How SuperOffice CRM is Continuously Improving Their Experience Program

Hello and welcome to the Account Experience podcast. My name's Adam Durrell and I'm joined by my colleague David Barber. Hi Dave.

Afternoon Adam.

How are you doing?

I am doing great. I'm sitting in Amsterdam and you are in.

I am in Camden in London on holiday to the UK on day five of my quarantine. So eagerly awaiting a negative result so I can go out and see the world.

Okay. I'm really excited about today's guest. By the way, on the Account Experience podcast we've got how Hans Christian Groenleith from SuperOffice. Now Dave, you've been working with Hans for a while.

Yeah. So I think Hans, when I joined CustomerGage as a customer success manager, I think Hans was one of my first customers. So I've been working with him for almost five years now and I'm really, really excited to see how he's kind of taken his project from nothing and managed to keep it going and maintain excitement throughout.

Yeah, I think your point about maintaining excitement is really key. It's hard to do it for a period, but Hans still manages to keep it fresh and working and I'm always really impressed by the way that he engages staff on that. So I'll be looking forward to hearing about how he does them.

Hey, what else did you notice this week? I noticed that UPS appointed a new CEO and she made it her stated target to take the score of ups to 5050 points of NPS by 2022.

2023.

Do we know where they are now?

They did not say but that was a stated aim to bring the company together on and that was it was well received by the stock market where they got a good bounce on that.

Bold game to play to say we will have this MPS by X date and it comes with a lot of hard work behind it but if you can get there and you can do the work then then great. It's only going to add value, right?

Yeah, that's great. Well let's find out from Hans about how he does that hard work. So let's go after the break to Hans. Welcome back to this week's Account Experience podcast. I'm joined as ever by Dave Barbara and I'd like to introduce my super guest today from SuperOffice. Based out of Norway. The 30 year old company has been the root of CRM since that time and it's got over 6,000 customers across Europe. It's a well known company on the continent here and last year it was sold to a private equity firm and it's interesting because hopefully our guest can talk a little bit about the impact of that.

So.

So let's welcome our guest of the podcast this week, an old friend of customer gauge, Hans Christian Grandleff, who, by the way, is also somewhat of a superman. He loves to live in a hut up a mountain and he's been in SuperOffice for 14 years. He's got a bit of a unique perspective of that for the half life of the company. Welcome, Hans Christian. Hello.

Well, thank you, Adam and Dave. Great to be on on here talking to you guys. Looking forward to that. And thanks for the introduction. Of course. I love the mountains and being up on in my hut skiing and stuff. So a lot of my spare time goes up there or other places that that's of interest to nature. Yeah.

So first of all, thanks so much for coming on here. There's some ground we'd love to cover today. We'd like to find out how you're using CX and NPS in your company. I'm a big fan of the posts that you do on LinkedIn about how you're bringing the culture there. So maybe we can start there. How has the journey been for you in the last few years as you've introduced net promoter and customer experience into the company?

Well, that's an interesting question. It's a long question, but we can take parts of it. And I think I remember when I talked to you the first time, Adam, that MPS is not a sprint, it's a marathon. And I've kept that sort of tight to the program and to my way working on it because it really takes time to get this addressed in all parts of the organization and part of this culture building that is so important to get to succeed. And we started back in 2017 and now we're 2021. And, you know, we still feel like we're sort of at the verge of something. We're still in the beginning, but it's very. It's becoming more mature and it's part of, you know, our DNA and that's sort of some achievements. But still, there are many things to improve with the program.

Well, why don't you walk us through how you were able to introduce it into the company and what you did to spread that passion that you had for customer experience.

