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Episode 45 of WP Product Talk dives deep into the world of business and customer experience. You know, we all want to achieve our goals, right? But have you ever wondered how enhancing the customer experience can actually help you skyrocket your business success? Well, my friends, you’re in for a treat because we have an incredible guest joining us today who’s an absolute genius when it comes to WordPress and achieving those business goals through an enhanced customer experience. So, are you ready to unlock the secrets and take your business to the next level? Let’s get started!
0:01 [Music] 0:20 hello and welcome to WP product talk the place where every week we interview an 0:26 experienced WordPress product owner on strategies tips experiences failures and 0:32 successes in running successful and thriving WordPress product businesses I'm Amber Hines CEO of equalized digital 0:38 and maker of the accessibility Checker plugin for WordPress and I'm Katie Keith CEO and 0:45 co-founder of BTU plugins and I am so excited to introduce 0:50 today's topic which is achieving business goals through enhanced customer experience in 0:56 WordPress this is a great topic because no business can succeed without keeping its customers happy but it's not always 1:03 obvious how to do that and of course today we have a special guest here to speak with us and 1:10 our special guest is lesie Sim let me bring her in lesie 1:17 welcome so great to be here thanks for having me would you like to introduce 1:23 yourself for everyone watching yeah I am the right now I'm fiddling with my Zoom 1:31 or my focus but yeah I'm the uh co-founder of newsletter glue uh and 1:37 email newsletter plugin for WordPress we connect to um email service providers 1:42 like MailChimp active campaign and a whole bunch more and that you build and send your newsletters from inside your 1:49 WordPress admin cool great and um before we start 1:55 the um discussion um if you want to ask any questions questions about um how to 2:01 keep customers happy and improve the customer Journey for your WordPress products then feel free to ask your 2:07 questions in the YouTube comments and um we'll answer them live and that is if you're watching live of 2:14 course yep so let's start by talking as we always do about why is this an 2:20 important topic for WordPress product owners so um I'll start and I love this 2:26 topic because when you get it right everyone wins so that's all always a fun thing to work on um the customer wins 2:33 because your product's meeting their needs they've got what they want and they're enjoying using it which is super 2:38 important your business wins because your customers are happy and therefore 2:43 they're more likely to buy your product not get a refund renew it in future tell 2:49 their friend maybe buy your other products or upgrade in the future depending on your business model so by 2:56 having a good customer Journey um that everything just works smoothly which is what everybody wants um but as WordPress 3:04 product owners there's loads we can do to improve customer experience and it's 3:09 actually pretty complex there's so many touch points um at every single possible 3:15 point of the journey that we need to get right so it's definitely worth talking about all of those different things and 3:21 how we can get every single stage right if possible so Leslie why do you think it's 3:27 such an important topic um I mean I I feel like KY you covered it so well already like there's 3:34 so many different touch points in a customers journey and kind of playing 3:39 with what you can and can't do and how much and how little you help customers make such a big difference to whether 3:47 they you know actually come on board or they refund within the first 30 days or whether they stay for years in years or 3:54 they turn out really quickly um and so forth so yeah thank yeah basically dis 4:00 agree with you I think you know it's interesting I I just came back from Cabo press which 4:08 is a business conference um in Mexico quite nice it looked 4:13 amazing uh yes you get to have sessions in the pool but we're not going to talk about that although I don't know as a 4:18 customer experience of a conference attendee I will say it had a very great 4:24 experience which makes me definitely want to go back right um but one of the take and I had so many but one of the 4:31 ones that we've been talking a lot about like in our own product business that I 4:37 I had the opportunity to hear Brenan Dunn um he was talking a lot about 4:43 segmentation and like personalized marketing and and Communications that are not just broad General and of course 4:51 we're recording this on October 11th I just left a meeting about Black Friday 4:57 with my team and that was something that I was like thinking about you know how 5:02 can we improve and make things feel more personal for people and how that will 5:08 really I think we haven't done it yet but I think will like help people to 5:14 want to engage more and and maybe increase our sales and help us to achieve our goals and and I think like 5:22 this customer experience topic is important because there's so many layers 5:27 to it right like you were talking about Katie like the checkout process all the way through