In this bonus section, you'll get access to previously recorded live expert workshops and Q&A from PLG experts such as Todd Olson (CEO of Pendo), Tara Robertson (CMO at Teamwork), Nelson Joyce (Co-founder of Tettra), and more.
Danny Villarreal:
Just start with some introductions. I'm Danny Villarreal, I'm the head of customer success at Jungle Scout.
Claudia Zuniga:
And my name is Claudia Zuniga, I'm the manager of customer experience.
Danny Villarreal:
And we work at Jungle Scout and usually the next question I get is, what is Jungle Scout? So we're a platform for customers and companies to win on Amazon. A lot of what we provide is data and insights to all levels of different sizes of companies, from very, very large to entrepreneurs. And we've been helping them grow for the last five years now. We're going on six right now, so we're in a really interesting phase in the company. And I like to tell people what I've realized throughout my own career is that onboarding is a journey. And for us here at Jungle Scout, that story is just more true than anything. And the reason I joined Jungle Scout is I was recruited in here to start something from scratch. They had built a really fast growing startup and as it started to mature and they had a really, really large number of customers, they said, "We need to do something more formal. We need to support our customers better."
Danny Villarreal:
And so for me, a lot of this is thinking about how do you first get someone into the tool? How do you physically onboard them into your tool? And then once they're in your tool, how do you train and educate them about the best ways to use it and to get value from that tool? And then hopefully they reach that finish line, they reach their goals, they have some sort of success. And that's really what we're driving to is this is the end state that we're all trying to reach with these programs and with this journey.
Danny Villarreal:
And so a little bit of research. I always like to put some numbers in there, but in doing research about how much we could move the needle on retention, we found that as small as a 5% improvement in retention rates, that can mean as much as a 20 to 95% increase in revenue and profits. And that's because these things are additive, they start to multiply, they start to be exponential growth if you can keep people around for long enough. And so it's not just focused on how do I keep someone for the first two weeks or how do I keep someone for the first month? This is how do I keep someone forever, hopefully. And so a lot of that starts with figuring out where your pain points are and starting to address those directly.
Danny Villarreal:
So the problems that were on the plate when I first started were we had really, really a very high amount of support requests. And when I say a lot, I'm not exaggerating. We had 14,000 support requests a month coming in, and a very, very small support team that was handling those requests. And although they were superstars and very efficient, it was such a reactive state of being that they were really not helping the customers in the way that they should to drive value in using the product. And I think in the best case scenarios, that's what you want to get to. And I see a question; how big was the support team? I think initially Claudia, you were on the support team before that. So where were we at when we started?
Claudia Zuniga:
By this point, we can have about 10 to 15 people at the most. So think about 10 to 15 people handling 14,000 emails.
Danny Villarreal:
Yeah. So the load was high to say the least. The second is, we've been doing a lot of different things to try to look at how do we move the needle on churn, retention however you were looking at it? And really we would see it drop down for a month or go up for a month, but there was never really any rhyme or reason to it, and we couldn't really find the secret sauce to either make churn to go down or to keep retention high.
Danny Villarreal:
And then the third problem was just adoption of the tools were not meeting our expectation. We have tools that can be very complex. And as we are continuing to develop, the landscape was getting more and more complex, and so people were like, "I want to make money, I want to sell on Amazon, I want to do better on Amazon, but it's a constantly shifting landscape." So we weren't getting the kinds of adoption that we were hoping for.
Danny Villarreal:
So those were the big rocks for us, and that's kind of where we started. The bets that we made to address those were... here's the top ones. And the first was really starting to look at how we were helping and supporting people. And in our first analysis, we realized the help was not very good and it was offsite, so people had to leave. So how could we bring that self service and good self service to people in a meaningful way?
Danny Villarreal:
The second was really starting to investing in how specifically we're onboarding people and getting them set up within our platform. The third was really to create a formal training and education program, not just have a webinar or not just have some videos, but really how do you actually train someone to get value out of your product and to execute on the jobs that they needed to do. And then the last one was really to create a team who owned all of these initiatives. We didn't want to spread this out, we didn't want to create additional silos, but you needed someone that was on the hook for this and could drive these initiatives. So those were the bets that our executive teams sort of made with our new team, our new customer experience team.
Danny Villarreal:
And so to start, we said self services is going to be the biggest lever that we've got, and we think that we can use those to prove value. And so we started using the methodology of doing an analysis of all of our help content, upping the value and making sure it was really good, really clear, and actually answering the top questions that we were getting. And then it was about surfacing that in a way to show that, not all help requires a ticket. If I can answer your question, you can just keep moving. You can just continue on with your work and not have to leave that. And I think for me in training, I've learned a lot over the years. And one of the biggest things is how do you bring, whether it's training or help into the flow of work? So I don't have to leave to go to some other help site or am I googling stuff, or I'm not going to YouTube or whatever. And so that was the biggest win here.
