ERP034 - Customer Satisfaction Scoring w/ Simplesat

Welcome to Evolved Radio where we explore the evolution of business and technology. Today's podcast is brought to you by SimpleSat, your tool for stupidly simple satisfaction surveys. I'm joined by Derek and Corey Brown, the father and son team behind Pronto marketing and SimpleSat. If you're in a service-based industry, it's important to know how your customers feel about your service. Traditional satisfaction surveys are terrible and response rates show that that's the case. SimpleSat can increase your client feedback tenfold. SimpleSat also makes the data more actionable. Jump over to simplesat.io for a free 30-day trial and try it out yourself. Now, onto my interview with Derek and Corey. Joining me on the podcast today are Derek and Corey Brown, co-founders of Pronto Marketing and SimpleSat. Welcome to the podcast, guys. Thanks for having us. So this will be in a bit of an experiment. This is actually the first time that I've had more than one guest at a time on the podcast. So we'll start with a bit of the background as we usually do. If you guys want to give us some history, I think people in the MSP market especially are probably familiar with Pronto. You guys do a fair bit of work on web pages and marketing efforts for the industry, and some people may have seen SimpleSat, and it's the new product that you guys are working on. If you want to kick us off and give us a bit of background on where Pronto came from and your development through the through the industry. Sure, um, you know, I'll take that, this is Derek. Uh, before I started Pronto, Corey and I started Pronto, I worked at Microsoft for about 13 years in a variety of different positions, mobile devices and such. Uh, for one period of time, I was responsible for Windows Small Business Server back in the day. And spent a lot of time, um, obviously getting to know our our partners, uh, around the world, I met partners in Australia and India and Europe, all around the US and had a partner advisory council, people like Curtis Hitz and Arland Sorenson and people. Um, and just learned a lot of and, you know, really got to enjoy my time with the, you know, IT guys and and what became MSPs out of that. And when I decided to take a break and do something different than Microsoft and got talking to Corey about starting a company. You know, I really thought from my experience, uh, with these guys that there's a lot of struggles around marketing and marketing execution and getting things done. Um, and so we started Pronto with the idea that we would be kind of like managed what we called managed services for marketing at that time that we would do execution and get things done uh for our MSP clients. And that's worked out really well. We've been doing it for 10 years, we have over 1500 clients, which are probably 900 or something our MSPs. Um, on all on some sort of, you know, ongoing subscription full service program. Along the way, customer service became really critical to us. You know, we're doing thousands of requests a month from major websites redu to, um, you know, quick short little updates to fixing things like broken forms, we have new customers on boarding, new customers going live, sort of all through the life cycle. And we started collecting this data in different sort of ad hoc ways. Zendesk had things or we use survey forms, um, and, you know, we're really a kind of a super data geeky company. I have a full-time data analyst that works for me on this kind of stuff. Um, and we just started wanting to build better tools that gave us a more holistic view of things, both from a a CSAT or customer satisfaction at a transactional basis, such as, um, you know, were you happy with the support ticket to specific sorts of, um, moments in time, like your website goes live, what was that experience for you? We do NPS when people cancel with us and ask us, you know, how what could we have done better and how do you feel about, um, you know, Pronto at that kind of exit moment. And then we do, you know, quarterly NPS and lots of things. So really SimpleSat started for us as an initiative to just get better data for us. And have a more holistic view. We also thought about it in terms of, you know, just wanting to have a full life cycle on our customers. For instance, we had a lot of people saying a lot of great stuff in our feedback, but we had no way to share it that was really scaled. And so we we thought about that particular uh challenge as well. So really SimpleSat kind of grew out of two things, which is our deep passion around customer service and doing better, along with working really closely with hundreds and hundreds of MSPs day in and day out. And the kind of things that they ask us, um, and the kinds of uh challenges that they have. And strategically for our business, it made a lot of sense because we really have come from just being a website. To a full range of marketing services and AdWords and Facebook campaign management and custom content development. And that we really have a full funnel. And the last kind of piece in that funnel is really about customer retention and customer satisfaction and sharing feedback, you know, back to the top of the funnel. So we felt like too, it was a really good fit for our business. So what I would take out of that is that the more things change, the more things stay the same. You mentioned two things that I'm certainly familiar with that the marketing is always a heavy interest for for customers. Um, for especially people in technical fields, it's not an area that they're super comfortable with. And usually need someone else to lean on for for some of that support. The other part that you mentioned that I'm a big believer in is that uh the knowledge is the easy part, the