right like it's a very 5:33 holistic thing and and you can sort of start like broadly thinking about it and just think okay I'm done like I've 5:38 thought about you know what's my onboarding Wizard and and now I've onboarded them and it's all done but I 5:44 feel like there's a lot that product owners you can just continually laying layering on to the customer experience 5:49 so it's always worth like revisiting I think one thing that um we 5:56 should probably talk about also is like when it comes to customer experience like you said it's like there's like 6:02 unlimited amount of things that you can really do but there has to be some sort of um recognition of like um matching 6:11 the customer experience to the price point and the expectation and the target 6:18 market um because like that's something that we grappled with a lot and I can talk about later but what I wanted to 6:24 say is like so for example if you're in um uh 6:30 lower uh price point with and like your game is high volume low price then you 6:37 know sure you can you know fly out to somebody's house and fix their plug-in 6:43 but really should you right like so so you know there's like um there's that 6:49 kind of like match meet meeting and matching expectations and then like maybe just slightly exceeding them is 6:55 kind of what what you want to do rather than just kind of like oh we have to make the most most perfect customer 7:00 experience um and I think that matters because like sometimes um plug-in owners might get too bugged down in like oh I 7:07 need to spend 100 hours optimizing our checkout but it's like not really and 7:14 likewise with the onboarding likewise the support like actually you know you just need to exceed expectations you don't have to like go so far um Beyond 7:22 them as to waste your own time and eat into your own profit margins well I mean that might be a good 7:29 transend ition into we always like to do Story Time and share our personal experience so do you want to dive in a 7:36 little bit more because you said lesli like you were trying to figure out like how do you match the customer experience 7:42 to your price point and I'd be curious to hear more about your personal Journey 7:47 on that yeah so at the start of this year we repositioned to work with medium to 7:55 large Publishers and we increased our prices significantly and a large 8:02 reason for doing that was because I wanted to provide like a great customer 8:08 experience for a certain type of customer and I found that at our price point we were just unable to do that 8:14 because it basically just meant we were making a loss every single time um customers came and asked for support um 8:22 and you know so like for example we found that we worked best with um like I 8:29 medium to large Publishers and our original price point started at $99 a 8:35 year for a single license and you have these fairly large Publishers with tens 8:40 of thousands of subscribers paying $99 a year to manage all of their newsletters inside of Wordpress and they would have 8:47 really specific and advanced technical questions um or like asking us you know 8:53 um can you uh you know add a filter to do this like very specific thing so that there 8:59 email can display in a certain way and um oh we we've created our own custom 9:04 block for for email and we want to make sure it works and it's like I'm so happy to help you do all of those things but 9:11 it doesn't make sense for us to do that at $99 a year but at the same time like we I 9:17 really liked talking to these people um it was awesome that they were using our product 9:22 and that was kind of ultimately why for me it felt like in order to keep 9:29 um servicing them and giving them the experience that I wanted to give them we had to increase our prices um 9:39 yeah yeah I I think I mean I think that's a really it's it's a a perennial 9:45 topic for WordPress product owners right like what should you charge but I mean we've we've sort of been in that that 9:51 same boat and we've talked a lot about you know like one thing is we don't offer an unlimited site license it's 9:58 always you pay per site um but I think it's the same thing when you have customers that need that high touch um 10:07 you have to figure out how to deliver what you want to deliver to them and 10:13 still make your business profitable so it can stick around to continue delivering the great product that it has 10:19 to people um so I I have totally been there and and I know um what you're 10:25 you're saying on the on the flip side you know something that was always shocked by and impressed and I don't 10:31 know if they still do it maybe you both know but I remember the first time that I bought give for a client site which 10:39 would have been like I don't know eight years ago or something it was a long time ago it was pretty new and then like 10:46 a couple weeks later I got a phone call from them and they just like wanted to check in and see how using the plug-in 10:52 was and that was the first time that had ever happened with a WordPress product 10:58 and I don't know of any other products that do it it's something that we've talked a lot about like can we add that 11:03 to our customer experience um but but it's sort of an interesting thing you 11:09 know because that's not an especially