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[Music]
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hello and welcome to WP product talk the place where every week we interview an
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experienced WordPress product owner on strategies tips experiences failures and
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successes in running successful and thriving WordPress product businesses I'm Amber Hines CEO of equalized digital
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and maker of the accessibility Checker plugin for WordPress and I'm Katie Keith CEO and
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co-founder of BTU plugins and I am so excited to introduce
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today's topic which is achieving business goals through enhanced customer experience in
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WordPress this is a great topic because no business can succeed without keeping its customers happy but it's not always
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obvious how to do that and of course today we have a special guest here to speak with us and
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our special guest is lesie Sim let me bring her in lesie
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welcome so great to be here thanks for having me would you like to introduce
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yourself for everyone watching yeah I am the right now I'm fiddling with my Zoom
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or my focus but yeah I'm the uh co-founder of newsletter glue uh and
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email newsletter plugin for WordPress we connect to um email service providers
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like MailChimp active campaign and a whole bunch more and that you build and send your newsletters from inside your
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WordPress admin cool great and um before we start
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the um discussion um if you want to ask any questions questions about um how to
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keep customers happy and improve the customer Journey for your WordPress products then feel free to ask your
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questions in the YouTube comments and um we'll answer them live and that is if you're watching live of
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course yep so let's start by talking as we always do about why is this an
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important topic for WordPress product owners so um I'll start and I love this
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topic because when you get it right everyone wins so that's all always a fun thing to work on um the customer wins
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because your product's meeting their needs they've got what they want and they're enjoying using it which is super
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important your business wins because your customers are happy and therefore
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they're more likely to buy your product not get a refund renew it in future tell
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their friend maybe buy your other products or upgrade in the future depending on your business model so by
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having a good customer Journey um that everything just works smoothly which is what everybody wants um but as WordPress
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product owners there's loads we can do to improve customer experience and it's
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actually pretty complex there's so many touch points um at every single possible
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point of the journey that we need to get right so it's definitely worth talking about all of those different things and
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how we can get every single stage right if possible so Leslie why do you think it's
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such an important topic um I mean I I feel like KY you covered it so well already like there's
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so many different touch points in a customers journey and kind of playing
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with what you can and can't do and how much and how little you help customers make such a big difference to whether
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they you know actually come on board or they refund within the first 30 days or whether they stay for years in years or
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they turn out really quickly um and so forth so yeah thank yeah basically dis
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agree with you I think you know it's interesting I I just came back from Cabo press which
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is a business conference um in Mexico quite nice it looked
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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
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customer experience of a conference attendee I will say it had a very great
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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
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ones that we've been talking a lot about like in our own product business that I
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I had the opportunity to hear Brenan Dunn um he was talking a lot about
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segmentation and like personalized marketing and and Communications that are not just broad General and of course
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we're recording this on October 11th I just left a meeting about Black Friday
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with my team and that was something that I was like thinking about you know how
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can we improve and make things feel more personal for people and how that will
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really I think we haven't done it yet but I think will like help people to
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want to engage more and and maybe increase our sales and help us to achieve our goals and and I think like
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this customer experience topic is important because there's so many layers
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to it right like you were talking about Katie like the checkout process all the way through right like it's a very
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holistic thing and and you can sort of start like broadly thinking about it and just think okay I'm done like I've
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thought about you know what's my onboarding Wizard and and now I've onboarded them and it's all done but I
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feel like there's a lot that product owners you can just continually laying layering on to the customer experience
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so it's always worth like revisiting I think one thing that um we
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should probably talk about also is like when it comes to customer experience like you said it's like there's like
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unlimited amount of things that you can really do but there has to be some sort of um recognition of like um matching
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the customer experience to the price point and the expectation and the target
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market um because like that's something that we grappled with a lot and I can talk about later but what I wanted to
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say is like so for example if you're in um uh
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lower uh price point with and like your game is high volume low price then you
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know sure you can you know fly out to somebody's house and fix their plug-in
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but really should you right like so so you know there's like um there's that
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kind of like match meet meeting and matching expectations and then like maybe just slightly exceeding them is
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kind of what what you want to do rather than just kind of like oh we have to make the most most perfect customer
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experience um and I think that matters because like sometimes um plug-in owners might get too bugged down in like oh I
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need to spend 100 hours optimizing our checkout but it's like not really and
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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
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them as to waste your own time and eat into your own profit margins well I mean that might be a good
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transend ition into we always like to do Story Time and share our personal experience so do you want to dive in a
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little bit more because you said lesli like you were trying to figure out like how do you match the customer experience
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to your price point and I'd be curious to hear more about your personal Journey
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on that yeah so at the start of this year we repositioned to work with medium to
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large Publishers and we increased our prices significantly and a large
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reason for doing that was because I wanted to provide like a great customer
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experience for a certain type of customer and I found that at our price point we were just unable to do that
