Content platform provider Turtl has made aftercare a key differentiator to its business model. Karla Rivershaw, head of marketing, explains the CX-centric business model and operations
How much impact does marketing’s insight have on product development? Chances are, not much. Marketing rarely has ownership of those four important Ps. Price and product are now commonly out of reach, but at the most customercentric businesses, all that’s up for grabs.
Unlike with other tech vendors, Turtl’s customers are given constant and easy access to free training and advice. Turtl believes that if its customers aren’t
getting the most they can from the platform, Turtl isn’t doing its job
. Karla Rivershaw, head of marketing at the content platform answers our questions on the CX strategy.
How does CX allow you to differentiate from your competitors?
We’re really proud of the feedback we get from our customers. We’ve heard from them that the amount of attention we give is vastly different from other martech vendors. And as a martech customer ourselves, we experience that too – we’ve signed up and never heard from the vendor again.
If you’re trying to resolve something it can be very frustrating when the vendor takes a hands-off approach. With some vendors you actually have to pay for training to use their platform, which I just think is absolutely bonkers. It’s so counterintuitive and the opposite to our business model. We believe that if our customers aren’t getting the full potential from our tech, we have a problem. The last time I checked our NPS was 99%.
Who looks after CX in your business?
Everyone, although more specifically we have two distinct teams that support our customer – we have the customer experience team, which works with users on a daily basis and are responsible for onboarding. They’re on call to answer any questions on how to use the Turtl platform but also monitor customers’ use so they can call or email them with suggestions for improvement.
We also have our customer success team, which provides a single point of contact for each customer – someone they can go to with questions, such as integration with another platform.
You use customer feedback to improve your product, could you explain that process?
Customer feedback is huge and we’re always looking to get more so that we can tie it into our product roadmap. We’re taking our product into totally different directions based on feedback from our customers over the past two months – it’s exciting to see how much customer ideas shape our business.
Our customer success officers and customer experience team are speaking to customers all the time
and they get a lot of feedback, which they collate and give to our developers. Unless it’s a stand out amazing idea, our developers then prioritise the improvements based on how many requests they’ve had and work through them systematically.
How are your employees involved in product development?
One of the things I absolutely love about working at Turtl is that everyone has an opportunity to feedback on the product because we’re all using it everyday.
We were looking to bring out a new feature in the product and our CEO Nick walked from desk to desk showing it to staff with an A/B scenario, asking them their view on the best experience. It showed me that the company really cares what its employees think.
Did you see customer-led product development in your previous roles?
I don’t think customer feedback ever made much of an impact to the product roadmap in any of the companies I’ve worked at before. I was working for large corporates. I recognise that it can be very difficult to make a connection between the customer feedback and the development of new solutions – there are so many people involved in a large organisation and far less transparency.
Developers were typically locked away on their own and they would come up with ideas that were so out of whack with what the customer wanted. I remember many soft product releases, and even full launches, where marketing hadn’t had a chance to see it, let alone have any input.
Should marketing step up to lead CX?
As a marketer you have to put yourself out there and I do think it’s really important that marketers lead this because we understand our audience more than most – better than sales most of the time. If we don’t understand our audience we aren’t effective at our jobs.
What does customer responsiveness mean to you?
Responsiveness means being able to contact the company wherever you are and by whatever means you want – whether that’s online, by email or phone and they need to be there ready to respond to you. If you have a live chat feature it has to be instantaneous; sending a ‘live chat’ message and
waiting an hour for a response isn’t great customer experience
.
If you give feedback to a company that business should first acknowledge that they received that feedback, after they need to share what happens with that feedback. If changes are made customers deserve to know they were part of that. We tell customers, including a timeline of when we expect to roll it out and appreciation for that fantastic insight.
What challenges do you face in staying customer-focused?
The only challenge we’ve had is finding enough of the right people as we grow our team. It’s really hard to fill roles in our team because we’re look for a very specific person who are going to make the customer feel great and like the heroes of their own story.
This is an extract from the report, Become a CXpert: The marketer’s guide to customer experience. To download the full guide with more insights and case studies on customer experience, please
click here.
Become a CXpert: The marketer’s guide to customer experience
Most B2B organisations suffer from diffused responsibility when it comes to CX. This guide will tell you why – and how – you can lead the charge.