it's not an Enterprise price right it's it follows more traditional though 11:16 profitable WordPress plug-in prices and yet they still were dedicating a team member to to call and provide that more 11:26 what felt like a more Hands-On personalized customer experience so yeah I think give are 11:32 really leading the way in that um and it there's implications as well like even 11:37 having a telephone number fied on the checkout which obviously they need in order to call them and that's really 11:43 interesting I've been aware very recently of kind of a gap in the experience for our customers which is 11:49 that customers very regularly ask to have some sort of a call with us um this is for either pre-sales or postsales 11:57 support they just want to talk through either a problem or their exact use case 12:02 and get advice and we don't do that we um have we have live chat on our website 12:09 when someone's available and we have email support like most plug-in companies but if you look at the SAS 12:16 industry they pretty much exclusively do live chat now um and um some do calls 12:23 the more expensive one so I've been trying to think about what is appropriate at our price point should we 12:29 be agreeing to calls because I know that we are doing regular refunds when we probably could have resolved it with a 12:35 call but the customer just can't be bothered to explain on email they may not be great with typing or English or 12:42 whatever and we are not accommodating their needs and they want their journey to include uh calls um and very few I 12:50 think WordPress companies are currently doing that and it's interesting that Giver being proactive in doing that 12:56 rather than just reactive yeah I think I be really curious to know 13:02 how many customers give does that for like is it every single Customer because that would be crazy um or is it just you 13:10 know handpick and and you just happen to be one of the lucky ones um yeah I don't know yeah and like 13:18 where's Matt when you need so I could add we yeah we um at our 13:29 not at our our single site but our five site and above plans we have two things 13:35 one is a personalized onboarding call so after they purchase they get an email 13:40 that looks like it's from me that is like here's a link to book a 30 minute call with Amber and most 13:49 people do that and we decided to add 13:55 that in I mean we were we decided okay well we can't be profitable with this at the single sight license but so we're 14:01 like this might motivate some people to go up to a five-site license it's also been really helpful for us like we're 14:06 talking about like how can we enhance the customer experience in a way that it achieves our goals well one we're really 14:13 a small team our product is relatively new it hasn't been tested on like all 14:18 the right like I don't know when jetpack releases an update they've probably tested it on at least 50 different 14:24 themes and right so the interesting thing about these calls is feel like it can help us a little bit with churn 14:31 because we haven't built out an onboarding wizard yet and and it's not always totally clear what people are 14:37 supposed to do with our Plugin or or they might know like how to use the 14:45 plugin but they're seeing errors and they don't understand them or maybe even they are a false positive or something because it's something that came up in 14:51 an environment that we just haven't been able to test on and so it does double duty I think it helps with getting 14:58 people up and running but also it gives me a look behind the scenes at people's websites and what our plugin is doing in 15:05 those environments and I sometimes leave those and I like open geub issues U so it's it's like 15:13 sneaky customer surveying because I can also talk to them you know like what brought you here what motivated you to 15:19 buy like all of that kind of stuff without them feeling like they're participating in a customer survey like 15:25 they think they're getting something from me right because I we figured out how to balance that and that has been 15:31 really useful and um you know if if we get to a certain scale point we might have to have other team members doing 15:37 them and not just me um but it's it's been really helpful and then the other thing that we do along that same line is 15:44 um every other Wednesday those same license plans I have an open Office 15:51 hours um that anyone can join and it's a zoom and basically in their plug-in 15:57 dashboard I think there's like an add-on for Ed that we sell with where you can 16:04 use it to restrict messaging to people that hold certain product licenses or or 16:10 have purchased have a certain subscription so just on their main dashboard screen we have something that 16:16 restricts if they only have those plugins and then it basically has a message and a link over to zoom where 16:22 they could go schedule we require people to register because I want to know in advance like who's coming and there's 16:27 just a thing that's like do you have any questions sometimes people are just like nope just coming to hang out and other times people will give me in advance 16:34 what their questions are um but both of those I feel like have really enhanced the customer experience and have helped 16:40 us