Reduce Churn & Increase Net New Customers through Onboarding w/ Unbounce Dir of Customer Enablement

at Unbounce.

Before she kicks off, I just want to go through a few housekeeping items, if you don't mind going to the next slide. Okay, so for these roundtable sessions, they're interactive, obviously, as you guys have your, your cameras on. We want to keep it that way. You know, the busier we are, the better. I'm sure we're all Zoom fatigue. We've heard it all year. We're a 30-minute session. I know we're a little bit behind. But, you know, we just want to keep it rolling since we've got a full day. We encourage you to keep your cameras on, like I said, audio muted. Join the conversation with a comment or question. Please raise your hand, the buttons in— you click participants at the bottom, and then it's at your Zoom screen. And we see a raised hand towards the end, we can start calling out questions. If you also do have a question, feel free to put it in the chat if it is on for you guys. If not, we'll also just take raised hands as mentioned before. Things to keep in mind: these sessions will be recorded, um, so please just keep that in mind whenever you ask a question. And then also something for everyone that we want to make sure we flag is we have our Brella networking app, so make sure you join us there. It's one-on-one meetings. I will link it in the chat for everyone to use if you haven't already signed up. And without further ado, I will kick it over to Ivy. Thank you for joining us.

Hi everyone, good morning, good afternoon, or good evening depending on where you are, and thank you again for the introduction. My name is Ivy. I am the Director of Customer Enablement at Unbounce, and today we're here to talk about customer onboarding and how that can be used to really reduce customer churn and increase net new customers. But before we get started around the kind of meat of what onboarding is and, you know, how we can do these things, I want to start with a question just to think about in your own mind, you don't have to put up your hand for this, but think back to the last product you purchased or maybe software service that you purchased that was unintuitive to set up. So I don't know about you all, but I have been doing a little bit more online shopping than I care to admit this year. And there have definitely been times where I've bought something that from the listing I thought was going to really level up my life, only for me to get it and I'm I'll be honest, I still have a standing desk that is in the box. And, you know, putting up together this chair was kind of a nightmare. And I've also been part of many a software implementation in my career. And there have definitely been moments throughout lots of those implementations where I thought, you know, my deadline for getting value out of this product has already come and gone, and we're still up in the setup phase. So I don't know if anything similar has happened to you, but think back to that point and think about how it made you feel. And take that feeling and kind of hold it with you because that feeling is really what customer onboarding is trying to solve. Now, a little bit about Unbounce. If you haven't heard of us, we are a landing page platform. Our software helps digital marketers create and publish and test their landing pages without the need of a developer. So we're all about getting our customers more conversions for less work. And, you know, we have this huge emphasis on customer support and customer success. Yet at the same time, in our 10 years, we were starting to notice that a segment of our new trial starts were actually not getting value out of the product. And that's why we created our customer onboarding team. We created it about 2 years ago. And after a lot of work in just the first year alone, we really, we saw our 1x conversion go up by 23%. And this year, especially during COVID we were able to keep our conversion rates flat, despite all of the turbulence that was going on around the world. Now, I love this quote from Intercom: 40 to 60% of free trial users will use your software once and never come back. And I'll be the first to admit that we were seeing that same problem at Unbounce, and maybe for some of you at your companies as well. What we did with our Customer Onboarding team is that we called our new trialers within 15 minutes of sign-up, just to learn about, you know, what they're experiencing and to offer ourselves as a guide throughout the process. And as we did so, we realized that they were feeling that same frustration that I was having you think back to at the beginning of this roundtable. They were, you know, our product that we thought was super intuitive to use was actually really difficult for folks. And we saw that they were having trouble with that first setup process that they found very technical. So we pivoted our scripts and made them all about, you know, helping customers down with the next issue that they were coming up with and solving the issues for them that were coming up during the setup process. So we view our customer onboarding team as a bridge between our product and our users. And that's really important in the SaaS world because our customers need to feel good about choosing you every single day. And, you know, think back to that moment again. First impressions really do matter. And by setting up our customers for success right at the beginning, not only do they— do we increase the likelihood of them actually starting a paid subscription with us, so increasing net new customers, but we see the likelihood of them using more features and staying with the service longer. So we're seeing their survivability go up, and that is decreasing our churn as well. So that's kind of it for my intro. I really want to get started with some discussion questions and dive into the roundtable discussion part. We've got 4 questions today, and, you know, really here we can talk about how— think about the customers that are going through the onboarding process in your product. Maybe you've got a really great one-in-app, maybe you've got, you know, people calling folks, or maybe you've got nothing. But think about that setup process. What are some examples of the challenges that they might experience during this phase, and how can you help them preemptively solve these issues? So at Unbounce, for example, one of our main setup points was connecting some— one of our customers' custom domains with the Unbounce platform. And that was a big hurdle for our customer onboarding team to walk through with the customer on the phone. Has anyone got anything?