Well, SuperOffice has always been passionate about the customer. That's the root of everything we do. The customer pays our salaries. And if we succeed or if our customers succeed, then we succeed. And we've had the founder, UN Amundsen, the Late UN Amundsen was also very passionate about that and trying to make tools for the salespeople to be productive. And we've been doing that for 30 years. Adding capabilities to the salespeople, to the marketing people and the service people, which. Dave, you mentioned it. Cx, you know, all companies today have focused on the CX role. So this is what we work with, developing tools for customers, mid sized customers. And so we've been very keen on listening to customers for all those years. And you know, we have what we call product managers in each of our subsidiaries in seven countries. We have project managers, we have product owners, we have consultants and sales. They all bring back feedback from customers. So over time that's how we develop. And then of course we had to add stuff that customers don't really know that they want. But back in 2017 we had gone from a cloud solution. No, sorry, we switched from an on premise solution to a cloud solution and we wanted to reach for smaller customers and we wanted to do more self service and stuff like that. And you know, our experience was that we got a lot of customers but self service is not an easy way of implementing CRM which is all about relationships and you really need processes and stuff to get it to work with our customers. And so we experienced churn, of course in the easy come, easy go customers. And then we thought, okay, let's how can we improve at putting the customer feedback into a more systematic approach. And that's where we sort of again talked about mps. And then we did some investigations and we had different partners and solution vendors shortlisted and stuff. And then long story short, we ended up with choosing you guys at Customer Gauge for that journey. And then we started the planning process. I think we did like half a year planning because you know, we have a management and our CEO Gisle, he's keen on doing stuff right. You know, it's like hitting a match. You get one chance of this. So we wanted to do a proper planning and make things work from the start. Not just starting in one loose end in the company but you know, do a thorough process and that's where we spent a lot of time and I think that's part of why we have come so far today without doing very many changes, but of course small changes all the time because you get feedback on it.

So is that something that you get in terms of the program that you're running now? Is that something that you get as much feedback from internal staff as you do with clients in terms of what you're trying to do and the changes that you're trying to make in the organization.

Yeah, we get a lot, you know, when we migrated our own solution, by the way, to the cloud last year, and while we did that, we took a break. And, you know, when you take a break for something that has become a habit, then you get sort of the feedback that, hey, what's going on? You know, even though they knew about it.

Right.

So you get sort of keen on getting feedback from your customers. And, you know, we don't do the transactional nps. We have some CSAT surveys, support and stuff like that, but we do basically the relational survey, and we have a cadence of every six months. We do it and we do very systematically so that we get a good reach. And then when our sales and CX people are lined up for their QBRs or meetings, then they're also looking at, okay, what is the mps? And how can we bring that to the table, to the customer, to try to develop the customer? So it's become a part of that as well.

Great.

Because I think. I think that's always a really hard win that any company trying to do what you're doing tries to get to is rather than just you yourself, Hans, sitting in a central position saying, here's all this information. You must use it. When you get to the stage of people coming to you to say, I want more information, or, I need this information to speak to my customer. And that makes your life a little bit easier, I imagine, right?

Yeah, it does. But of course, you know, NPS is a small, small, tiny part of somebody's feedback at some time. But adding it all together, it gives you a pretty good 360 view of what's going on. Or like you, Adam, normally say, you know, or is it, you know, if you don't get a response, that's a pretty bad sign as well, you know? Yeah.

That, I think, is the most worrying thing. Let's drill down into that, because I love what you're saying about how you're empowering your frontline staff to use this. How do you deliver that to your frontline staff? Are you doing that through SuperOffice itself? Tell us a little bit about the nuts and bolts of the program.

Yeah, well, when we started, we thought, okay, who should we survey? That's the critical thing. Because if you survey, we have people in or our goal is that for our customers, we want Everybody to use SuperOffice.

Right.

But you have some people who are managers and what we call together with you guys, the growth influencers, those who impact the business. And those are the people that we want to talk to. And sometimes it's easy to reach these people and other times they're in a different country or we don't have that sort of buy in at the time we had it when we sold the system. And maybe over time people have changed, other new people are coming into the office. So we did a thorough planning so that, you know, we have a program, big customers, they get QBRs or they get a meeting twice a year, strategy meeting. And then we in our superoffice CRM, of course we book the meeting and we have different types of meetings and all that triggers automatic. So those who are on those meetings, they are marked as what we call engaged. So the system keeps track of all the people that we talk to. But if we talk to the wrong person without the power in the organization, they are marked as well.

Right.