execution is where the rubber meets the road. And I think that's a and certainly an area where more businesses should take advantage of uh agencies that can support them in the areas that are not core to their business. So I think that's uh really interesting that that that is still very evident in the industry today as well. Yeah. We're big believers, I mean, execution's hard. Um, and something as simple as saying you should get a monthly newsletter out. Um, when you're in the tornado of taking care of customers and your focus is, you know, with small businesses and you're their IT guy. Um, it's so easy to punt, send the newsletter to next week, week after week after week. And, you know, we just get it done for our clients. Yeah. And then the the move to uh SimpleSat, you mentioned uh CSAT, customer satisfaction scoring. This is certainly something that uh I'm a big, big believer in. Because how do you know how you're doing with your customer service if you're not actually collecting that feedback directly from the people that you're serving? And I think a lot of people make a mistake in making a lot of assumptions about what they think is happening and what they feel the client thinks about them and the relationship, and they don't really have a lot of data to validate that uh that visibility and to be able to justify what they either feel is the case. Or, you know, sometimes they can just get scared and start to worry about, you know, are we okay here? Is this client, are we is our relationship solid? I don't really know. They seem to say the right things when I speak to them. But they're not really giving me the warm fuzzies. So I I think uh the the customer satisfaction scoring really helps to objectify that data and make it clear that the clients on the ground are giving you appropriate feedback. And people are satisfied with the level of service that you're giving and being able to have that as a defensible measure if anyone ever questions what you're actually offering and whether or not people are satisfied with the service. So, um, that's sort of my view of CSAT, but uh uh, you know, Corey, if you'd like to expand on that. Maybe touch on how you your view of CSAT is important to a business. Right. Yeah, and I it it's it's a really good point that it's kind of like before you do all the other cool stuff with satisfaction like um publishing as testimonials or publishing your satisfaction score or um integrations with third-party systems like your your CRM or your PSA. It's really getting it in place in the first place, going from nothing to something is definitely the most important part. And it's like, you know, you're driving at night with the without headlights on. You're just you're completely in the dark. Um, where once you get this set up, it's there's kind of a a piece of mind and a confidence like you're saying that, um, you know, you know every interaction, the customer at least has a chance to to rate the feedback and provide feedback. And it comes into the system or it comes to you in a structured way where it's not, you know, just anecdotal, um, an email to the founder of the company about a complaint or something you hear off hand while the tech is on site. Um, it's captured in a structured way every time, which allows you to, um, you know, take each piece of feedback and investigate that and dig into it in a structured way. Like in our team, for example, when we get a bad satisfaction at Pronto, it sends an email to a group of people. And our support manager is the person on point to dig into it and let us know what happened. And we kind of do a little mini five wise analysis on that. So all of us in the company, we just know that if a customer leaves a bad uh review, we know that we're going to talk about it and we know that we're going to do something better to improve from it. Yeah, you you hit on it being a two-pronged approach that one you have to find your way in the dark and just knowing what the customer satisfaction score is to begin with is sort of the first effort of that. Uh if you roll this out or uh and you find, hey, the satisfaction score is great, good. And then you can continue to maintain that and address any negative feedback. But also in some cases, you may launch it and maybe this is the resistance and some why some people are not comfortable sometimes rolling out these systems is they're fearful of what they're actually going to find out. And if they validate that clients are unhappy, then that that can sort of lead to some fear of validating the truth of that. Which I think is kind of hiding from the inevitable, you're better off to know those things and be able to manage them appropriately rather than uh just stick your head in the sand and saying, well, I don't want someone to say that what we're doing isn't working. Uh you're much better off to be able to know that in order to fix it. Yeah, we had a period of time where uh we were at that time we were using Zendesk and we were always getting 99%, 99.5% um good ratings. And I forget quite what was the the question they would ask. I was just how satisfied. Yeah, you happy, you know, and people go happy, yes. And we changed the the the wording a little bit, you know, something like was everything perfect. And and we intentionally wanted that score to go down some because we weren't getting enough enough feedback, you know, of like, okay, we were good, but were we great. Um, so yeah, you can't hide from it. You want to keep, you know, and then then we started to get those. You know, it dropped down to whatever 97, 98%, but we got some really great feedback of people who were overall happy, but like, well, now that you ask, you could have done this a little better. Um, so, you know, we just keep digging for it. And sure it hurts your feelings