I don't see any raised hands on this end, so we can go to the next one.

Okay, great. Then think about your company. Do you have— do you know the difference between your onboarding team and your customer support team at your company? Or if you don't have one, what is the difference in your opinion? So at Unbounce, the difference for us is to really leverage the proactivity of a customer onboarding team versus a customer support team. So we view our customer support team as purely reactive. You know, if a customer has an issue, they open up a ticket, they go in a chat, or they call in, and that's That's how, you know, that's when our customer support team swarms around the issue and helps them solve it. For Unbounce, however, an onboarding team is all about being proactive. You know, we will look at the customer journey or an ideal customer journey that somebody's supposed to take during their free trial, identify points where they should be seeing value or maybe starting to see issues. And then we reach out before those points and be proactive and even just say to a customer, hey, you know, you're about to head into a phase where a lot of our customers find this tricky. I'm going to send you some instructions down the line, or, you know, we can walk through it together on the phone. But if you are feeling that moment of trickiness in the next couple of days, you know, just reach out back to us and let's have that conversation. Does anyone else have any examples where they've leveraged proactiveness in their onboarding?

Don't see anything on this end. Um, we do have someone from Australia, so hello.

Yeah, I'd also just say like, I would— the questions are really thought-provoking. I just can't quickly— I can't quickly think of them, but like, I'm taking screenshots of all this and like, I'll probably have like an hour with my team on the questions. It's like, well, yeah, it's a really thought-provoking question. But I like when you ask what's the difference between onboarding and customer support, proactive onboarding and then reactive customer support, and then identifying points of value and points of frustration and just letting people know that that experience would be shared is tremendously valuable. I'm getting value from it, a lot of value from your talk. I guess I just want you to know.

Okay, great. Yeah, I mean, it's hard to know when I, you know, even just percolating on these things, and I'm happy to share my experience, you know, what I've really learned is that people just want to feel understood, or your customers want to feel understood, want to feel seen. There's that moment, I mean, honestly, I'll be honest and speak for myself, it's really hard to try anything new these days. And, you know, there's always that anxiety when you're doing something new or trying something that you don't really know if it's going to work, you know, the time that you're going to invest. And even just having somebody on the other end of the phone or through an email saying, like, listening to what it is that you want to do with the product and saying, "You've come to the right place." And think about what that's going to make you feel in that moment. Yes.

My name's Bill Furlong. Hi, Bill. I'm enjoying your presentation as well. We're a small company still. Early-stage seed-funded. We have a small team, of course, but growing. And the way I look at this is we see it just like you, probably a lot smaller, of course, where we have more of an automated technical process around chats and fact sheets, et cetera, for customer service. You can reach a real person. But we absolutely go front and center with our onboarding process with schedule an appointment with one of our people to get them to understand the onboarding process to our app management platform. So while we're still very early, and this is why we're at this conference, it's that delineation between something more personal and proactive versus being more reactive. And if you can, from a cost structure, handle that through, you know, AI and chat and email. But again, we're learning the trade and this is why this is such a great community here.

Yeah, and I honestly think that customer onboarding is even more important or that, you know, having this proactive quality is what is even really important when you're small and you are able to be quick and tactical, right? Because getting that feedback from a customer or being with them on the phone as they're setting it up, hearing their reactions firsthand, that's such valuable insight for a smaller company, you know, when you're still able to make changes on the fly. For us at Upmounts, you know, we have been around for 10 years, but we haven't had an onboarding team until the last 2 years. And, you know, creating it a scrappy team on the fly, we learned so much that we were able to pivot you know, just small parts of the product and, you know, learn that that human interaction is what people were missing. Right.

Ivy, do you— since you have that personal engagement, can I ask you how you are indeed recording those insights so that the product team and marketing can learn from it? I mean, does it go into a CRM a note system, or is there any other sort of data lake or platform that you put those learnings in?

Yeah, that's a great question. We do leverage our CRM. We use Salesforce and we actually use a tool that connects with Salesforce. It's called Dooley. It's, it's a note-taking app for Salesforce. In my experience, You know, part of it is setting up the systems to collect the data. The other part is making sure that your reps are equipped to input the data quickly and accurately, because no matter how good your systems are, if people aren't using them, then they're not really working, are they? So, you know, we're trying to tackle it from both ends. We have a really fast and easy-to-use note-taking app that's connected with Salesforce in Duly, and then we have When somebody inputs the feedback and we have meetings with our product team, you know, we try and collect the feedback in the way that the product team is most able to use it. You know, so it's not always freeform. Like we have them in categories that help the product team start to solve issues. Like, you know, I want to get more conversions. That's an issue. And then, you know, not— and then how does that issue show up for this customer? That part is more freeform. so we have like a kind of a hybrid model.

