Unbounce’s (formerly Internal) Customer Success Newsletter

Hey, Customer Success peeps — hands up!

…anyone? No?

Yeah, yeah, I’m being dramatic. Yes, Customer Success is a pretty new (and growing!) field but I’ve had the chance to chat with many awesome CS folks at many cool companies and it’s always inspiring to hear what other teams are up to.

But truth be told, I still feel like the black sheep.

Whenever I go to conferences, sessions tend to cover engineering
…or marketing
…or sales
…or product development
…or lean validation
…or funding

Customer Success (heck, customer support) often feels like an afterthought.

So when I was at Learn Startup Conference in December and noticed a talk called Keep Your Executives Close to Your Customers,  I bolted to it straightaway.

tl;dr: The speaker, Usha Viswanathan’s ultimate pearl of wisdom:  you’ll build the best product if your product team is directly connected to your customers.

This has been Unbounce’s M.O. since day 1.

We’ve got an open office (I sit right next to our Director of Product), and our Customer Success team is super vocal when it comes to bugs & feature requests. But each month, we also compile an internal newsletter of data-y goodness to share bugs, issues, feature requests, trends, and customer feedback with the rest of the Unbounce team.

And for the first time, I’m sharing our previously-internal Customer Success Newsletter (News-o-Rama!) on Inside Unbounce.

Have a gander through January’s newsletter (looking back on December 2013).

If you have any questions about how we compile the data, where we source it, and what previous iterations of the newsletter were like, please (please!) let me know. I’m always keen to chat Customer Success with other Black Sheep.

Customer Success News-O-Rama
January 2014

Happy New Year from CS (and Shout Outs!)

Thank you Mitchelle, Ahmed and Lou

While we all enjoyed a break over Christmas, Mitchelle, Alex, Ahmed & Lou diligently covered our inbound support channels to make sure our customers were looked after. Huge props to them for keeping our customers happy.

Cool New Product Mock Ups from Vivi!

The CS team was super excited by the prototype for the new domain set up process. Custom domain configuration is our #1 pain point and we know that improved set up instructions in-app will be super helpful for customers, and hope it will help reduce the number of domain and CNAME related issues we get.

Cole Showcasing Stage #1 of the Anticipated Shared Content Feature!

Since we’re on the phone with customers every day, it really helps to see how our product is evolving to meet our customer needs. Thanks for putting together the video Cole. Pretty cool mock up and we can’t wait to see Stage #2.

Thanks again Devs :)

Thanks to ongoing bug fixes, CS only needed to escalate 27 tickets to the dev team in November (amazing!). We’ve got more customers than ever but that was the fewest number of tickets escalated in 2013. It’s great to see the escalations graph decline.

Big Wins for CS

10 various bug fixes have reduced support issues and have helped CS provide quick solutions for customers.
Constant Contact now supports OAuth2 authentication.
Page title bug related to tags was fixed up.

Top Support Categories

PAGE BUILDER ISSUES 18%
+0% Compared to Nov

BILLING ISSUES 24%
+7% Compared to Nov

Domain issues 10%
-2% Compared to Nov

Most Common Billing Issues

Account Cancellations & Refund Requests

Customers request refunds for the first month’s charge mainly because they forgot to cancel before the trial ends. There’s always a chunk of cancellation tickets because customers are not aware that they can do it themselves.

$1 Charge Inquiry and Payment rejection

Inquiry about either why customers are seeing $1 transactions on their credit cards or the verification of the credit card procedure has failed during signup.

Updated Billing Details

When we can’t bill a customer, they’re notified to update their billing details to prevent their accounts from being suspended. Many customers follow up after they’ve updated their billing deets to ensure their account remains in good standing.

Most Common Page Builder Issues

3rd Party Code

Customers often require support when embedding 3rd party components. Customers trying to embed Lightboxes is one of our leading 3rd party code support issues.

Forms

These tickets tend to vary pretty widely but include multiple columns, horizontal forms, error messaging, form logic, multiple forms per page, multi-step forms (on the same page) or RTL label support.

Images

Mainly tickets are related to image quality on retina screens and scaling the background image.

Most Common Domain Issues

Incorrect DNS Settings

We’re working with the product design team to improve the CNAME setup instructions, this way customers are less dependant on support when they set up everything with their hosting provider.

Setting up the naked domain

Most customers expect the naked domain to work without any action on their part. It’s a quick fix with a 301 redirect or WWWizer. The new domain name instructions design is taking it into consideration to make setting up naked domains an easier process for our customers.

Propagation issues

Lots of eager customers submit support tickets when their domains don’t work immediately. These issues usually solve themselves without intervention once the customers wait a bit.

Top Feature Requests

1. Responsive pages
2. Shared content (cut/copy/paste)
3. SSL
4. Import/Export of pages

New Feature Requests Gaining Traction

1. Auto-save
2. E-commerce integration
3. Get response integration
4. Uploading a file to the form

Requests From Your Favourite CS Team ;)

The Big 4

As you see from our feature requests above, customers are clamouring for responsive, shared content, SSL (and our other major request, dynamic content). We’re really excited to see progress on these and can’t wait to announce them :)

Some Customer Feedback

 

Unbounce has been great – all the reps have been very helpful and professional, and took the time to help me. Considering using Unbounce requires a learning curve, I do appreciate the patience from your team!”

 

“I feel that Unbounce support has elevated the playing field to a new high.”

 

“I received the most phenomenal support! Thank you so much for everything. I’m now one of your biggest fans.”

Cool New Signups in December