're not alone and even big companies very often are not very um advanced in their email automation and maybe it's going to be one of your strong sides over time we invite you to build your assets which which is exactly what you'll be promoting in your communication if you build great assets um you can then mix and match them uh using different channels different automations uh and this can be docs videos different types of calls whatever you can do really you can build that with time and make it work and we invite you to check out some founders stories and expert stories at

19:47our podcast called better done than perfect season three is about customer success and uh if you ever feel like joining useless then you're qualified as a bootstrapper for 500 credits just start a free trial and let us know at support email address that's it on my site and let's welcome some questions thanks so much jane man i wish i had seen this talk back in the day when i was schlepping shirts in my garage in fresno drip shirts and packing them up in it my kids were too young to do it at the time and i was put stuffing them in an envelope and printing out labels on

20:30stamps.com when our acosta i forget it was like when a customer got x number of conversions or subscribers or something so that was great um some questions are coming in and if you're watching this and you have questions feel free to uh submit them in the gather town chat first question for you jane is what about customer data platforms like segment how do they play into all of this i'm glad that you asked because this is kind of the like advanced level to the advanced level to a certain extent customer data platforms centralize your customer data so that you can plug and play different tools and the most popular one

21:11is segment then there is a newly added competitor called rudder stack they're slightly more friendly on on pricing but i think they're largely following the same principles and some of our customers really swear by those systems because this allows you to try and test different tools without really having to integrate every time so this really levels up your no code game if you say so yep excellent uh next question is a crm the same as your email marketing tool or how do you pick one

21:52crm can mean different things for different people and there is always misunderstanding in the market for example a sales theorem such as close a pipe drive means you are manually organizing leads doing some automated follow-up but mostly like manually moving them through the pipeline on the other hand a lot of modern automation tools are starting to call them sam themselves crm because they that's what you have there drip you know these days is a e-commerce serum i think mailchimp is calling themselves ethereum basically your email database that you can enrich with different behavior information is considered a serum so um can be as easy or as advanced as you

22:36want hubspot is a famous one i'll be not maybe a fantastic choice for sas founders useless can be called a crm technically and we can go as far as even managing accounts instead of single users really any email automation tool can be ethereum but it doesn't doesn't have to be yeah i agree with you that that line has blurred and i think if you think of a crm as your customer all of your customer data the source of truth then that is pretty easy to make the case that you know a a drip or a user list or mailchimp could be that i think if you have a really heavy sales process

23:15and you think of crm as sales automation software which is what some people how some people define it which i think it should then just be called something different but if if that is what you think of crm then i you know they're like you said there are tools hubspot pipedriveclose.com so it just kind of depends on if you're like a marketing heavy or a sales heavy uh company i think yeah the phrase you mentioned the source of truth it's a special pain point because for a lot of sas businesses it's your own admin dashboard and then you just don't trust anything else and then it

23:50can be stripe and we know why email serums are not source of truth because they typically just have a pile of email addresses instead of actual accounts and that just makes it hard to understand what it is yeah very nice let me check uh to see if there are any other questions i actually have a question i think we have we have like one minute before we wrap so your you said um pr the printful integration um or printful works with the integration but you use a company that that doesn't have you considered switching or i guess your company you said ask for credit card upfront even

24:26when you have zero dollar which seems odd but are you able to switch or what's the hang up there yeah we investigated the opportunities about a year ago when we were producing the shirts and unfortunately all those uh print on demand services they still demand you to have your own mini e-commerce store um so there is no like direct way to print a shirt using zapier unfortunately there's there's definitely an open opportunity there maybe even sold by now uh so we went with cotton club and we prepaid a certain number of promo codes 100 promo codes but they were still the way it works they still ask for a

25:08credit card with a zero dollar bill right which we don't want to put our customers through that or friends that's not nice so we just and then we had a certain period when we didn't have the form and we just asked for details via email we just oh my god they forgot the email like their phone number again and then over and over us so we ended up with a form yep very good and i myself have filled out that form and received the t-shirt i wish i had it here in the room but it's uh in the closet it's really nice one yeah a good good good choice so with

25:38that thank you so much for uh for chatting with us today and enlightening us on customer success if folks want to keep up with you you're at userlist.com and what's your twi i didn't look up your twitter handle ui breakfast that's my breakfast excellent thanks jane thank you rob

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