Danny Villarreal:
And we started with a tool called Elevēo, which you see there on the left, which has a great and quick integration with Zendesk. And then we furthered that later on by integrating Pendo's resource center, which has a much more robust interface and allowed us to do a lot more there. So what we saw next was that's part of the problem, but then how are we actually telling people, what's the happy path that you should be following? And so in conjunction with that help, we released some... what I call passive onboarding. We had tried the active version of this, which is I'm just going to pop up something on every screen you go to and tell you here's a walkthrough.
Danny Villarreal:
And look, we know too many pop-ups are annoying. We got the feedback from customers. And so what we did is we took those guided walkthroughs and we created a list using Pendo again, and we surfaced that within the app. And not only did this have sort of a light gamification aspect to it with people wanting to check off all those boxes. People wanted to get to a hundred percent, but we knew that these were the biggest activation points in our tool to get to some of those initial aha moments and to start to drive value.
Danny Villarreal:
And someone asked the question, how would you analyze 14,000 tickets a month? I can tell you there was not a whole lot of analysis going on, but we were able to bucket them into what were the biggest problems? What were the questions that people asked the most? We did just some tax analysis and we were already classifying them in Zendesk at the time, so that helped us get an idea of bucket wise, where were the biggest questions? And so we could double down on creating help and in creating onboarding for those specifically.
Danny Villarreal:
The other great thing about this is I wasn't now popping these up in the app to sort of drive people to them, but they could now choose their own path. So we created high value walkthroughs that were now on demand. So this was really turning it on its head a little bit and learning from some of those experiences. And then the proof is in the pudding, and so being able to go back to our leadership team and say, "Hey, we had this problem. We worked on this for two months. We're working on this starting in July and by October, we already saw just a massive decrease in the number of tickets that were coming in." And so this just shows that I think it was actually bringing the help into the tool was the biggest lever, but also increasing the quality and making the onboarding part of that as well.
Danny Villarreal:
And so we saw this go down and it even hit an all time low of 5300 tickets in December, which is a huge period of new customers for us, so that was really a massive difference. And look, it stayed this way for quite some time. But I think what we know is that anytime you make an improvement, you're upping the game for yourself. That boost was short-lived. We saw an increase in retention. We saw a reduction in churn. We saw a reduction in tickets, but people get used to that. They expect more every time you make it better. And so for the existing users, this was a massive difference, but it meant more was expected from us now. So we hit the research hard. We flew all the team into a single location, obviously before COVID and we sat around a table, we started brainstorming, we did a customer journey.
Danny Villarreal:
We got all the leaders of the different departments together, and we started brainstorming what are our opportunities? What are our pain points? Where are we still not meeting the mark for our customers? We also turned the data people on this and said, "Can we do a regression analysis of what from our Pendo data and other usage data that we've got are the points where we see there's the highest correlation to attention and the lowest correlation to churn?" And so we were able to take some of those big points. Oh yeah, the wall was full of sticky notes. It was a pretty epic day. And Claudia, I still have all of those sticky notes in a bag for you.
Claudia Zuniga:
Thank you.
Danny Villarreal:
But at the end of the day, we came out of with so much insights and the company was really energized about this. People felt like they learned a lot, but now it was action plan. How do we take all of this stuff we learned and turn it into action? And so the biggest lever from this that we saw is that we need to do more formal training. We need to create that human-to-human interaction with people and really start driving that as the leader for our experience. And we also came out of this saying we're not setting people up for success. Literally, we're not setting them up for success, meaning they're coming into a tool in an empty state. And so how do we take, especially our highest value customers and get them to do some of the actions per set up as they walk into the tool.
Danny Villarreal:
They just signed up, that leads them right into this brand new set up flow that we created and getting them to create some of those activation points even during the setup process, so they don't have to wait. And we'd even played around with making a skip in this, and of course a lot of people skipped it. We decided not to make skip optional anymore. You had to get through this and do some of those things. And we immediately saw that the cohorts that were going through this compared to the previous ones were sticking around longer, they were doing more things in the tool right away, and they were seeing some of that initial value right from the very beginning.