to better understand how people are using our product and to you know see 16:47 issues yeah I love all of that because um I like the idea of doing it for 16:53 certain price points because one it makes it profitable for you but two it 16:59 also might encourage people to upgrade you could I don't know if you do but you could potentially advertise that as a 17:05 perk of the higher licenses like we have faster guaranteed response times for 17:10 more expensive licenses so it's a way of enhancing that I suppose um so there's 17:16 lots of good things about that but also the fact that you have this friendly looking but automated email means you 17:23 don't have to collect their phone number on the checkout necessarily it puts is maybe a little bit less resource heavy 17:29 than what give do because they only have to talk if they want to talk we do 17:35 actually collect the phone number too because our goal is to do phone calls 17:40 it's optional though we didn't make it a required field so Katie do you do office hours I 17:47 feel like um you know what em was saying about office hours is kind of a good 17:53 middle ground for your plugins cuz they're not I strug with we 18:00 have to so many different plugins if office hours is a shared thing where 18:06 anybody who's on the call can listen in we're going to be talking about plugins that they're not interested in so we 18:13 might have one person who's really want detailed questions about building a document library and all the woocommerce 18:20 people aboard then so on the one hand it might educate them about other plugins which they then end up buying on the 18:26 other we sell such a diverse range I don't know if a shared call would be 18:34 useful yeah I mean we've talked about what does the future of office hours look like even just as we scale our user 18:40 base like right now it's pretty easy I think the most I've ever had come to office hours was eight but frequently 18:46 it's like three or four people so we can divide an hour very easily among three 18:53 or four people um you know so then we've talked about what happens if suddenly 18:59 the demand is it's like 50 people are coming and then it's almost has to be a little bit more like a webinar you have 19:04 to have submitted your question in advance we're only going to pick some of them which is not as useful right so then it's talking about do we put offer 19:11 them more frequently and then we have to have more Staffing on that um or do we divide them by industry and be like this 19:17 is the government office hours this is the education office you know I don't know from a I can imagine that'd be 19:23 challenging for you too when you have so many different plugins like would you do a lot 19:28 but just doing one and see what happens yeah we could let's say you had 19:34 four people in an hour if one person has to wait 45 minutes for their turn is are 19:41 they bored waiting is the other the other customers questions like really specific or can everybody learn no 19:49 generally everybody can learn like I don't think anybody has ever because that's I said like some people show up with no questions and they just want to 19:55 listen so because all also o do they're not always just like plug-in usage 20:01 questions a lot of times we've been using that because people have questions about how do they fix an accessibility 20:08 problem that the plugin has identified on their website and our our support 20:14 does not include that but at office hours I'm willing to do that but like our our support that you pay for is how 20:21 to use the plugin not us teaching you how to code accessibility fixes right 20:26 why are you willing to do that in office hours because customer experience 20:34 ktie yeah customer experience if we didn't if we did it in 20:39 our support thread I think it would overrun our our support and also um our 20:47 our main support person is not like an accessibility 20:52 expert yes right so that would also probably increase our support costs if we had to have a 20:58 really experienced Dev answering questions about like how do I fix these 21:06 links in my nav menu that are actually supposed to be buttons like like the 21:11 amount of time it might take to provide code for that yeah I kind of meant the other way 21:17 around really that if that's normally not included in the support why do they 21:22 get more in office hours but yeah it is a more public way of and conversational 21:27 BAS way isn't it yeah and I I think it's just like an added value typically who 21:34 comes to office there everyone's want will have like a higher ed institution but typically it's agencies and so we're 21:40 trying to like provide value that makes them want to continue using the plugin and feel support supported from us so 21:49 yeah interesting I think like this is another really good um kind of pillar of customer experience 21:58 um that the fact that you know customers are not using um the accessibility 22:06 Checker just to check their accessibility they're actually using it because they care about accessibility and they want to make their entire 22:12 website better and like this comes back to you know like I guess like jobs to be done kind of kind of a thing um I'm not 22:19 sure if you've both heard of that framework before um but it's that's like 