Achieving Business Goals through Enhanced Customer Experience in WordPress

[00:00:20] Amber Hinds: Hello and welcome to WP Product Talk, the place where every week we interview an experienced WordPress product owner on strategies, tips, experiences, failures, and successes in running successful and thriving WordPress product businesses. I'm Amber Hines, CEO of Equalize Digital and maker of the Accessibility Checker plugin for WordPress.

[00:00:43] Katie Keith: I'm Katie Keith, CEO and co-founder of Barn2 Plugins.

[00:00:48] Amber Hinds: And I am so excited to introduce today's topic, is achieving business goals through enhanced customer experience in WordPress.

[00:00:57] Katie Keith: This is a great topic because no business can succeed without keeping its customers happy, but it's not always obvious how to do that.

[00:01:06] Amber Hinds: And of course today we have a special guest here to speak with us and our special guest is Leslie Sim. Let me bring her in. Leslie, welcome.

[00:01:18] Lesley Sim: So great to be here. for having me.

[00:01:21] Amber Hinds: Would you like to introduce yourself for everyone watching?

[00:01:26] Lesley Sim: Yeah, I am the, right now I'm fiddling with my zoom or my focus, but yeah, I'm the co-founder of Newsletter Glue, an email newsletter plugin for WordPress. We connect to email service providers like MailChimp, ActiveCampaign and a whole bunch more. And that you build and send your newsletters from inside your WordPress admin.

[00:01:53] Katie Keith: Cool. Great. And before we start the discussion, if you want to ask any questions about how to keep customers happy and improve the customer journey for your WordPress products, then feel free to ask your questions in the YouTube comments and we'll answer them live. And that is if you're watching live, of course. So let's start by talking, as we always do, about why is this an important topic for WordPress product owners. So I'll start. And I love this topic because when you get it right, everyone wins. So that's always a fun thing to work on. The customer wins because your product's meeting their needs, they've got what they want, and they're enjoying using it, which is super important. Your business wins because your customers are happy and therefore they're more likely to buy your product, not get a refund, renew it in future, tell their friend, maybe buy your other products or upgrade in the future, depending on your business model. So by having a good customer journey, everything just works smoothly, which is what everybody wants. But as WordPress product owners, there's loads we can do to improve customer experience. And it's actually pretty complex. There's so many touch points. at every single possible point of the journey that we need to get right. So it's definitely worth talking about all of those different things and how we can get every single stage right if possible. So, Lesley, why do you think it's such an important topic?

[00:03:29] Lesley Sim: I mean, I feel like Katie, you covered it so well already. Like there's so many different touch points in a customer's journey and kind of playing with what you can and can't do and how much and how little you customers make such a big difference to whether they actually come on board or they refund within the first 30 days or whether they stay for years and years or they churn out really quickly and so forth. So yeah. I basically just agree with you.

[00:04:02] Amber Hinds: I think, you know, it's interesting. I just came back from Cabo Press, which is a business conference in Mexico. Quite nice. 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 customer experience of a conference attendee, I will say it had to be a great experience, which makes me definitely want to go back. Right. But one of the

[00:04:13] Katie Keith: Amazing.

[00:04:29] Amber Hinds: takeaways and I had so many, but one of the ones that we've been talking a lot about like in our own product business that I had the opportunity to hear Brennan Dunn. He was talking a lot about segmentation and like personalized marketing and communications that are not just broad general. And of course we're recording this on October 11th. I just left a meeting about Black Friday with my team. And that was something that I was thinking about, how can we improve and make things feel more personal for people and how that will really, I think, we haven't done it yet, but I think will help people to want to engage more and maybe increase our sales and help us to achieve our goals. And I think this customer experience topic is important because there's so many layers to it. Right? Like you were talking about, Katie, like the checkout process all the way through, right? It's a very holistic thing and you can sort of start like broadly thinking about it and just think, okay, I'm done. Like I've thought about, you know, what's my onboarding wizard? And now I've onboarded them and it's all done. But I feel like there's a lot that product owners, you can just continually layering onto the customer experience. So it's always worth like revisiting.

[00:05:53] Lesley Sim: I think one thing that we should probably talk about also is when it comes to customer experience, you said, there's unlimited amount of things that you can really do. But there has to be some sort of recognition of matching the customer experience to the price point and the expectation and the target market. Because that's something that we grappled with a lot and I can talk about later. what I wanted to say is like, so for example, if you're in a lower price point with, and like your game is high volume, low price, then, know, sure you can, you know, fly out to somebody's house and fix their plugin, but really should you, right? so you know, there's like, there's like,

[00:06:46] Amber Hinds: So.