sometimes, but you got to know. Better to know, yeah. The the other piece I think um is really important as well is sometimes the users are happy and the business owner is not. And usually the account manager is having a conversation with the business owner who, you know, maybe has some negative feedback and is saying, you know, well, I've heard that people are not satisfied with the service that you're delivering. And being able to present some evidence to say, well, that's, you know, that's not the indication that we're getting, everyone seems to be really pleased, maybe you're just hearing from one noisy person who keeps walking to your office to say that they're dissatisfied. Uh, so I think the the again, that that objective data to be able to have um a data point to control the conversations that you're having with a client. Around certain narratives that may or may not be true, I think is really, really helpful as well. The other piece that I think um is great for the the approach that you guys are taking is reducing the friction from giving surveys. Uh and collecting that data. Uh I'm sure everyone has been sent emails that says, hey, please fill out the survey. And most people delete them. But if they're actually inclined to fill out that survey, they click a link and realize that it's a four-page uh web form that they have to. We need their way through and typing into open fields and scoring on a rating of 10 and uh they they go through the first page and probably give up after that. And you guys are taking the approach of limited friction where just give me a thumbs up or a thumbs down or uh a smiley face or a frowny face and that really helps the user to be able to just give you a single click within the email, within the ticket, within the the web page. And reduces that friction of them actually being able to provide the feedback that you are looking for. Yeah, and there's a few parts there. One is about the the one click feedback, which is really important where like you're saying, if you get an email that says, you know, please take five minutes out of your day to take a survey. And there's a button there, it's the response rate's going to be super low. Because right there it's, you know, you're asking, it's kind of like you're asking something that just no one wants to do in the first place. And the second part is that um once you're on a survey, it's they're usually the the user experience is pretty bad and the design is bad and there's uh you see the pagination. And it's like one out of 20 and you're like, no, you know, no way I'm going to answer this. So, um, if if we combine the one click feedback. So that's where you see the smiley faces in an email or thumbs or um an NPS, net promoter score, zero through 10 question in email. Once you click that, you're already answering question number one and that um is already captured in the system whether they complete the rest of the survey or not. So that's, you know, already there increasing your response rates and increasing the number of um overall responses you're going to get. And then two, once you're on the survey, we're doing as much as we can to create a fun and interactive and intuitive survey process that is, you know, really different from the mean right now. Which is this really kind of boring, um, ugly, arduous task where it's actually it should be kind of fun and it should be a, you know, a leave a positive image for your company after your customer takes a survey. That it's like, wow, that was that was cool what they just did. That, um, you know, they have their their stuff together. Excellent. So you guys are generally serving the MSP and IT service market. But obviously CSAT is something that's pretty universal, especially in any type of uh service entity. You you guys don't limit yourself or or view the product as centric around IT service providers, do you? So at the moment, um, kind of yes and no. We we do have customers that are non-MSPs using the product. And most of them are still technology companies, um, that are relying on a help desk such as uh Zendesk or Freshdesk to collect customer satisfaction. Um, at the moment, we are over 90% of our users are MSPs and um, we're finding more and more as we get into this just how, um, you know, there's there's all these different industries and niches and just how much each individual one requires an incredible amount of focus and attention to really get it right. So, while we it's kind of just the the non-MSPs are just coming in through um word of mouth or organically. But the the product that we're building right now is really, you know, centered around MSPs, around um the support that we offer and the integrations that we have and um the marketing and everything around that. So mainly IT service. Okay, great. And what type of feedback are you getting from the clients? I imagine there's the party that didn't have any type of CSAT program in place. And I'm sure they're wowed. And then you may have some people that are uh coming over from uh different types of survey systems, you want maybe touch on both of those uh scenarios or any other type of success stories that you have. Yeah, sure. So, um, and like you said, there's definitely two camps. One, they were doing nothing before. And it's now they're they're it's completely eye opening for the company to have this sort of data. Um, a user forwarded me an internal mail just the other day that they had sent out to their team. Where they say, um, you know, this this data is beyond valuable. And they're sharing the um dashboards with their team in an email and kind of doing uh weekly pep talks with the team. And saying, you know, now we're up our satisfaction's up a few points. We dropped one the last week. So let's keep it up. Stuff like that, so that's really cool