22:26 a a Content writing but why don't for our audience or all of our viewers maybe you could summarize it h pressure um 22:34 jobs to be done is kind of like a really popular product management framework um that helps you think about what job a 22:43 customer is trying to achieve rather than what feature you're trying to build for them so the really famous I forgot 22:52 um so the founder was the the person that came up with the idea was this guy called clay Christian 22:58 who has now um unfortunately passed away but the um really popular example that he 23:05 would talk about is milkshakes in McDonald's and um McDonald's hired him 23:12 and his uh company to figure out how to sell more milkshakes and instead of you 23:17 know thinking about you know going straight into the features like oh how do we make a more delicious milkshake how do we add more flavors how do we you 23:24 know change the packaging they were like okay let's look at the customers job to be done and it turned out that the 23:29 customer job to be done wasn't you know milkshakes for dessert with their burgers it was um it turned out that 23:37 they were selling a lot of milkshakes in the morning and it was because um drivers like truck drivers or people 23:43 driving long distances were looking for um something that they could eat in the morning that was really easy and they 23:50 could eat while driving these really long distances 2 hours 4 hours and you know eating a milkshake um was easier 23:57 than like trying to hold a burger or like pancakes in the morning um and it was just a spilling and so um when they 24:05 realized that was the job of the milkshake they were able to um make the 24:11 milkshake like more nutritious or more breakfasty and I think that like enabled 24:16 them to sell more milkshakes and so in um our case or in Amber case let's say 24:23 for example um the accessibility Checkers job to be done isn't just to 24:28 like show up these you know like check marks or like xes yeah like that's not the job to be 24:35 done right like the job of the agency is to um build an accessible website for 24:41 their customers and so if you think about it kind of holistically then 24:46 office hours is part of the product because it's helping agencies with their job of building um better more 24:53 accessible websites likewise for me right like with newslet glue um my 24:58 customers aren't coming to me because they want um email ready blocks that 25:04 they can use in the blog editor um they're coming to me because they want to build faster newsletters or they want 25:09 to um streamline their newsletter operations or they want to grow go their 25:14 subscriber count so you know I consider um my podcast sticky podcast where I 25:20 interview newsl Publishers like part of my product because that helps them with 25:25 their job to be done um in terms of figuring out like how do I get more subscription Revenue how do I um reduce 25:32 turn and stuff like that um and I think like that's kind of a really important way to think about it because I think 25:39 customers think about it that way as well like they consider everything that you provide um part of the value that 25:46 they're getting from you when they become a customer now that was a good explanation 25:53 of the framework you're the right person to Define it so this is this is interesting 26:00 we were talking about pricing a little bit and uh Peter angrel said a favorite 26:06 pricing plan includes annual renewals at a discount most experienced users need less support and the discount makes it 26:12 hard to cancel I wonder why it isn't used anymore um I'm curious if either of you 26:20 have thoughts because we were talking about like pricing as part of customer experience and all that kind of stuff 26:29 yeah I have done this in the past so we need to distinguish between manual and 26:36 subscription renewals so with the manual ones it is quite well documented that 26:42 it's good to have some sort of discount at least at some stage of the process 26:48 like at Barn two we offer a discount I think if they don't renew by the renewal 26:54 date so they've canceled their subscription they've let it expire they've ignored several reminders like 27:01 your subscription will expire in two weeks and all of that your your license key rather and so at some point we do 27:08 start offering a discount um but the other side of that is the subscription 27:13 renewals that will happen automatically and I think quite a few plug-in companies have done the maths including 27:19 ourselves which is that the percentage of additional renewals you get from 27:25 having a discount does not make from the Lost revenue of taking of giving 27:31 everybody a discount so let's say you give 20% discount on all your automatic 27:37 renewals um if you didn't do that you wouldn't get 20% more renewals if that 27:43 makes sense therefore it's less profitable so um a lot of people these 27:49 days tend to be having renewals for people that are in danger of being lost anyway um I know that's not necessarily 27:56 the most customer focused uh way to describe that that's the kind of the business um perspective on it uh 28:03 but that's how a lot of people are doing it yeah I think I think it probably 28:10 comes down to like you said it's it's a business decision and I