How CloudApp More Than Doubled Customer Satisfaction Rates in Under a Year

You can have a great platform. You can have the smartest people working on it, but without customers, you won't last very long as a company.

Customer experience can be an easy thing to ignore when you're first starting up as a company, but if done right it will become your biggest asset.

At CloudApp, we saw our experience slipping last year and completely rehauled how we take care of our customers. It led to multiple 100 percent satisfaction rate weeks and a ~20 percent quarter-over-quarter increase in happiness scores and 100% since the year started.

In this post, I'll share the steps we took to make that happen.

Creating a Positive Customer Experience

In an interview I did with David Hunt, the VP of Support for Hubspot, he mentioned that there are three ways to connect better with your audience for a good customer experience:

• Always have empathy: Providing training can be a great way to help reps understand customer empathy. It can also help to have a process and documentation for how to respond to different situations. Structure leads to empathy.
• Prioritize speed: No one wants to wait a long time once they've submitted a support ticket.
• Give your support team what they need: If your team doesn't have the tools, training, correct onboarding, or other resources it needs then you won't be able to get the success you want.

Here are four more things we did at CloudApp to help improve our customer satisfaction for our community.

1. Improve response time speed.

Two years ago with our small team, our goal was to respond to any support request within 2-3 days. As we invested more there the goal became shorter and shorter.

This last quarter, 97% of customers are getting a response in less than 6 hours. According to data from SuperOffice, the average response time for support in tech is 12 hours and 10 minutes so we are way above average for tech.

In today's world, when customers reach your support queue they have probably already searched your knowledgebase, checked for video fixes on YouTube, and asked a co-worker how to fix a problem.

That means when they reach out to you, speed is incredibly important. We as a company have put a continual effort to focus on speed and provide global coverage with our support team located remotely around the world.

2. Use CloudApp videos.

In some cases, we actually learn how to use our own platform from watching how our customers use it. We heard story after story of how people were using CloudApp in their customer support tickets to close issues faster with videos and GIFs.

We put that to the test. All of our responses to customers included a CloudApp screen recorder video, GIF maker, or screenshot when applicable. We removed unneeded text from responses and included a video or image instead.

By using visuals to close tickets, we found an immediate uplift in both satisfaction and our customers commented about how it “was cool to see you use CloudApp to fix my issue.” This has led to increased usage by our customer base as well.

3. Create banked responses for common issues.

Analyzing and understanding your data is a key component of improving your business.

Our customer experience team noticed that a good portion of our support tickets were coming in about similar questions. This led to the team using CloudApp to create screen-recorded videos, GIFs, and screenshots to answer these common questions. They then housed them in a collection folder on CloudApp that's accessible by their team.

These assets help to quickly close common questions fast and create more time for the questions that may take a little more time or engineering involvement.

4. Respond to follow-up questions.

The speed with initial connection is important, but it's also crucial to respond fast to follow-up questions that may come in from the same ticket.

Our team structured a system within our support software to enable priority queueing. This system has worked in being able to mix new tickets with follow-ups to ensure a balance of quality follow-up.

They also started all focusing on every ticket vs. being more specialty-focused (free, pro, team, enterprise). With all of the reps working together, it has helped increase the output with the size our company is currently.

Customer Support is Key for a Good Customer Experience

You can nail every part of the customer journey, but if your support is lacking you'll fail at customer experience. Support provides the biggest opportunity for you to surprise and delight your customers.

Putting a focus on speed and ways to improve processes will pay dividends with happy customers who want to rave about how you treated them.

Here are three things you need to start doing today to improve your customer support and experience.

1. Focus on speed.

It will be worthwhile to do a deep dive into your customer experience system to see where there might be some holes. It's amazing what little things you will find by taking a step back and understanding how things are going.

2. Make it a part of your culture.

Amazon is a best-in-class company to look at for customer support. Jeff Bezos is famous for calling support himself in meetings to see how long it would take to get a rep. He created the accountability needed to make it a piece of the company culture that everyone cared about and focused on.

When you make the customer experience a part of your culture and part of every piece of the journey then your customers will be primed to expect a good experience in support. Don't let them down.

3. Process.

Creating process and documentation isn't always the sexiest part of a job, but it always pays off. Find a place to house the documentation that works for you and refer to it often in team meetings and training.

You will also find that technology can help immensely improve your process. Using tools to manage your queue or tools like CloudApp to create videos, screenshots, and GIFs to close tickets faster will only help speed and culture.

Customer experience is key to growth in any business. Understanding how to make it better and where to focus will help your company take the next step toward best-in-class status.