We do have a question in here that I think still kind of relates to the discussion question that you're on. And it's asking, do you use your customer success approach— and you may have already answered this a little bit— but do you use your customer success approach when you are onboarding— to your onboarding team methods?

Yeah, that's a really great question. My background is actually in sales. Most of my career has been in sales, and at Unbounce, I actually head up the sales functions. And we consider our customer onboarding a hybrid between sales and customer success. And I, you know, use a lot of the customer success methodology because ultimately, you know, what I say to my team here at Unbounce is the importance is, you know, setting up our customers customers for success, you know, emphasize with them, go into it as much as possible because ultimately, like, the goal that you're trying to get is that they're reaching the setup points. But where I bring my sales philosophy in is that I really see as a sales— a really good salesperson is somebody who isn't afraid to make a recommendation to a customer. So a customer support person might be there to solve a problem for a customer exactly in the way that the customer is hoping it's solved. But, you know, this is a— customer onboarding is a key moment in this customer's journey, right? They're about to do something new and their old workflows, you know, a lot of them may work, some of them may not. And a really good sales rep is able to listen to those things, ask the right questions, and at the end, make a recommendation. You know, you can say like, That is amazing. But to be honest, I think you should do it this way instead. I think this way is going to be a lot better for you. And that's— those are the two philosophies that I try to bring into customer onboarding. Does that answer the question?

It does. I think it does. Do you have more discussion questions or I can keep going? We have some more Q&A kind of popping in here.

Yeah, I mean, I'm happy to do— I've got— 2 more discussion questions, but I've also— we can just run through them really quickly, and then if there's no answers to those, then I'll take another Q&A question. How does that sound?

Perfect.

I have a question.

This is Chris with Systems Surveyor.

I'm just curious about your onboarding. You know, we're trying to bring folks in on an unassisted basis and perhaps using some tools, some tutorial tools on screen versus using even videos or even a personal onboarding session, our accounts often have, you know, 10 or so folks on a single account. I'm curious if you have experience with the different forms of onboarding or any recommendations there.

Yeah, actually, and it goes into my next question, which I'll just bring up right now, which is how do you get people to engage with all the different types of onboarding that you're offering? You know, emails, in-app videos, phone calls, you know, how do How do you get people to engage? And I'm curious if anybody has any tactics and would like to chime in because it's, you know, I've only got my one experience at Upbound. We've experimented, I'll be honest, just about everything because, you know, that trial period for us is so critical. For us, it's 14 days. And, you know, when somebody doesn't sign up and go for a paid subscription at the end, that's it, you know, they're gone. And our marketing team, you know, we've let's be honest, paid so much into acquisition that it's a shame to lose anybody, right? And what we found though is that, you know, with video within app, for us it's been tricky because our product is almost like a Photoshop for marketers. You know, you can do so much with it that it's been tricky for us to get any piece of content that works for most customers, when we've done that, it's become so broad that it hasn't really provided any value. And that's why, you know, we've been trying to go with our emails and we look at— we start segmenting our emails and in-apps based off of user actions. We leverage Intercom to help us do that in Salesforce and also time and what industry they are to try and tailor the messaging as much as possible, because when it is personal, people are, in my experience, more likely to respond to it. But that's the other reason why we've layered in calls. And honestly, we've even started texting to kind of show that there is a person at the end of the day. Yeah, you've got these marketing emails, and let's be honest, everybody's inbox is full of marketing emails. But if you respond to them, you're going to get a person that will respond back. Does that answer your question?

Yeah, I'm interested in other people's experience on the different formats, though. But thank you.

Ivy, so this tends to be kind of my zone of area where I tend to excel. And the way I've done it is I keep the emails to one line. And I make sure that the context of the communication actually matches their present psychology, if that makes sense. So a lot of times I'll sign up for a SaaS product and they'll keep trying to sell me, but they don't realize that it's not a fit and I'm not even interested. And so the message is falling on deaf ears. So what I like, what I like to do with these is just make sure they're one-line emails. So, so you register for the trial, is the product going to be a fit? Send. They're like, holy crap, this is pretty short. I got to reply to it. That's kind of how I've done it. Do you guys do any of that at Unbounce?

