Jerome Breche is an entrepreneur, innovator, and one of the co-founders of SnapEngage, a customer engagement application that empowers any company or anyone to quickly get a robust chat system embedded onto a website.
Here are my 5 questions with Jerome and his answers:
1) In a recent New York Times article The Yin and the Yang of Corporate Innovation there is a discussion between the merits of a bottom-down (think Google) versus a top-down (think Apple) approach to innovation. What path has SnapEngage taken with regards to the evolution of its innovation?
I do not believe we have taken either of these approaches; If I was to give a name to our approach I would call it “outside-in”. I have come to learn our customers know best what they want. So we have a vision for the product, we know where we want to go, and we’re using the product internally, but we don’t possess knowledge as broad or as good as our customer base. So our approach is to listen to our customers and they are really the ones driving the product innovation. To be honest, we cannot actually take credit for any of the ideation of capabilities in the product. Our customers have done it through feedback via social media and blogs, in person, as well as communication with our company.
To insure this effort is successful we use different tools for this. One I like is Pivotal Tracker. With Pivotal Tracker we can track very detailed development tasks, this allows us to be very agile and deliver them quickly to our users. Inside those tasks we actually track who was the requester so we can deliver the feature directly to the customer who asked for it initially, or to a group of customers and get their feedback quickly to make sure it is exactly what they wanted. We also keep extensive logs and road maps on Google Docs that the company shares. We have monthly and quarterly internal reviews to evaluate our successes and failures. We used to react to every piece of feedback, which isn’t scalable. Through these tools we can sort the data better and make determinations about what to work on for the betterment of our customer’s experience with the product.
2) You make use of the freemium model to market SnapEngage. Are you an advocate of this model? And if so, what advice do you have for entrepreneurs to implement this model successfully in marketing their own products? If not, what warnings do you have about this model?
I don’t know if I would call myself an advocate. We use it because it makes sense for our product because inside the free SnapEngage widget we have a small advertisement for SnapEngage. So if a free customer is going to use our product just a little bit, not enough for them justifying paying for the product, they’re actually paying us by putting our brand on their website. So we look at this as a win-win, it is creating more traffic for us and our most advantageous customer acquisitions so far are all through word-of-mouth. So it’s people who use it on a different website, or those who have heard about it other ways, that make it to our website. So for us a freemium model adds some value because we are able to put our brand name on other people’s websites. Yes, it costs us a little bit in free support, but not much considering the value we get from building product advocates. Plus we have a great product, which you need to succeed using a freemium model, people use it and then eventually become customers.
3) Your company offers world class customer service, not only to paying customers but to prospects as well. Free customer service to non-paying customers is obviously not scalable without an assumption about conversion. What considerations were necessary to make sure this level of support was/is sustainable (outside the obvious answer of “making sure you have a best-in-class product that converts”)?
Great service builds brand advocates which is a powerful form of marketing. Our company mantra is to treat every customer or prospect exactly the same way. To make it scalable we constantly try to improve support. We have focused on really making our FAQs usable so people can help themselves if they’re so inclined. However, we have no scripts or time budgets for interactions with people. So far this has worked for us, and people enjoy talking to real people.
4) In a 2003 TED video Seth Godin talks about a company needing to be “remarkable” in order to maintain a high level of success (Seth Godin on Sliced Bread). Live chat has been around since the 1990s with products such as ICQ. In the world of live chat, how have you built SnapEngage to ensure it is a product your customers remark about?
This brings us back to listening to customers, and if we go back to the history of our company that’s how we build the SnapEngage product. Initially, our company was a video distribution solution, a completely different use case but some of our customers asked us for a small feedback widget they could put on their website. So we built it, and then those early customers asked us for a more real-time way of responding to customer feedback, and that’s how we got into the live chat business! It was just by listening to our customers and their feedback. And this approach has led us to develop features and capabilities which are different from our competitors; an example of this is putting the chat agent’s picture in the live chat window. This feature, asked for by our customers, has created a more personal engagement for them with their customers. When a website visitor sees a real person’s smiling face, they are way more likely to respond to this message and engage. I like this feature because it highlights that we’re really about developing a more personal engagement/experience with users.
5) One has the opportunity to meet much of your team simply by engaging them through your application via your consumer facing website www.snapengage.com. Outside the unique advantage of getting a potential prospect instant interaction with your product, one also quickly learns that SnapEngage is a company of really cool people that are willing to go out of their way to help you. Is there any advice you can share on how you’ve been able to develop such an outstanding company ethos?
Luck plays a part. So far we’re very fortunate to find the right people. Of course, leading by example is effective, showing anyone that comes onboard that SnapEngage is friendly with all our customers. As a founder I’m still on live chat and phone support, it is important that I know what our customers are talking about or asking. Furthermore, we don’t believe in believe in mechanical systems like typical customer service organizations offer. They have scripts, scenarios and protocols. We empower our agents to interact as real humans with all customers so we don’t really have guidelines for our teams expect the one: your aim is to help the customer. Giving our employees this liberty makes a big difference on how they successfully interact with customers.
Hiring is obviously extremely important as well, we spend a lot of time on the hiring process. I interview at least 30 candidates for each position and we are really, really careful on who we hire because it is so important. Also, we involve the entire team in the hiring process… the entire team is involved and everyone gets a vote, this helps ensure the new hire is a good fit. We make any new hire read Zappo’s founder Tony Hsieh’s Delivering Happiness