don't know if it makes as much sense to discount but I 28:17 think you know too sure more experienced users need less support um that is 28:24 probably true but your cost as a product developer don't necessarily go down over 28:31 time for those people even if they're not asking for support in theory you're supporting your product by adding new 28:38 features or you know improving things when like phpa gets deprecated right 28:44 like like and you have to go go back and make updates to your code and and continuing to do that stuff so I think I 28:52 think that's probably why more people move to the automated subscriptions and it's just the same price or maybe you 28:58 discount the first year to try and get people in and then in hopes that they'll renew it full price and not cancel so I 29:05 think the that discounted renewal thing um is an artifact of the time before 29:13 this before subscriptions were a thing to begin with so what I mean by that is you know there was a time not that long 29:20 ago where um plugins were pay once used forever and then if you know maybe two 29:26 years later the pl plugin developer might update the plugin and then you pay for it again if you want it if not you 29:31 could just use that same plugin forever um and then as subscriptions became a 29:37 thing um plug-in owners or developers were suddenly faced with how do I get people to pay for subscriptions where 29:44 they were previously just paying uh for a single lifetime license or paying once 29:50 and using it forever and then they were like oh we could do discounts um and so you know that that that's kind of where 29:58 the that's kind of how that started and like that's how that step went and then as people got used to the idea of 30:05 subscriptions um having to do the discount um wasn't like it wasn't really 30:12 necessary to do the discounts anymore because people were familiar with the idea and comfortable with the idea of um 30:18 paying annually for subscriptions um and I think like it's really great that we're trending away 30:25 from that because you know in the stone ages when we had when it was all just pay once and use forever 30:33 you know all the plugin owners were able to make that much money and you know that also as a result means you don't 30:39 get as good plugins people aren't constantly improving on it not giving good support and you know lots of B 30:45 stuff snowballs on from there and that was yeah that was not good customer experience customers 30:53 thought it was good that they'd pay once like $29 for a plug-in on code Canyon 30:59 for Lifetime updates but it wasn't in their interest because so many of them 31:04 went out of business and were discontinued because um as Amber was just saying there are ongoing 31:10 development costs to maintain a plug-in and keep it going for the future so it 31:15 wasn't sustainable and it is actually in the customer's interest for the business 31:20 to be profitable and sustainable because it's so frustrating we've all had it 31:25 many times a plug in we're using stops existing and you have that dilemma do we 31:31 replace it with something else do we keep using it what if there's security problems do we Fork it if we're in the 31:36 industry and can do that is not a good situation and I think also plins have 31:43 just gotten sorry um I think plugins have just gotten more advanced and 31:48 complex over time like um you know none of us have a memberships Plugin or um 31:56 like a learning management system unless KY you I'm not sure you have you have 32:02 you're referring to platform plugins really ex none of us have a platform plugin yeah and you know if you're if 32:09 you're doing that then if I if my entire membership business was running on a platform plug-in I'm not going to want 32:15 to just like pay $49 once and use it for the next 10 years like I I want to pay 32:20 you know lots of money so that they're making it really good and they're going to be there when I need support and all 32:26 of the things yeah I'm curious so we talked about that 32:33 um one of our our me main goals for this episode was talking about achieving 32:39 business goals with enhanced customer experience but I think what might be interesting for some people is even stepping back and i' I'd be curious what 32:46 either of you do when you're planning to even identify what those business goals 32:53 are that are connected to customer experience because we all have business goals that are sort of irrelevant to 32:58 customer experience to some degree but like how how would somebody who's trying to figure that out like what are the 33:04 goals I should have and which ones are relevant or does my customer experience really impact do do either of you have 33:12 tips or thoughts on that I think um what you mentioned 33:20 earlier about onboarding and retention and just 33:25 that early sales call thing is kind of how um is I I think I did I followed a 33:31 very very similar path um and so what I found was 33:37 that if I don't there are some customers who obviously buy my plug-in use it 33:43 never contact me um and they are perfectly happy and that's great but then it's it always kind of makes me 33:50 really sad when someone buys a plug-in um couldn't get it to work and for for 33:57 for like completely easy reason like easy to fix