Danny Villarreal:
The other half like I said was, how do we do more active onboarding? How do we do live onboarding, on-demand onboarding, formal training? And so in the background of this, we had started building an academy but we needed to take it right to the customer. So as soon as they got out of that onboarding flow, we have a pop-up. And I know I said no pop-ups, but this pop-up is really important. And it was, how do we get them into a live training? Sometimes even that same day to have an expert walk them through the tool and help them understand how to get the most out of this. And Jungle Scout has over 50,000 customers, and so clearly we can't do this on a one-off basis, but we were letting as many people as wanted sign up. And some days we would have over a hundred people in a session coming to it, but we had multiple people there answering questions during the session and then the instructor would answer questions at the end.
Danny Villarreal:
And we saw in some of these cohorts, just great, great adoption from them as well as really good and positive feedback. And as we continue to advance that, Claudia actually created some of these programs like Tool Tip Tuesday and Mastermind. And these were evolutions of that initial onboarding program. So instead of going over the whole tool, every Tuesday, we pick a part of our platform and do a dive into it and say, here's our best practices. Learn from an expert. Walk through this with the people that know how to win with this every day. And to further that, she created more of a Mastermind series that was now bringing people outside of the company, so industry experts to come do multi-week sessions. So once a week for four or five weeks and bringing their industry expertise again into the tool, right to the customers. So they were getting these really high value experiences and trainings, and not only from us, but from people who were sort of walking the walk in the real world.
Danny Villarreal:
And so this was a tremendous amount of confluence around training, around onboarding. And at the same time like I said, we were building this in-app academy, whereas before we were driving people outside of the site again. So bringing that educational content in the app, providing these valuable resources so people could get that again in the flow of their work and across all of these, the net was an increase in engagement and an increase in retention. So people were staying longer, time on site went up, the number of things that they were doing increased, but so did their appetite for more of this. So over that last year, we've been building more and more advanced content and just the number of kinds of content that we were building dramatically increased.
Danny Villarreal:
Probably the lesson that it took us a while to learn was we have a global customer base. The internet is not just the United States. This is a global marketplace. We have people from all over the world and certain markets were growing very, very fast. So we wanted to seize on that by at least being able to onboard those customers in their own languages. So we took some of those same assets that we created and we localized them. And so using Pendo, we were able to create localized versions of these in surface and direct them to some of those onboarding experiences in their native language. We also started capturing our trainings that we had in our academy in their languages as well. So it wasn't perfect. It wasn't a native speaker, but they could still watch it and they were watching. And so we immediately started to get more traction with that, and we saw those markets start to grow and flourish around us.
Danny Villarreal:
During my talk with [Remly 00:15:25] last time, we spent a lot of time talking about the Chinese market. And this is one example of we really took something, we're investing in China by opening an office there. We were creating Chinese content in the app. We created a whole Chinese academy within our app as well, and this was one of our fastest growing segments. And so we put the effort into making sure that they were getting the best onboarding and training experience that they could, and that has now resulted in massive growth in this segment. The Chinese market is still the fastest growing segment within our particular business and we still continue to see that growth happening even today. So some of the seeds we planted back then are starting to come to fruition now, and it's made a massive impact on our business.
Danny Villarreal:
I think one of the other things that we learned as we continue to grow and expand is that we need to keep showing value. You've got product teams, you've got engineering teams, you've got people that are spending time building and investing in your product. You need to socialize that value in the product itself. So letting people know you released a new feature, driving them to content about it, whether that's blogs or videos or webinars. And that gets people excited, but you're also raising that value proposition for them. You're helping them understand that you're continuing to invest in them as your customers, and that there's even more that they can do and even more that they can get out of your products than where they started. So that continues to drive that confidence in your company, but also showing that you're making that progress over time.
Danny Villarreal:
Earlier this year, we also made a pretty substantial decision to diversify our enterprise business from our SMBs. And what that meant is starting up a whole new company within a company almost to some extent. So that meant starting over on a whole lot of the things that we had done. And while that was painful, we've already built a business that's doing more than a million dollars in business just in the half year that we've been doing it. And we've separated this idea of what does an enterprise customer need versus what do our other customers need. So increasing levels of specialization. And those new teams have been able to drive both focus and results. So showing that by changing this methodology, we were able to do more in something where we were traditionally low to medium touch with customers because we had many, but isolating that high value, high spend customer base and creating a group of CSMs now that support them and CS ops that supports them versus maybe having a customer experience and a support team that's supporting maybe a very large group of customers.
Danny Villarreal:
So this is something new for us, but it's something that's already paying dividends and we're continuing to expand these teams and we're already doubling the size of the teams that are working on this because the business is growing so fast right now. So this is forcing us to take a look at all of those things that we were just talking about; self-service, onboarding, training. And how do we do that in a more high touch world? And what does that mean and where is the value for those customers? So we're able to take some of those learnings, but it's also starting over again in some ways.