So we're striving to get to talk to the right people. And then we also said that, you know, we cannot send it out once a quarter or once half year to everybody. How, how should we then follow up on everything? So we created an algorithm that drips this. So it divides everything into daily surveys and we get the response, then we dispatch that response to the account manager or the CX person. So they get, you know, two to three follow up calls a day. And you can handle that together with your sales job or following up jobs or consulting jobs or stuff like that. So it puts a good balance. And that was really key, I think when we started it, because people were sort of afraid, you know, we're busy guys and girls and now we get another thing on our shoulders. How do we handle that? So that was a really planning exercise and that's. I think that's a good tip. Bringing onward as well, to spread it out, not a little bit day by day, sort of. That's our experience on it.

Yeah, I think you mentioned at the start as well, Hans, that like it's a marathon, not a sprint.

When I talked to you the first time, Adam, that, you know, MPS is not a sprint, it's a marathon.

How do you keep your teams and also your customers motivated to partake and join in in this kilometer after kilometer or mile after mile, as I'm in the UK at the moment.

Yeah, I think this is where you sort of need to keep on. You need somebody in the organization that maybe has my role to sort of be the promoter internally and talk about it all the time and follow up and make things and you need to present it in different meetings, you need to get the buy in from the managers and we have the buy in from the CEO and the management team and we have the buy in now from the local managers and we actually have the buy in from the people who close the loop as well. But it has taken time because in the beginning it was difficult and they just, you know, just to close the loop. You just answer the question. Now, like we see in some of the countries, like Germany for instance, we have had a tremendous raise in this journey. They're actually doing what we think they should do. You use feedback as an excuse to discuss topics with the customer.

Right?

Because. And I talk to that all the time. It's not about the score, but people tend, some people tend to say that try to be smart about response.

Right.

And okay, you gave me three. Now how would you. What should I do to, to, to get an 8 or 9 or 10 even, you know, that's irrelevant for the customer.

Right.

You can think it, but you have to sort of do this in an empathetic way. And, and this is. Some are really enjoying it and embracing it and, and getting value from it on the personal level. And some are, you know, need a reminder from time to time. And that's where you know, you need to have these weekly huddles or sharing because it's so easy that, okay, I got this, I closed it, done. You know, if that's your KPI having no open, open loops. But the other way is, okay, I had this, I talked about this and I share it with my colleagues on the team. So that's where we really are trying to go now. So sharing that knowledge and learning from it, because we need to learn on the corporate level, right? Not only on a one to one basis.

One of the things that I was really following you on social media last year, it was probably just before COVID actually was following you all around your offices as you brought the message of customer experience and net promoter around. And I thought it was a great initiative. You put first of all, how far did you cover? You know, how did you organize that? Can you share? Because I thought there was a really successful program.

Yeah, well, we have a CX team. Every customer, we have 6,000 customers and every customer has a person attached to it. Two persons actually, one salesperson who's responsible for growing the account and one CX person making sure that everything is okay. A little bit about the setup that you have as well. And then all these subsidiaries are in superoffice. You know, the culture is about winning New business and celebrating success and having all the good stuff and, you know, sharing that. And so all the subsidiaries are really keen on succeeding in sales and CX or whatever.

Right.

And then of course, if you're our Dutch subsidiary, you know, they're in Eindhoven, it's a long way away from here and we have a lot of connecting stuff. But sometimes, you know, from the ivory tower in Oslo, we need to go out to the trenches and talk to them. And for me, it's really important to get the feedback from those frontline because, you know, we see all the feedback, but we don't talk, we don't hear the problems and the challenges that they have. So personally, I love going out there and inspiring them because I get so much back.

Yeah.

You know, that's why you want to talk to customers. Well, because you can teach something and you can learn something back. And then of course we have. We don't have sort of the competitions that says that you're the best and stuff like that, but we're trying to strive for improvements in the programs. So if the German subsidiary, they have had a pretty good improvement cycle for cycle. And then of course, that's cool to talk about, but it's just as cool to talk about other people and say, what can they learn from each other and what are the challenges, etc, etc. And you know, it's not as easy as saying that. I'm trying to find correlations. Everybody says, okay, if NPES goes up, what happens to the turnover? Like our Swiss company, they have the highest growth in the group, you know, but the NPS is bouncing up and down, but it's a little bit like it's too few responses, so it's not predictable enough.