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because it basically just meant we were making a loss every single time um customers came and asked for support um
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and you know so like for example we found that we worked best with um like I
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medium to large Publishers and our original price point started at $99 a
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year for a single license and you have these fairly large Publishers with tens
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of thousands of subscribers paying $99 a year to manage all of their newsletters inside of Wordpress and they would have
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really specific and advanced technical questions um or like asking us you know
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um can you uh you know add a filter to do this like very specific thing so that there
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email can display in a certain way and um oh we we've created our own custom
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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
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it doesn't make sense for us to do that at $99 a year but at the same time like we I
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really liked talking to these people um it was awesome that they were using our product
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and that was kind of ultimately why for me it felt like in order to keep
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um servicing them and giving them the experience that I wanted to give them we had to increase our prices um
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yeah yeah I I think I mean I think that's a really it's it's a a perennial
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topic for WordPress product owners right like what should you charge but I mean we've we've sort of been in that that
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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
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always you pay per site um but I think it's the same thing when you have customers that need that high touch um
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you have to figure out how to deliver what you want to deliver to them and
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still make your business profitable so it can stick around to continue delivering the great product that it has
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to people um so I I have totally been there and and I know um what you're
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you're saying on the on the flip side you know something that was always shocked by and impressed and I don't
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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
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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
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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
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was and that was the first time that had ever happened with a WordPress product
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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
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to our customer experience um but but it's sort of an interesting thing you
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know because that's not an especially it's not an Enterprise price right it's it follows more traditional though
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profitable WordPress plug-in prices and yet they still were dedicating a team member to to call and provide that more
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what felt like a more Hands-On personalized customer experience so yeah I think give are
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really leading the way in that um and it there's implications as well like even
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having a telephone number fied on the checkout which obviously they need in order to call them and that's really
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interesting I've been aware very recently of kind of a gap in the experience for our customers which is
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that customers very regularly ask to have some sort of a call with us um this is for either pre-sales or postsales
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support they just want to talk through either a problem or their exact use case
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and get advice and we don't do that we um have we have live chat on our website
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when someone's available and we have email support like most plug-in companies but if you look at the SAS
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industry they pretty much exclusively do live chat now um and um some do calls
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the more expensive one so I've been trying to think about what is appropriate at our price point should we
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be agreeing to calls because I know that we are doing regular refunds when we probably could have resolved it with a
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call but the customer just can't be bothered to explain on email they may not be great with typing or English or
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whatever and we are not accommodating their needs and they want their journey to include uh calls um and very few I
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think WordPress companies are currently doing that and it's interesting that Giver being proactive in doing that
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rather than just reactive yeah I think I be really curious to know
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how many customers give does that for like is it every single Customer because that would be crazy um or is it just you
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know handpick and and you just happen to be one of the lucky ones um yeah I don't know yeah and like
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where's Matt when you need so I could add we yeah we um at our
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not at our our single site but our five site and above plans we have two things
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one is a personalized onboarding call so after they purchase they get an email
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that looks like it's from me that is like here's a link to book a 30 minute call with Amber and most
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people do that and we decided to add
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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
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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
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talking about like how can we enhance the customer experience in a way that it achieves our goals well one we're really
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a small team our product is relatively new it hasn't been tested on like all
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the right like I don't know when jetpack releases an update they've probably tested it on at least 50 different
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themes and right so the interesting thing about these calls is feel like it can help us a little bit with churn
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because we haven't built out an onboarding wizard yet and and it's not always totally clear what people are
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supposed to do with our Plugin or or they might know like how to use the
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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
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an environment that we just haven't been able to test on and so it does double duty I think it helps with getting
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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
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those environments and I sometimes leave those and I like open geub issues U so it's it's like
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sneaky customer surveying because I can also talk to them you know like what brought you here what motivated you to
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buy like all of that kind of stuff without them feeling like they're participating in a customer survey like
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they think they're getting something from me right because I we figured out how to balance that and that has been
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really useful and um you know if if we get to a certain scale point we might have to have other team members doing
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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
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um every other Wednesday those same license plans I have an open Office
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hours um that anyone can join and it's a zoom and basically in their plug-in
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dashboard I think there's like an add-on for Ed that we sell with where you can
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use it to restrict messaging to people that hold certain product licenses or or
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have purchased have a certain subscription so just on their main dashboard screen we have something that
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restricts if they only have those plugins and then it basically has a message and a link over to zoom where
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they could go schedule we require people to register because I want to know in advance like who's coming and there's
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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
