Customer Feedback for Growth: A Conversation with Timothy Wu

Yeah. So I think for us in our business model, good customer experience and good customer service. Well, sorry, let me actually break this up a little bit. There’s a certain portion, which is: “Hey, I have a question or an issue,” and you want some sort of feedback and that sort of thing from somebody on the team, right? Usually you want to talk to somebody on the phone or, if you prefer not to, you do emails and that sort of thing. And the customer experience—I think I’ll decouple those topics a little bit. Interestingly for us as a product, the ideal customer experience is actually that we’re almost like a sidecar for them, where we are an invisible presence that they know they should trust and depend on for their money—bringing deposits into their account, sending money out reliably and in a timely manner—and then, if they’re utilizing a line of credit product or future loan products, they apply, can qualify, get approved, and then the money hits their bank account in a really quick fashion. So these are all parts of the experience where our challenge is to create a product that is super stable and safe for us on a risk and prod side. Of course, it also works seamlessly in the background. One of the things—and I’ll tie it to the service portion here—is that the more we talk to our customers (our CS team is on the phone every day, our product team and even part of our engineering will shadow calls once in a while or actually conduct their own user interviews), the one thing we hear from this profile of entrepreneurs and micro recipes is that ain’t nobody got time for anything—the last thing a small business owner wants to do when they’re handling HR, operations, marketing, sales, and product development for themselves is to have to work with waiting on their bank or their financial services or spend time with us on the phone when they need to reach us. So I think for the customer experience side, it’s about trying to keep that as streamlined for them as possible and providing some of the layered value we’ve had—things like cashback awards, access to ATMs wherever they need to go, and not necessarily having to visit a branch are all things we’re trying to optimize for the benefit of small business owners.

Yeah, in terms of the customer service side, it’s all the things that we as humans and consumers love about customer service. If you have an issue, you want to get a hold of somebody very quickly. You want them to know what they’re talking about, to be empathetic to your situation, and to be knowledgeable about the thing you’re asking for. So the way we’ve been able to recreate that a little bit is by following a model from the customer service industry. More and more, all sorts of customer service centers—from startup products to really large banks—have certain levers and touch points with customers in terms of service rates. Usually you go to a website, find a help or chat bot that directs your inquiry, and then eventually you get to a phone number that you can call, and there’s usually phone shooting stuff. So on our end, we’re working with the components available to us from standard customer service practices, but we’re trying to figure out, “Okay, can we get deflection a little bit better by asking or prompting the right questions inside our chat bot?” And eventually, when they get connected to an agent, does it get routed to somebody who is an expert in that field? There are still a lot of improvements on our end that we’re trying to work on. But again, as long as you’re tapping on those components that I talked about, to me that is good customer service—it’s efficient, and you’re accomplishing something with each touch point.

Yeah, absolutely. I think on a quantitative side, we have a pretty standard data stack. I’d say we use analytics and tracking tools like Amplitude and Google Analytics for our website. We also consolidate all the data and throw it into dashboards. There’s a bunch of dashboards for every component of our business, right? On the marketing growth side and on the CS and operation side, we try our best to feed as many data sources into these consolidated dashboards as possible.

On the customer service front, just knowing how many times certain customers are calling in and the volume of calls coming into our team on a regular basis is super important in terms of starting to tip into the qualitative side of things; understanding our user behavior is super important. One of the tools I’ve discovered in my time here at Hatch—a tool I didn’t realize was a thing—was an endorsement for them. But I don’t actually work with them directly. There is a really interesting tool in place called Full Story, which is actually a combination of heat maps and session recording. I assume heat maps are really big for any web marketer, right? Full Story does this where it’s not just maps but also records user sessions of people going through your product and shows what they are clicking on. You can see the behavior of your users; you don’t just get a nice colored map of where they’re clicking—you can see they’re clicking here, here, and here. And you can see a lot of what a user is doing. There’s a whole view called rage cooking, where it’s super frustrated and expecting a link or a piece of text to be a button, and that’s super insightful. And so that’s a little more qualitative, but still quantitative, because there’s very little interaction needed. It is collected and does its thing in the background in terms of actual qualitative feedback.

A few of the things we do, as I mentioned before, are product interviews, exit surveys, and any time a user or customer takes action, we try to understand what it is—usually around cancelations or requests to close accounts—but we try our best to be proactive about it too. It doesn’t have to be the moment they decide to close their account or ask for a suspension; we eventually reach out to them. We do it on a quarterly basis, where it’s like, “Okay, let’s just send out a wave of emails.” It gets people on the phone with us, so there are those aspects.

And I think for the marketing aspect that I really like, qualitative feedback is super important. In the lens of startups and product-based companies, we’re all super fixated on what feature we can build to best serve this customer, right? But a lot of times there’s a lot of nuance in what customers are asking for, and it’s a difficult thing if we literally built out the laundry list of what every single person wants because it’s impossible to balance, right?