Right.

And then people tend to, well, we can't really trust it. And then, so it takes, you know, you need to coach it then and talk about this. Yeah.

Do you have any metrics on the response rate that you can share?

Well, sure, you know, response rates, I think we were a little bit above the benchmark that you had. We're not on the 100%, but I think we were like 18%.

That's pretty good. Our B2B response rate benchmark is actually 11% across the board.

Yeah. And then if you look at. Because we have more people, you've given us some good tips and, you know, this, the pyramid, large customers, you need more people, and small customer, you need less. So this is also implemented. So our biggest customers, we say that at least you need five people.

Yes.

And Our algorithm always counts on that. So I think now it's up to 25% of our customers who's actually responding.

Yeah, that's a distinction, isn't it? Because you've got a contact rate of 18% and your customer base well at least 25%. Well, I guess you'd be higher though, actually in terms of account response.

Yeah. And of course that's what you mentioned. What is the next step and growing. This is important for us because as I said in the beginning, if you don't get a response, could mean anything. But most likely it's not a good sign. You know, don't they really care? And you should care if you have a mission or a business critical system, like a CRM system. So we need to push our way in there and make them care if, if they don't really thought about it. Sometimes it's not obvious, but they haven't gotten it. They're fed up with feedback via surveys. They didn't understand that they really could benefit from it and stuff like that.

Is that something you're able to do, Hans? You're able to take the feedback that customers give you and then relay it back to your customer base? Has that been a successful program for you to do that?

Well, that's on my to do list actually, together with product marketing this year. So that we are putting together some stuff that what have we learned and what have we changed and what are our plans ahead? So trying to relate it back there because I really believe in what you guys are saying as well, that we try to close the loop fast. But you know, every. If it's 18% or 20% is 80% who doesn't know anything.

Right.

Because they didn't even respond. So if you can send that out. But we do a lot of stuff but you know, one person might have this problem and we fix a lot of other problems. So it's not, it's. The difficult part is, okay, you gather all the feedback. It's not like everything goes into two buckets. If you just fix that, then you're home free.

Yeah, of course. I think that's always it with. Especially as myself and Adam are well aware, working, working in the SaaS space. Then you know, it's. If you try and please everyone, you're not going to have a very nice looking tool, are you? And I've seen that kind of thing before where you work with tools and they say, well, one customer wanted this, so now that's an option and another customer wanted this, so now that's also an option and before you know it, your tool is completely impossible to use. So it's striking that balance. I guess it's difficult between letting customers know that the feedback is valued and appreciated while also not being able to act upon everything as well. So is that kind of thing going to go into your messaging later in the year as well?

Yeah, it does. And you know, we're creating after Covid, we've had massive uptake in the online webinars and stuff like that. And you know, the MPS feedback also feeds what is interesting topics and stuff like that. And you know, we're a product company but most of the wishes and feedback is most likely because they didn't know that we had it, they didn't know how to use it and they thought about something that was not general policy in their company. So, you know, it's all about talking to people.

Right.

And that's where this NPS door opener is the key in my opinion.

Are you able to. I mean, hopefully you've got some customers who will be listening to this. So are you able to give any feedback to them now? But basically I'm trying to make it easy for you so you don't have to write that email. Well, are there a few things you said? Oh, we learned this. Thank you for the feedback. This is what we learned, that we fixed this in our product.

Sure. You know, we did a gathering of all the feedback and basically 50% of those type of feedbacks goes into non product issues.

Right.

And that's all about trying to deliver on the promises that we have, like coming back to people when we say we should come back to people and keep or deliver on the promises and stuff like you know, the normal stuff coming back. And I think that I've actually made, what's it called, a manifesto, you know, and it's like 10 points on that and it says that if we'd done. I converted everything into just if we'd done these things, then all of these would just be really happy. And then I presented this for the management team and said, hey, well this is what we strive for every day. And it's right. We strive of course to say that if we promise something, we come back and deliver it. But in the heat of the day you might miss on that on some occasions. But those are the 50. And it's like the support things. Like a couple of years ago we had local support, right. Dutch support in Holland and German in Dortmund, etc. And then we moved everything to our own customer experience center in Vilnius. And in the beginning we got from the feedback that they didn't really understand the languages. And it took time and this and that. And now actually the customer feedback through the NPS says that that's our usp. What are the top ones that we have? Really good support services, you know, so over time it really helps doing that.