[00:06:50] Lesley Sim: kind of like meeting and matching expectations and then like maybe just slightly exceeding them is kind of what you want to do rather than just kind of like, we have to make the most perfect customer experience. And I think that matters because like sometimes plugin owners might get too bogged down in like, I need to spend a hundred hours optimizing our checkout, but it's like, not really. likewise with the onboarding, likewise with support, like actually, you you just need to exceed expectations. You don't have to like... Go so far beyond them as to waste your own time and eat into your own profit margins.

[00:07:26] Amber Hinds: Well, I mean, that might be a good transition into we always like to do story time and share our personal experience. So do you want to dive in a little bit more? Because you said, Leslie, you like you were trying to figure out like, how do you match the customer experience to your price point? And I'd be curious to hear more about your personal journey on that.

[00:07:49] Lesley Sim: Yeah, so at the start of this year, we repositioned to work with medium to large publishers and we increased our prices significantly. And a large reason for doing that was because I wanted to provide a great customer experience for a certain type of customer. And I found that at our price point, we were just unable to do that because it basically just meant we were making a loss every single time. customers came and asked for support. And you know, so like, for example, we found that we worked best with, like I said, medium to large publishers. And our original price point started at $99 a year for a single license. And you have these fairly large publishers with tens of thousands of subscribers paying $99 a year to manage all of their newsletters inside of WordPress. And they would have really specific and advanced technical questions or like asking us, know, can you, you know, add a filter to do this like very specific thing so that their email can display in a certain way. And, oh, we've created our own custom block 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 it doesn't make sense for us to do that at $99 a year. But at the same time, like we've I really liked talking to these people. It was awesome that they were using our product. And that was kind of ultimately why, for me, it felt like in order to keep servicing them and giving them the experience that I wanted to give them, we had to increase our prices. Yeah.

[00:09:40] Amber Hinds: Yeah, I think, I mean, I think that's a really, it's, it's a perennial topic for WordPress product owners, right? Like what should you charge? But I mean, we've, we've sort of been in that, that 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 always you pay per site. but I think it's the same thing when you have customers that need that high touch, you have to figure out how. to deliver what you want to deliver to them and still make your business profitable so it can stick around to continue delivering the great product that it has to people. So I have totally been there and I know what you're saying. On the flip side, know something that I was always shocked by and impressed and I don't 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 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 a couple of weeks later, I got a phone call from them and they just like wanted to check in and see how using the plugin was. And that was the first time that had ever happened with a WordPress product. And I don't know of any other products to do it as something that we've talked a lot about, like, can we add that to our customer experience? but But it's sort of an interesting thing, you know, because that's not an especially, it's not an enterprise price, right? It's, it's follows more traditional though profitable WordPress plugin prices. And yet they still were dedicating a team member to, to call and provide that more, what felt like a more hands-on personalized customer experience.

[00:11:30] Katie Keith: Yeah, I think give a really leading the way in that. And there's implications as well, like even having a telephone number field on the checkout, which obviously they need in order to call them. And that's really interesting. I've been aware very recently of kind of a gap in the experience for our customers, which is that customers very regularly asked to have some sort of a call with us. This is for either pre sales or post sales support. They just want to talk through either a problem or their exact use case and get advice. And we don't do that. We have live chat on our website when someone's available, and we have email support like most plug-in companies. But if you look at the SaaS industry, they pretty much exclusively do live chat now. And some do calls, the more expensive ones. So I've been trying to think about what is appropriate at our price point should we be agreeing to calls. Because I know that we are doing regular refunds when we probably could have resolved it with a call, but the customer just can't be bothered to explain on email. They may not be great with typing or English or whatever, and we are not accommodating their needs. And they want their journey to include calls. And very few, I think, WordPress companies are currently doing that. And it's interesting that Giver being proactive in doing that rather than just reactive.

[00:12:59] Lesley Sim: Yeah, I think I'd be really curious to know how many customers give does that for like, is it every single customer? Because that would be crazy. Or is it just, you know, handpicked and Amber, you just happen to be one of the lucky ones. Yeah. like, where's my

[00:13:15] Amber Hinds: Yeah, I don't know.

[00:13:19] Katie Keith: when you leave.