Yeah, we've experimented with that. Not quite that short. We've also tried to make sure that they're actually coming from like, you know, one person and not from, like, you know, not from an automated service. The other thing that we've experimented with that's actually worked really well is our first welcome email has a picture, like a candid photo of the onboarding team. And it's like, saw you sign up for a trial. Like, you know, this is when I introduce ourselves. This is going to be your onboarding team. If you have a question, now you can reach out to us and we're going to be the ones to respond. And we've had that one work out really well because, you know, people like to have that connection with a team that is going to help them.

That's great. Only thing I'd just like to offer the group is to assess the burden to reply for the person on your message. And if there's a high burden to reply to your question, like if you're asking a question on like, you know, tell me the 4 dimensions of your heart today, you know, and there's a lot of, like they have to engage energy. Like, 'cause when you're going through email, what our minds do is they rapidly calculate, is this gonna be worth the burden to reply? And so one time, sometimes what I'll do is I'll ask the one-line question and then I'll give like 4 answers with forward slashes. So I say, you know, is this product going to be a good fit? No, it sucks. Yeah, it's great. Oh my gosh, it's perfect. And no, I'm going to pass. And giving them the answers reduces the burden to reply. And I also find I get good answers with this because, like you, I sometimes feel like I'm talking to a black hole, you know, with these customers. I get so frustrated. I've been trying everything.

Yeah, and it's tricky. And like, you know, the other thing is because we're a marketing company and we're centered around conversions, like I also design my emails like our landing pages and that we try to center them for conversion. So what's the call to action here? And it shouldn't be something like, "Tell me what you think." You know, "Tell me what your thoughts are." "Let me know if you have any questions." Those are very passive calls to action, right? And you know, they're not gonna inspire anybody to to come and reply and say, you know, when you say, tell me what you think. You ask, you end your emails with a question. It's very quick, you know. And the other thing that I love, I can't remember where I read this, is that, you know, people read articles, people skim emails. So if it's going to be an email, try and think about, is this an email that somebody who doesn't really care about you is going to be able to get the information on. And let's be honest, because people are getting the emails on their phones, you don't know their level of engagement with the software. So if you can make, you know, if it's going to be a slightly longer email, have a lot of paragraph breaks, repeat the information at the beginning and end of the paragraphs, because that's what people are reading when they're skimming. End with a question. And, you know, That's it.

So we only have a few minutes left, and I know you had another discussion question, Ivy, so I'll let you get to that one too.

Actually, you know, if people have got some Q&A, I'd rather take that because I'd rather this be more of a roundtable. Yeah.

Do you mind just throwing up the last question, Ivy?

Sure.

So one that we have in here that is kind of a multi-part. So do you really call people within 15 minutes of sign-up, which I think we just spoke to, or was that just a test to understand why they're not using it?

No, we still do.

Okay, perfect. Do you onboard everyone or a segment?

We have pivoted to onboarding a segment. We have a lot of new trialers every month and a small and scrappy team, and it doesn't It's not feasible, but we're lucky we have a pretty global office. We have an office here in Vancouver, Canada, and an office in Berlin. So part of that segment is, you know, folks who we actually can call within the business hour, and then we focus on our key segments.

Okay, perfect. What are your best practices on how to get someone on the line fast and effectively?

Oof. I mean, If there was a silver bullet, I haven't heard it yet. I think we've talked a lot about, you know, different tactics. The other one is we've been pivoting to experimenting with text, you know, for reaching a voicemail. It really depends on your understanding, I think, your customer segment. For Unbounce, we focus on small, medium SMBs, kind of in the upper S region. And for a lot of us, like, they are able to be on text, they are able to be a bit more scrappy. If you're selling into enterprise, for example, texting may not be the right fit. But the other thing is you can front-load, you know, your voicemail if you are leaving voicemails. And for us, we're leaving a few voicemails with exactly what this call is going to accomplish. And it's not something like welcoming you to the platform and answering any questions you might have. It's like, you know, on this call, we're going to help you set up this. Which a lot of customers find really tricky, you know, or you may run into this, and if, but if and when you do, please give us a call back at this number and I'll help you set up. Those are strategies that have worked for us.

One of the ones I want to close out with, which I think might be a very good one for everyone, is what is the top thing or things you're measuring during your onboarding?

Ooh, that's a good question. You know, for us, definitely product usage. One of the key metrics for our customer onboarding team is how much of those setup steps is somebody actually accomplishing during the free trial, which is going to set them up for long-term success with the product. The other one is, is 1x conversion. Like I said, I have a sales background, so a lot of the metrics I personally measure around sales and revenue. And we also measure, you know, how often somebody expands. So we