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what their questions are um but both of those I feel like have really enhanced the customer experience and have helped
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us to better understand how people are using our product and to you know see
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issues yeah I love all of that because um I like the idea of doing it for
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certain price points because one it makes it profitable for you but two it
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also might encourage people to upgrade you could I don't know if you do but you could potentially advertise that as a
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perk of the higher licenses like we have faster guaranteed response times for
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more expensive licenses so it's a way of enhancing that I suppose um so there's
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lots of good things about that but also the fact that you have this friendly looking but automated email means you
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don't have to collect their phone number on the checkout necessarily it puts is maybe a little bit less resource heavy
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than what give do because they only have to talk if they want to talk we do
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actually collect the phone number too because our goal is to do phone calls
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it's optional though we didn't make it a required field so Katie do you do office hours I
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feel like um you know what em was saying about office hours is kind of a good
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middle ground for your plugins cuz they're not I strug with we
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have to so many different plugins if office hours is a shared thing where
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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
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might have one person who's really want detailed questions about building a document library and all the woocommerce
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people aboard then so on the one hand it might educate them about other plugins which they then end up buying on the
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other we sell such a diverse range I don't know if a shared call would be
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useful yeah I mean we've talked about what does the future of office hours look like even just as we scale our user
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base like right now it's pretty easy I think the most I've ever had come to office hours was eight but frequently
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it's like three or four people so we can divide an hour very easily among three
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or four people um you know so then we've talked about what happens if suddenly
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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
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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
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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
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is the government office hours this is the education office you know I don't know from a I can imagine that'd be
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challenging for you too when you have so many different plugins like would you do a lot
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but just doing one and see what happens yeah we could let's say you had
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four people in an hour if one person has to wait 45 minutes for their turn is are
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they bored waiting is the other the other customers questions like really specific or can everybody learn no
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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
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listen so because all also o do they're not always just like plug-in usage
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questions a lot of times we've been using that because people have questions about how do they fix an accessibility
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problem that the plugin has identified on their website and our our support
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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
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to use the plugin not us teaching you how to code accessibility fixes right
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why are you willing to do that in office hours because customer experience
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ktie yeah customer experience if we didn't if we did it in
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our support thread I think it would overrun our our support and also um our
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our main support person is not like an accessibility
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expert yes right so that would also probably increase our support costs if we had to have a
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really experienced Dev answering questions about like how do I fix these
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links in my nav menu that are actually supposed to be buttons like like the
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amount of time it might take to provide code for that yeah I kind of meant the other way
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around really that if that's normally not included in the support why do they
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get more in office hours but yeah it is a more public way of and conversational
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BAS way isn't it yeah and I I think it's just like an added value typically who
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comes to office there everyone's want will have like a higher ed institution but typically it's agencies and so we're
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trying to like provide value that makes them want to continue using the plugin and feel support supported from us so
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yeah interesting I think like this is another really good um kind of pillar of customer experience
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um that the fact that you know customers are not using um the accessibility
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Checker just to check their accessibility they're actually using it because they care about accessibility and they want to make their entire
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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
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sure if you've both heard of that framework before um but it's that's like
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a a Content writing but why don't for our audience or all of our viewers maybe you could summarize it h pressure um
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jobs to be done is kind of like a really popular product management framework um that helps you think about what job a
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customer is trying to achieve rather than what feature you're trying to build for them so the really famous I forgot
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um so the founder was the the person that came up with the idea was this guy called clay Christian
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who has now um unfortunately passed away but the um really popular example that he
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would talk about is milkshakes in McDonald's and um McDonald's hired him
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and his uh company to figure out how to sell more milkshakes and instead of you
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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
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know change the packaging they were like okay let's look at the customers job to be done and it turned out that the
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customer job to be done wasn't you know milkshakes for dessert with their burgers it was um it turned out that
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they were selling a lot of milkshakes in the morning and it was because um drivers like truck drivers or people
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driving long distances were looking for um something that they could eat in the morning that was really easy and they
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could eat while driving these really long distances 2 hours 4 hours and you know eating a milkshake um was easier
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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
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realized that was the job of the milkshake they were able to um make the
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milkshake like more nutritious or more breakfasty and I think that like enabled
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them to sell more milkshakes and so in um our case or in Amber case let's say
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for example um the accessibility Checkers job to be done isn't just to
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like show up these you know like check marks or like xes yeah like that's not the job to be
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done right like the job of the agency is to um build an accessible website for
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their customers and so if you think about it kind of holistically then
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office hours is part of the product because it's helping agencies with their job of building um better more
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accessible websites likewise for me right like with newslet glue um my