[00:13:23] Lesley Sim: it

[00:13:24] Amber Hinds: So I could add, not at our single site, but our five site and above plans, we have two things. One is a personalized onboarding call. So after they purchase, they get an email that looks like it's from me, that is like, here's a link to book a 30 minute call with Amber. Most people do that. And we decided to add that in. I mean, we we decided, OK, well, we can't be profitable with this at the single site license. But so we're 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 talking about like how can we enhance the customer experience in a way that it achieves our goals? Well, one, we're really a small team. Our product is relatively new. It hasn't been tested on like all the right, like, I don't know when jetpack releases an update, they've probably tested it on at least 50 different themes and right. So the interesting thing about these calls is I feel like it can help us a little bit with churn because we haven't built out an onboarding wizard yet. And, and it's not always totally clear what people are supposed to do with our plugin or, or they might know like, how to use the 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 an environment that we just haven't been able to test on. And so it does double duty. I think it helps with getting 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 those environments. And I sometimes leave those and I like open GitHub issues. So it's like sneaky. customer surveying, because I can also talk to them, you know, like what brought you here? What motivated you to buy it? Like all of that kind of stuff without them feeling like they're participating in a customer survey, like they think they're getting something from me, right? Because I, we figured out how to balance that. And that has been really useful. And, you know, if we get to a certain scale point, we might have to have other team members doing them and not just me. but it's been really helpful. And then the other thing that we do along that same line is every other Wednesday, those same license plans, I have an open office hours that anyone can join and it's a Zoom and basically in their plugin dashboard, I think there's like an add-on for EDD that we sell with where you can use it to restrict messaging. to people that hold certain product licenses or have purchased, have a certain subscription. So just on their main dashboard screen, we have something that restricts if they only have those plugins. And then it basically has a message and a link over to Zoom where they could go schedule. We require people to register because I want to know in advance like who's coming. And there's just the thing that's like, you have any questions? Sometimes people are just like, nope, just coming to hang out. And other times people will give me in advance what their questions are. But both of those, I feel like have really enhanced the customer experience and have helped us to better understand how people are using our product and to see issues.

[00:16:48] Katie Keith: Yeah, I love all of that because I like the idea of doing it for certain price points because one, it makes it profitable for you. But two, it also it might encourage people to upgrade. You could I don't know if you do, but you could potentially advertise that as a perk of the higher licenses. Like we have faster guaranteed response times for more expensive licenses. So it's a way of enhancing that, I suppose. So there's lots of good things about that. But also the fact that you have this friendly looking but automated email means you don't have to collect their phone number on the checkout necessarily. puts, it's maybe a little bit less resource heavy than what GIF do because they only have to talk if they want to talk.

[00:17:35] Amber Hinds: We do actually collect the phone number too, because our goal is to do phone calls. It's optional though. We didn't make it a required field.

[00:17:45] Lesley Sim: Katie, do you do office hours? feel like, you know what Amber was saying about office hours is kind of a good middle ground for your plugins. you.

[00:18:00] Katie Keith: We have so many different plugins. If office hours is a shared thing where 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 might have one person who's really wants detailed questions about building a document library and all the WooCommerce people are bored then. So on the one hand, it might educate them about other plugins, which they then end up buying. On the other, We sell such a diverse range, I don't know if a shared call would be useful.

[00:18:35] Amber Hinds: Yeah, I mean, we've talked about what is the future of office hours look like even just as we scale our user base. Like right now it's pretty easy. I think the most I've ever had come to office hours was eight, but frequently it's like three or four people. So we can divide an hour very easily among three or four people. You know, so then we've talked about what happens if suddenly the demand is, like 50 people are coming and then it's almost has to be a little bit more like a webinar. You have 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 offer them more frequently and then we have to have more staffing on that. Or do we divide them by industry and be like, this is the government office hours. This is the education. You know, I don't know from. I can imagine that'd be challenging for you too when you have so many different plugins, like would you do a lot? But I just doing one and see what happens.

[00:19:32] Katie Keith: Yeah, we could. Let's say you had four people in an hour. If one person has to wait 45 minutes for their turn, are they bored waiting? Is the other customer's questions really specific or can everybody learn?

[00:19:48] Amber Hinds: No, generally everybody can learn. Like I don't think anybody has ever, cause that's what I said. Like some people show up with no questions and they just want to listen. So because I'll also do, they're not always just like plugin uses questions. A lot of times we've been using that because people have questions about how did they fix an accessibility problem that the plugin has identified on their website. And our, our support does not include that, but at office hours, I'm willing to do that. But like our support that you pay for is how to use the plugin, not us teaching you how to code accessibility fixes, right?

[00:20:27] Katie Keith: to do that in office hours.

[00:20:32] Lesley Sim: Customer experience, Katie!

[00:20:34] Amber Hinds: Yeah, customer experience. If we didn't, we did it in our support thread. I think it would overrun our, our support and also our, our main support person is not like an accessibility expert. Yeah. So that would also probably increase our support costs if we had to have a really experienced dev answering questions about like, how do I fix these links in my nav menu that are actually supposed to be buttons? Like the amount of time it might take to provide code for that.

[00:21:15] Katie Keith: Yeah, I kind of meant the other way round really, that if that's normally not included in the support, why do they get more in office hours? But yeah, it is a more public way of and conversational based way, isn't it?

[00:21:29] Amber Hinds: Yeah. And I think it's just like an added value typically who comes to office hours. Everyone's going to have like