That's interesting. Was that to do with consistency that you're. By putting it in one place, you could, you could share best practices. I'm curious as to how.

Definitely best practices and, you know, you can have training programs for these people and they're staying on for a long time and they. Instead of having three people in one country, now you have 35 people in the same office. And they can all share best practices, they can share the cues and all kind of things. And it's really, yeah, it's really nice to see how that actually works. And competence and skills has really risen far above what it used to be because then you had to talk to consultant, he was busy consulting and stuff like that. Now everything is available for the customers. And then of course, we see that we have things in our roadmap and it's nice to align the roadmap to the product feedback. And we're coming up with the brand new version now, you know, every three weeks. But we have a new generation coming up in October where we add more stuff as well. And that goes both on the mobile client, it goes on on the marketing things or marketing platform, more on artificial intelligence and stuff like that. So we're adding more capabilities to the product as well, all the time.

Just to touch on a point you read a bit earlier, Hans, in terms of making sure that your salespeople and your account managers want to go out and get the results and aren't afraid of the results and things like that. Is there something that you guys do internally to make sure that everyone is up, armed with everything they need to say? For example, if I'm working in sales and I get a two from my customer and they say my bill is wrong every single month and I'm terribly upset about it. And then a 2 goes against Dave's name in the NPS table in customer Gauge, wherever it might be, am I then armed or do I have the fear removed to then say, okay, well, thanks for that, I'm going to pass on to the finance team and they have the, the skills and the armor that they need to get that kind of thing.

So, yeah, well, it's very little personalized feedback, so to say. Sometimes we say that Marianne is great and Henrik. I get all the stuff that I want, you know, but it's not massively on that and what we try because our CX people who most of the times gets it, they are some of the senior people in the company. They know a lot about the product, and if they don't, it's troublesome for them because they can always help them, you know, fix problems. And much of the stuff is fixed problem. It's very little like invoicing and billing. But if that's the problem, then we just assign this request that comes in and we assign it to the customer service department and they fix it.

Right.

And of course, often when they. When they call, what I hear, oh, they are quite happy. But, you know, they gave a five. Okay, fine. We're not looking really for that five, because we won't experience that five BS seven until next six months.

Right, exactly.

So it's not like you did a very bad job and we're hanging them out. But we try to use this as a tool to sort of. Okay, always think about the next experience. So whatever you do, you design products, you design services, you design customer experience for the nps. So to say, you know, that's the golden rule. Back in the Ultimate Question, the book. And it's about that feeling. And I think most of people just. If you think about it and are reminded about it, then you know what to do in these situations. But it's okay to say sorry or we cannot solve all the problems and that's how it is and stuff like that. So you just have to work around with it as well. Sometimes you just have to say no. And I think that customers are happy with it.

At least it's one way or the other.

Right?

Yeah. Put the foot down. It's nothing. If you say, I really agree and I have a fine five other customers doing that. Okay. If there's five or 50 of the customers, most likely we'll put it in the roadmap. Yeah.

Hans, what does we were on a break mean? I mean, my family's a huge fan of friends. What were you doing with that when you said we were on a break? How did that work?

Well, of course we said that it was on a break, but then we just stopped it because we have a program. We can stop it for three weeks to the next standard. We had to do some integrations, but it worked fine. But after. After a while, you know, people are missing stuff.

Right.

And then that's. When you think about that things are important.

Right.

When you miss it, then you can get that feeling that, okay, somebody's caring because, you know, and I. Well, the MPS program has been sort of. In the beginning it was. The first year is tough because then you think it's. If it's a bad score, it's going to ditch because then it's a system or you know, it doesn't fit or something like that. So we had a lot of fights, but now I think it's. So it's part of our, like I said, DNA of the culture. So this is there. We need to improve it all the time. Yeah.

So looking back over the last four years, you must have learned a few valuable lessons. So if you could have got, if you were to start again from the process, what would you have done differently or what would you advise people not to do?