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customers aren't coming to me because they want um email ready blocks that
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they can use in the blog editor um they're coming to me because they want to build faster newsletters or they want
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to um streamline their newsletter operations or they want to grow go their
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subscriber count so you know I consider um my podcast sticky podcast where I
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interview newsl Publishers like part of my product because that helps them with
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their job to be done um in terms of figuring out like how do I get more subscription Revenue how do I um reduce
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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
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customers think about it that way as well like they consider everything that you provide um part of the value that
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they're getting from you when they become a customer now that was a good explanation
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of the framework you're the right person to Define it so this is this is interesting
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we were talking about pricing a little bit and uh Peter angrel said a favorite
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pricing plan includes annual renewals at a discount most experienced users need less support and the discount makes it
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hard to cancel I wonder why it isn't used anymore um I'm curious if either of you
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have thoughts because we were talking about like pricing as part of customer experience and all that kind of stuff
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yeah I have done this in the past so we need to distinguish between manual and
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subscription renewals so with the manual ones it is quite well documented that
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it's good to have some sort of discount at least at some stage of the process
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like at Barn two we offer a discount I think if they don't renew by the renewal
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date so they've canceled their subscription they've let it expire they've ignored several reminders like
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your subscription will expire in two weeks and all of that your your license key rather and so at some point we do
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start offering a discount um but the other side of that is the subscription
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renewals that will happen automatically and I think quite a few plug-in companies have done the maths including
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ourselves which is that the percentage of additional renewals you get from
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having a discount does not make from the Lost revenue of taking of giving
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everybody a discount so let's say you give 20% discount on all your automatic
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renewals um if you didn't do that you wouldn't get 20% more renewals if that
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makes sense therefore it's less profitable so um a lot of people these
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days tend to be having renewals for people that are in danger of being lost anyway um I know that's not necessarily
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the most customer focused uh way to describe that that's the kind of the business um perspective on it uh
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but that's how a lot of people are doing it yeah I think I think it probably
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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
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think you know too sure more experienced users need less support um that is
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probably true but your cost as a product developer don't necessarily go down over
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time for those people even if they're not asking for support in theory you're supporting your product by adding new
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features or you know improving things when like phpa gets deprecated right
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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
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think that's probably why more people move to the automated subscriptions and it's just the same price or maybe you
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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
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think the that discounted renewal thing um is an artifact of the time before
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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
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ago where um plugins were pay once used forever and then if you know maybe two
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years later the pl plugin developer might update the plugin and then you pay for it again if you want it if not you
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could just use that same plugin forever um and then as subscriptions became a
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thing um plug-in owners or developers were suddenly faced with how do I get people to pay for subscriptions where
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they were previously just paying uh for a single lifetime license or paying once
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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
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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
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subscriptions um having to do the discount um wasn't like it wasn't really
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necessary to do the discounts anymore because people were familiar with the idea and comfortable with the idea of um
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paying annually for subscriptions um and I think like it's really great that we're trending away
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from that because you know in the stone ages when we had when it was all just pay once and use forever
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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
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get as good plugins people aren't constantly improving on it not giving good support and you know lots of B
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stuff snowballs on from there and that was yeah that was not good customer experience customers
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thought it was good that they'd pay once like $29 for a plug-in on code Canyon
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for Lifetime updates but it wasn't in their interest because so many of them
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went out of business and were discontinued because um as Amber was just saying there are ongoing
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development costs to maintain a plug-in and keep it going for the future so it
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wasn't sustainable and it is actually in the customer's interest for the business
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to be profitable and sustainable because it's so frustrating we've all had it
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many times a plug in we're using stops existing and you have that dilemma do we
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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
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industry and can do that is not a good situation and I think also plins have
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just gotten sorry um I think plugins have just gotten more advanced and
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complex over time like um you know none of us have a memberships Plugin or um
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like a learning management system unless KY you I'm not sure you have you have
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you're referring to platform plugins really ex none of us have a platform plugin yeah and you know if you're if
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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
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to just like pay $49 once and use it for the next 10 years like I I want to pay
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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
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of the things yeah I'm curious so we talked about that
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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
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either of you do when you're planning to even identify what those business goals
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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
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goals I should have and which ones are relevant or does my customer experience really impact do do either of you have
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tips or thoughts on that I think um what you mentioned
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earlier about onboarding and retention and just
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that early sales call thing is kind of how um is I I think I did I followed a
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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
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45:41
for watching everyone bye bye