to see that it's actually making a a driving impact on a company. Um, from other users switching over from other services, we've received a lot of feedback that um they're receiving more responses, the response rates are going up from other solutions they were using. And also our um testimonial testimonial publishing widgets on websites are a huge hit. Where, you know, before they were just they weren't really able to take advantage of positive feedback. And one feature with SimpleSat is you can publish it, um, you can publish feedback on your website in real time and display it on your homepage or a testimonials page. So that's a big hit. Where we have a lot of users displaying that feedback on their website. Yeah. Yeah, that's a cool feature as well that you can actually see, hey, this was feedback from, you know, this morning. Or yesterday afternoon. It gives a the the the the vision around the fact that this is real-time data that you're not sort of cherry-picking testimonials from four years ago and leaving them up on the website. That there's there's fresh stuff coming in and people are satisfied with the service that you're that you're providing. So I think that's a really cool plus as well. That kind of leads to I guess uh some of the other feature sets that's one of the differentiators that I certainly see in SimpleSat from the other products. In the in the industry. Um, it it's not something that didn't exist before. So I I'm curious why you guys decided to develop your own product to meet this need if you've either saw that there was something missing in the market. Or you felt that there was a competitive advantage that you could produce uh against the competitors that were there. Yeah, sure. So, um, as Derek said in the beginning as we, you know, SimpleSat really came from us with Pronto not having the solution that we really wanted. So, a lot of this comes from our learnings about um everything from. Just feeling like the surveys aren't interactive and intuitive enough for users to, um, you know, there's no a lot of different survey tools. They they only do one thing, so they only do uh CSAT ticket feedback. Where a lot of other tools specialize just in net promoter score collection. Or, um, you know, there's other tools like Survey Monkey or Typeform that make really great survey tools, but really don't focus on the customer satisfaction element or focus on the MSP market. So, when we look at customer satisfaction, we really view it as there's three areas. That one is um surveys, so doing a great job at presenting surveys to customers and collecting data. Um, two is the insights piece where once you collect the data, it's taking advantage of it in your own dashboard with leaderboards and stats. Um, integrations, notifications and reporting. And the third one is, you know, taking that customer satisfaction act back out kind of top of funnel thing where you're actually using it as a marketing tool to um increase website conversions and uh show your satisfaction percentage on a website or point positive customers to leave a good review on Google or Facebook or um some industry page. So we've seen a lot of there's other competitors or other companies that do a great job at one of these areas, but we're not seeing one that does a great job in every area. And we really want to take ownership over every part from beginning to end and that's how we think we can have the most high quality product in that process. Right, so kind of wrapping in a bunch of uh the different products that are available out there. Uh the CSAT is the one that that is sort of the core of the product right now. Uh the the other components that we've tucked on touched on are are more in the road map and things that you're developing. Um, do you want to touch on sort of what you see as the the development and the road map for the product and what people would hope to see in the next 6 to 12 months? Yeah, sure. So right now we're working on um a net promoter score email feature. So this will allow MSPs to sync their customer list with SimpleSat, I will start with Connectwise and Autotask and Infusionsoft. And you sync the customer list and um all the fields that you need there and you can create an audience within SimpleSat to make sure that you're only sending an net promoter score email to. Like active contacts with Connectwise or Infusionsoft, we use the person type. And we'll manage all of the sending rules and delivery and frequency where you can set it up on autopilot where email sends out uh once a quarter to all your active contacts between Monday and Friday, 5 and to 9 um 9 to 5 p.m. Um evenly spurted out the distribution between your list. So, it'll be a great. We've done this with Pronto for years now. But it'll just it's a great autopilot where you just know it's not like something you need to put on your calendar. You know, you need to do the NPS survey and just like marketing, you're you're going to forget to do it or punt it. It's just on autopilot. It's always working. The feedback's coming in just like CSAT. So that's the the NPS feature and we we have that will be ready to start testing in August. Other types of integrations, we're just working on getting deeper in the IT market. So for example, we're working on getting with uh direct integration with Bright Gage now. Users can integrate with Bright Gage at the moment through our Dropbox integration. We'd like to get deeper with Bright Gage with that. And just working with other partners and vendors and tools such as IT Glue and Connectwise and Autotask and all of them, just getting deeper with that. Great. And the NPS. We we kind of touched on it a couple of times. People may not be as familiar with it because we kind of elaborated on CSAT. Uh maybe if you could uh just give us a bit of