So I think on the marketing side, what I have enjoyed doing recently is bringing in some of our customers to work on marketing storytelling, sort of brand narrative projects. We have this whole series called The SMB Spotlight Series, and we’ve done podcast-style interviews where we sit down and ask them these very same types of questions—how did you get started? How did you know that you wanted to put your nine to five and ask them about their day, about what they’re doing, and what they’re working towards? We’ve done that in a video format in a mini documentary style. We’ve also done phone interview podcast stuff and tried our best to weave that into our own content marketing as well. So not only do we do one of these interviews and have a video, a transcript, and a blog post come out of it, we’re also asking them, as a small business owner, what their struggles have been. Our hope is that with content like that, we’ll be able to put it out into the world and get more of our customers to learn from each other. It’s educational and part of the whole growing-the-pie sort of thing. If small business owners are very candid and transparent about the things they’re working on, what excites them, and what worries them, others can learn from that and eventually learn from pitfalls and avoid mistakes.

Yeah. I hope I can give a simple response here for what could potentially be a very complex answer. As I mentioned before, to me it’s not as easy as simply saying, “Okay, people want this thing. They’re asking for it, go build the thing right?” You have to assume that everything someone wants, right off the bat, in its most literal form, has some type of meeting or pain point that you’re trying to address. If you want to abstract that out and say, “Okay, well, I want an integration into my accounting system, what are they really asking for?” they’re actually asking for a way to save time—pulling down a bunch of transactions and doing data entry into their spreadsheets, or anything like that. So I think that’s the challenge.

In terms of using product feedback to unlock growth, there’s a move into the complicated phase. It’s like, “Okay, the thing they asked for: what’s the pain point they’re trying to solve?” Also, are there other folks in our customer base who are asking for that same thing? Cool—do some analysis on whether there’s a certain percentage of people either asking for the thing or exhibiting behaviors that would lead us to believe they’re asking for things. For this particular example, it’s just how many times people are hitting that download transactions button. Then, when we figure out when we want to actually funnel resources into it—and put engineers, designers, and marketing folks into promoting this thing—we have to also think about what the opportunity size is here. For example, if we’re building an accounting system integration, who are the top five most used integrations? We could run out and build direct integrations into smaller, just getting started accounting systems. But does it make sense for us to build for the largest ones? Yeah, it’s an interesting challenge. It’s a mixture of taking what the customers are asking for through the feedback channels and then determining how this is actually helping their pain points. Then there’s a whole bunch of research and due diligence that we have to do on the data side and market side to determine, “Hey, this is where we could go,” because we could help as many customers as possible. There’s one aspect of helping the current customers we have, but we can extrapolate that and say, “Okay, if we’re helping a large portion of our customers, we can assume that there’s a whole market of folks who are looking for certain things like that.” So yeah, that sounds pretty straightforward, but my brain was…

Yeah, I don’t want to speak for other members of my team because on the marketing and growth side we usually see it through our social media channels from a branding and voice perspective. We have this really heated customer, and we’re at an early stage where I’m still jumping into these issues and giving my opinion. When we get a really elevated customer with a very specific use case, my team gets roped in to decide, “Okay, what’s the best public, PR-friendly way to respond?”

I think as a marketing professional there’s a certain level at which you need to show acknowledgment and management of a customer’s concern. But because of privacy issues, compliance, and legal restrictions, you just can’t get in the weeds or give detailed information about their accounts. You can’t fully satisfy a customer if they simply want to go to Twitter, rant, and start a public fight with you. There’s a balance to strike. At the end of the day, our RCS team tries their best to exhibit empathy—saying, “Hey, we hear you”—and relay feedback when possible, even if they can’t resolve the issue immediately. As long as customers feel heard, there’s at least some recourse. We’ve all been in situations where we complain or give negative feedback and feel like our input goes into a black hole.

There’s a lot of language crafting my team works on, even helping with responses such as, “That looks a little too sterile; maybe we could make the customer feel more heard.” There’s a lot encompassed in that.

I’ll draw away from Hatch for a second and talk about my experience at Square. I was on the account management and sales team there for at least two years, on the phone day in and day out with customers. Occasionally, I would get a customer who was super heated, and it’s one thing to handle that with empathy on the phone, but also not give room when you simply can’t do anything for them.

From a team standpoint, it’s really important. I really miss the call center, the sales floor—when you have a rough call, it’s easy to swivel your chair to a coworker and say, “Man, that was super rough,” and get support from your team. I think working remote is definitely a bit tough. I haven’t had one of these calls in such a long time, so it’s hard for me to comment on that, but there’s the aspect of how you respond to the customer and how teammates who handle de-escalation help out. There are many ways to smooth things out and consider what can be taken away from the experience.