reasons and you know if only I could have gotten them on a phone call 34:04 um you know it would have been great or someone is using us but they're not using us in a great way so you know 34:11 they're having like an okay experience but just because they weren't aware of certain features um they you know they 34:18 had like a five out of 10 or like six out of 10 experience when they actually should have been having an eight out of 10 experience because we have the 34:23 features um to make it an eight out of 10 10 out of 10 experience for them and so like for me I love kind of getting on 34:31 calls or doing things to enhance that customer experience to give them that 34:37 eight out of 10 um experience or 10 out of 10 experience um and I do get on 34:42 sales calls often where like the customer is like oh actually we already played a demo we're like pretty sure we 34:48 want to buy this um we just wanted to get a call to make sure that we weren't missing out on features or we weren't or 34:55 or we wanted to share our workflow with you so that you can tell us what's you know what are the best practices and I 35:00 love those calls because I'm like yes let's like help like I want to help you 35:08 I'm glad that you're helping me help you make you awesome that makes sense um 35:14 yeah yeah so yeah on onboarding and retention is is the summary of all the 35:21 stuff that I just said absolutely yeah because the business goal is to retain 35:27 the customer um well get them in the first place which means the customer Journey on your website needs to be good 35:35 um or you never get the customer and once they've made that purchase then the goal is to retain them initially by not 35:43 having them have a refund and then subsequently to continue renewing in the future so for me it's about thinking 35:51 about every single stage of that Journey for the customer so when they first 35:56 first by your website then how are they on boarded um for example we use Easy 36:02 Digital downloads um with their per product emails add-on which allows us to 36:07 send a personalized email depending on what plugin they've bought and that contains in very brief instructions on 36:15 how to get started with that plug-in so they get the receipt email with their license key and whatever and they also 36:21 get U instructions so they can get started straight away we we've done um 36:27 setup Wizards for each plugin so that when you install it on the first activation a setup wizard opens which 36:34 was inspired by the woocommerce setup wizard um so that it guides them through 36:39 all the key settings and then it signposts them to what to do next so for example if they want to create um 36:46 product filters in woocommerce it will send them to the Creator filter page after the wizard so they choose their 36:53 settings activate the license key and then they are guided to to the right place so hopefully that will help them 36:59 to with the onboarding so that they're less likely to get a refund and we also 37:05 have a email sequence so I think after three days we email just to check in with them and say How are you getting on 37:12 um I'd love to um enhance that to do what amber does about offering them a call or um office hour sort of a joint 37:20 call or whatever um so that they've got a more personal um way of getting 37:25 support but even so they can reply to that email we wouldn't do no reply address that's terrible for customer 37:32 experience don't do no reply emails anybody um so they can just reply or use 37:38 our Support Center or whatever and then when we have emails 37:43 every few months with some tips on how to get the most out of the plugin which ramps up a bit before renewal time as 37:51 well um at which point we offer them an a it's like a free or audit or health 37:58 check of how they're using the plug-in so we'll they can just reply to the email and we'll take a lot a look at 38:04 their site and say are you using it to its full potential are there any new features you're not making the most of 38:10 and that's like just a few weeks before Ren to kind of remind them we're still here we can still help you support is 38:17 still available there is ongoing value so um all of those things hopefully work 38:22 together to achieve the business goals by making the customer 38:28 happy and we've got another comment which is from one of my team members actually um who's um talking about what 38:36 Leslie mentioned does it follow that as a customer you get what you pay for so you pay a lot one time low fee for a 38:43 plugin and then don't expect much for it so what do you think Leslie uh the short answer is yes I mean 38:52 I I have plugins that I pay $49 a year for and I don't you know I don't expect 39:00 anything um I try not to renew every I like renew every other year like it's 39:05 it's a tiny little plugin that I could probably just um code myself but like uh it's easier to just pay $49 every other 39:12 year to get like alternate year updates for and like it's enough you know what I would say though 39:19 to like push back on that a tiny bit is we're all sitting here from the seat of 39:24 being product owners so we have a different perspective I think on what it 39:30 takes to build a product and how that relates to pricing than maybe the 39:35 average WordPress user