a a bit of a download on on the usefulness of NPS as well. Yeah, NPS is great for for two reasons, it came from some research that um that two guys did at Bane. I don't know, it must be 20 years ago or something and wrote a book called the ultimate question. And what they found was through kind of two things, one that the most effective kind of question you could ask someone was, would you recommend this company to a friend or a colleague? Um in in one way or another. Um, they also did some interesting research that companies that actively did do customer service and follow up on it, uh had greater growth in their in their um and their stock price. It was actually kind of a an analysis on the impact of the financials of a company that are focused on customer service. The great thing about NPS is not only it's a proven methodology in terms of this question, but it's now benchmarked across all kinds of industries. And, you know, you can go out and find benchmarks. And see how you can compare. So, I think it's just it's a, you know, it's not a it's not a solution for everything. There's other information that you need. Like NPS is not good for a ticket satisfaction rating, it's more like a quarterly or something to kind of check in with your customer. On this kind of um feeling about the overall relationship. You know, we also use a methodology, you know, something like radar that's kind of in between CSAT and NPS. And sort of digging down a little bit more. Um, but I think at a minimum, especially say for an MSP, you need that CSAT transactional, how do we do on this ticket? And that's kind of a real hot, you know, kind of question that you can watch go up and down over time. And then you step back and ask your NPS and get that feeling of overall how people feel about the relationship. Right, that's a great summary, so you're kind of collecting that that similar type of data both from the top end of the relationship as well as the transactions within that relationship, right? Right. And then once you have those those in place, it's really insightful, um, when you're collecting both CSAT and NPS feedback. And at Pronto, we know this where you'll there'll be cases where you might have a really high CSAT score for a customer, but a lower NPS score. And the other way around. And something like that could happen where, you know, the texts are always friendly and they always get things right the first time, but maybe overall your service is really overpriced or maybe you're missing a a service component that's really inconvenient for the customer. So, while they're really happy with the day-to-day interactions, they're not likely to recommend your company to a friend. And, you know, it could be the other way around too, where maybe there's a few texts that they just don't really like working with, but overall they're super happy to recommend you because they see a lot of value in the service. And, you know, they couldn't live without you. So, that's been really helpful for us at Pronto that, you know, if you're only doing, it's kind of like, if you're not doing anything, you're totally driving in the dark. But if you're only doing one, then it's half the picture. So, getting both in place really helped us. Yeah, as I often say, uh data does not give you any answers, it'll only help you ask more intelligent questions. And and like with that those asking questions, it's one thing that's great too about getting this feedback is it it opens up a a conversation with the with your customer. And that's really what's important that, um, you know, it's just it's giving more channels and more opportunities to open up the conversation. And the real meaningful insights that's going to happen are once they answer a question and you follow up with them and then you have a conversation about that, that's really one of the biggest values of a tool like this. Yeah, and customer satisfaction is something that people absolutely need to take seriously, it's your best defense against commoditization in any type of service-based industry. You need to develop deep, meaningful relationships with with your clients. And being able to collect that data and know that you're on track is is super, super critical. If uh people are not collecting CSAT information and they're they're curious about the product, where would you uh suggest they they go to check things out? Right, yeah, you can go to simplesat.io. And just follow the sign up process from there. We have a free 30-day trial where you can use the product in its full form to test it out and implement your system. So, super easy to get going and I'm always available for support or helping implement with anything. So, anything I haven't asked or anything we haven't touched on that we should in the conversation? No, you've done a pretty good job today, Todd. If listeners would like to connect with you. And ask follow along on social, any avenues that they should look for you on? Yeah, so you can find us on uh Facebook and LinkedIn. Our emails are Corey at simplesat.io. Or Derek at simplesat.io. Um, probably the best way to get in contact though is to go to our website at simplesat.io and just chat start chatting with us with the widget in the bottom right corner. Okay. Awesome. Well, I appreciate you guys uh coming on the show and talking a bit about uh NPS and CSAT and all the cool stuff that you're delivering to the IT market. Yeah, well, thank you so much for the time. Yeah, thanks a lot, we appreciate it. I hope you enjoyed our conversation about SimpleSat and the importance of client feedback. If you haven't already, go to simplesat.io and test it out with a free 30-day trial. Also, if you haven't yet subscribed to Evolve Radio, please subscribe, that way you'll get the latest episode straight to your smartphone.