BI 324: How to Improve the eCommerce Customer Experience and Profit From Your Customer Support
July 28, 2020
On the show with me today is Justin Winter; Co-founder and CEO of Boostopia - a SaaS app that helps eCommerce companies to better engage their support team and improve the customer experience by helping managers to better understand, manage, and improve both their support team and the overall customer experience.
Episode Highlights
[02:25] — Justin introduces Boostopia
Boostopia is a software for customer support managers that come up with ways to improve eCommerce customer experience.
Three of the four co-founders worked with Justin at an eCommerce company he founded before Boostopia.
At first, the company relied on the first batch of customers and their referral networks. Now, they’re developing a lead generation program through cold sales and business development.
Their focus has been companies with one full-time agent and between 1 and 20 customers.
[09:45] — Boostopia's positioning
Their processes improve support operations so that it’s not only a cost center but something that creates revenue. The end goal is to improve the overall customer experience.
As a result, the solution they found was in enterprise products requiring multi-year contracts.
They designed the software to have an accessible modern design that is intuitive and easy.
[13:40] — The #1 problem that Boostopia solves
Boostopia helps companies scale and grow without spending money and hiring people more than they need to.
Boostopia’s tools and add-ons help scaling organizations understand how they can improve their support department system.
On average, Boostopia helps companies decrease their support volume by 30% and make the existing team 20% faster.
By improving their processes and treating their teams better, companies serve their customers better as a result
[16:43] — The job of a support team role
One of the highest turnover roles in an eCommerce company is the support role. It’s because oftentimes companies are not engaging the team.
Without improving the processes of the support operation, customer experience will suffer.
Customers prefer not to have problems in the first place instead of talking to people about the issues they have.
[21:10] — Boostopia’s customer acquisition categories
Outbound or cold sales development
Customer referrals
Paid advertising campaigns
[25:09] — Justin explains how they pull leads
They create an outbound sequence of email varieties to start conversations and eventually get customers on an initial call.
They clinch two to three appointments from about 300 emails per week, a 1% ratio.
[27:29] — The bottleneck in the system
They were having intermittent deliverability challenges, and they couldn’t get out of that slump.
The solution they’re testing for this is bringing a third party to improve their domain reputation.
[28:49] — Justin shares what their messaging looks like
Boostopia cites some of the hallmark brands they have worked with.
They then give a preview of their support operation solution when it comes to scaling.
They offer free in-depth support operation audits.
They’re also stacking around intent, signal-based programs.
[35:00] — What their referral program looks like
They're intentional about asking existing customers to refer other potential clients to them. It is a 100% manual outreach.
Concerning their partnerships, their clients send them referrals who have questions about ticketing systems. If they close the deal, Boostopia gives the referring client a referral fee.
[38:02] — A look into Boostopia’s processes
The initial work — build the process, optimize, and figure out what the best process is.
The next is to identify what the best tool or resource is for automating that process. The goal is to minimize the amount of human input.
Boostopia is in the spectrum of automating to outsourcing. Their onboarding specialists handle all the onboarding work with customers, which is a checklist-heavy and well-documented process.
[43:08] — Ways to improve eCommerce customer experience
Customers want advisors, not problem-fixers. They care the most about customer experience.
Hence, it is crucial to focus on the operation side of things to free them from answering repetitive customer questions.
More and more companies are moving their support operations from a cost center to a profit center.
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