and I don't know that the average WordPress user 39:42 always thinks low price I expect not very much 39:47 from this plugin high price it's totally worth it and it's going to do a lot for 39:53 me right like I think sometimes there Price shopping completely um not always 40:00 sometimes it's about ease of use right um but I think there are definitely people who don't pay a lot for plugins 40:08 and yet still expect probably even more than they really should expect for for 40:13 that PL I mean there are people that expect a lot out of free plugins on wordpress.org and get mad when it doesn't do things and they go right back 40:20 and I I'm just like why it's free someone's donating this to you so 40:27 yeah I you know websites like code Canyon have a lot to answer for don't they for selling everything so cheaply 40:34 you can get a really complex platform type plug-in for very very little money 40:39 on those sites and the reason it's cheap is because it's not sustainable as a business model um but they people expect 40:47 other companies to follow suit don't they yeah yeah I I I think we need to 40:55 transition over to our best advice because we try to hang out about um 45 41:02 minutes or so uh lesie do you want to start what's your best advice for new 41:09 product owners or existing product owners who want to try and enhance their 41:14 customer experience um yeah I think I want to go back 41:20 to um that question and like what I said earlier as as well um at the start about 41:29 kind of you know the customer experience has to be um had the boundaries of the customer 41:37 experience has to be the business goals and like what's realistic for the business because you don't want to you 41:44 know fly over to someone's house to fix the thing when they're paying $49 a year 41:49 um and as and like that's why this is a business podcast and not a podcast for 41:55 like CER customers to teach them how to abuse business owners um and yeah so I 42:03 think like at the end of the day um as a business owner you have to be really clear about what makes business sense 42:08 for you and think about customer experience from the goal of like you 42:17 have to start from what business goal am I achieving with my customer experience 42:23 right because there are like lots of cases where your goal is actually to get a million down a million downloads and 42:29 charge really low prices and have poor customer experience because that's what that what that is what makes sense for 42:36 your business goal and the shape of your business and so you have to just be 42:41 really clear about that I 42:47 guess what about you Katie I would say to think about your 42:52 customer's Journey from start to finish because that is their experience visiting your website buying the plug-in 42:59 and everything that comes after it so think about what that's like for them and that will give you so many ideas um 43:07 if possible and we haven't touched on this um do some user testing whether it's just a friend or a formal user 43:14 testing service to replicate to experience that journey and tell you 43:20 what it's like rather than because you've got your own kind of um blinkers from being the product owner it's hard 43:26 to have a a fresh objective view of your own product and the experience of your customers you know what the settings 43:33 page is there you put it there and um other people it might not be so obvious 43:38 for example so get feedback and listen to it yeah yeah I think I think both that 43:45 is great advice I'm sort of so I am very much a planner and I have to visualize 43:51 things so I think my advice is a little bit of a combination of both of yours 43:57 but literally put it down on paper so we as um my partners and I sit down at 44:04 least twice a year and write smart goals or modify our smart goals for the year in the middle of the Year based upon 44:10 what we're seeing um so specific measurable achievable um realistic and 44:16 time bound goals and um and then we also 44:22 have done the user Journey mapping and not just go through it but we have 44:27 literal flows that we've made in like a diagram maker weuse slick plan um that's 44:32 sort of like this is a person This Is How They enter this is what the whole experience is and I think spending time 44:39 to create that kind of stuff on paper is really helpful instead of just broadly 44:44 thinking about it um and and it's going to probably have better results when it 44:50 comes to achieving the goals I think the biggest step that I'm going to go towards is seg segmenting better as I 44:57 mentioned at the beginning and and I think we could all probably do more to segment our messaging and what our 45:03 offering is for different people in our audience definitely yeah well thank you 45:11 so much Leslie you've been an amazing guest and it's been a really interesting conversation where we've covered lots of 45:16 different really useful things that I hope people found helpful so thank you very much and special thanks to post 45:24 status for being our green room for WP product talk if you're enjoying these 45:29 shows do us a favor and hit like subscribe share it with your friends and add us into your 45:36 newsletters and most of all we hope we will see you back here next week thanks 45:41 for watching everyone bye bye