Well, looking back, I think we did a lot of things wisely. I think it's important to plan and plan for success, I would say, because you plan to make this a long term journey. If you plan for it to be test, it's going to be a test and you're going to do something else.

Right.

And then I think you will get a lot of obstacles and a lot of. Because you will get, you'll get feedback that you think is unfair or it's not the right people we're measuring. And so you have to, you have to automate stuff, but you also have to optimize stuff.

Right.

Because if you don't have resources to optimize as you go along, it's not going to get the credibility in the organization. And it helps that you have the management teams supporting it because if they don't support it, it's not going to happen. You need to put resources in and.

In terms of that, Hans, when you say you need to put resources in and obviously you need to go to your management and say I need resource to do this or sales, you need to put resource into this. When the obvious question comes back of what's the difference to my bottom line, what are you giving back there? Because obviously if I ask Adam for any resources in our organization, I better have some good bottom line decisions that's going to help that with.

Yeah. So talking about ROI or stuff like that. Well, I think that when we implemented the mps it was to get control of churn and retention.

Right.

Because like I said, we're losing customers and we didn't really understand what, why and we wanted a tool that could give us the opportunity to fix problems when they arise and not too Late, Right. When the churn is gone.

Right.

So that was the goal in the beginning. But, you know, looking only at. So we have, you know, KPIs and all kind of things. But now when we are bought, you know, we are starting a new journey, you know, private equity coming up. And, you know, they want to go in there, they want to go public at some time. And then SuperOffice, who has been a growth company since we started, continues on that growth path. And then it's not about Churn, but it's about net growth and it's all about growth.

Right.

So that means that NPS is just as important to, you know, close those holes if we can, that, but also use it as a measurement tool to, to get more opportunities in business. And you know, the promoter part of this is something that also is on the next type. Okay, how can we sort of utilize having all these promoters and really, you know, they tell us that they want to recommend it. So what can we do together to make that actually happen? So we are growing, the profits are up. And it was before we went to MPS as well. But I think that now there is an understanding that, you know, you need, you need a severe NPS score, which is solid founded in order to fuel that growth. Because if you don't have it, it's not going to help growing. You could put a lot of stuff in there, but. And this is one way of measuring the customer voice. And you know, it's not lying, even though we might have some strange responses here and there, but overall, it's statistics.

Love it.

Yeah.

Hans, what's next for you with this program?

Well, we had, you know, 30% of our customers are handled by partners. And the algorithm that we have is like, okay, what programs are we doing? What are we doing? You know, that doesn't work when we don't talk directly to customers. Customers. So then we have implemented automatic, you know, when you, when you log into your bank, you get this, please update your details and you do it. So we've done things like this so that these customers, all customers, have to update who are the key roles, like who's the agreement responsible, who's the security responsible and who's the system administrators. So now we all of a sudden get this information and we're starting to get responses from these as well. So the reach is going out and we can help partners grow our customers through them. And then of course, anything we can do to improve the response rates is important. You have some tools where you can add just the manual reminders and stuff and I'm sure there will be more of that type later on. And then. Yeah, so and then we've started much what we call, you know, frontline. Was that the outer loop and then we have the inner loop. So now I'm spending much time on actually talking to R and D because they're getting interested. What are customers saying from this channel?

Right.

And then I talk to support. What are they saying? How can they improve? So we're taking it back to the strategic level, trying to pinpoint some initiatives. If we can get two or three initiatives rolling, that will help us grow. So it's not only Frontline, it's also that inner loop strategy development part.

If I take a few things away from that, what I really the key things you program was about automating it, making it work. I loved what you're saying about non product learnings that you had such as delivering on promises. And by the way, I want you to share your manifesto with us.

But I want to wrap up and.

Say I think the way that you speak about this is really valuable to superoffice clients as well. I think they're really lucky to have such a well run CX program where you really take their feedback seriously and it's really wonderful to learn about how you do it.

Well, thanks for asking and having me on.

Thank you so much for your time today. I hope we get to see you soon and come back and tell us more about the program as it matures.

Will do. Thanks guys.

Thanks a lot. Hans. Speak soon.

Yep, bye.