Danny Villarreal:
So the results are pretty dramatic. From an adoption standpoint, we saw 26% of overall adoption increase from all of the efforts that I've just talked about. One of the biggest increase was in NPS itself. So the sentiment of the customers reflected the value that they were getting. You saw them giving us the nines and tens on NPS, but you also saw it in their comments and in their feedback to us.
Danny Villarreal:
Probably the biggest and this number has actually even increased a little bit since I wrote this the first time, but we've seen anywhere from a 15 to 25% increase in retention and advance, like net dollar retention too, not just overall customer retention. But being able to look at those cohort retention charts and see specifically the people that go through these programs, it's more sticky, they stay for longer, they spend more. Looking at a return on investment, these are the kinds of things that you can take to your leadership teams and ask for more resources or ask for them to make larger bets on new initiatives that you're trying to take. So some of the missteps that we made earlier was not focusing as much on documenting our success, but I think that's a really big driver for continuing to facilitate that conversation at all levels within the company.
Danny Villarreal:
So some of the things just from a suggestion standpoint that I think really worked for us was not being afraid to test things and failing too. And you want to fail as quick as possible, but iterating on decisions you made and trying to amplify your success. And these are just some examples. We tried targeted chat, didn't work out so well. It wasn't scalable, but we learned a lot and we rolled that into other programs. Reorganization, that actually worked out really well. So changing the makeup of our teams or the focus of those teams to really align where the highest value and highest leverage was. Segment research continues to be probably one of the biggest drivers for success at Jungle Scout. So understanding the different users, what they value, where they come from, what they need. That is really, really important. It's something that continues to drive us.
Danny Villarreal:
Personalization. I think we've only scratched the surface on this and the more that we can personalize user's experiences and customers' experiences, the more sticky it is. And so we're on a path here, but we're still in some of the early stages of doing that. Social and community. I don't think that people talk enough about this in this world. Social media can be a strong driver, not only for learning, but for creating a community, but also just driving your message across non-traditional channels. Community has also been a really tremendous driver for keeping people around. They start to identify with you personally, they start to identify with that group. And I mean, product life growth is a great example of that.
Danny Villarreal:
Within Jungle Scout, we've been able to form similar communities and those communities are really sticky and very large. We have over 50,000 customers in one of those communities right now. And then just advocacy. I think we were always thinking about advocacy, but we never knew how to externalize that, and so now we have a whole team that's really just focused on driving that external advocacy and implanting those seeds in different places throughout the process. So tons of interesting stuff here, and I'll let Claudia talk to you a little bit more about what's next.
Claudia Zuniga:
Yes. And note that we have made some great progress, we are by no means done and we might never be done, which is okay. One of the core values as Danny said here at Jungle Scout is test and iterate. So we continue to learn from the results that we have got so far, we continue to come up with new ideas and better offerings based on them. And I'm actually really excited for the things that we're going to be working on. So for one, we're actually doubling down on retention efforts. Before, it kind of seemed that we were stuck with churn. We were not looking at that the right way. We were maybe fixated a little bit with it. But at the end of the day, churn is an outcome. And of course it is super important to measure and understand it and learn from it, but there is not much that you can do after your customers are already gone.
Claudia Zuniga:
So our efforts are not being aimed at retention and actually that went from being a metric that was purely for customer experience into being something that was adopted and shared by the whole company and understood to be really, really important.
Claudia Zuniga:
With that, really focus on the value that we can bring to our customers. Closing the value gap and really building around the solutions that they are seeking. For example, now after two years, we actually finally have a dedicated sprint team that actually works towards fixing things and building those solutions to create great experiences. We're working in a more personalized set up flow like next iteration of what you saw before. We are working better tracking of the activation points in our customer journey so we can guide them better at the right time.
Claudia Zuniga:
And actually some of that value for us in particular, like Danny mentioned, it came from having more human interactions. But it was also understanding where and how those interactions were most effective. Our tool can get a little bit technical and we did see the value that our customers were having from coming to this live settings, from the one to many, the webinars, the live trainings. But we also understood that not all of this have to be live to actually be meaningful. So we moved it to the on-demand option for part of the onboarding, the tutorials, the demo, and we're getting great results. So it's also about finding the balance between them both.
Claudia Zuniga:
Next of course comes really understanding our customers, but really getting them in a way where we want to anticipate and answer their needs maybe even before they know them. So a huge part of that is really understanding who they are. We have this joint effort with product design, UX engineering, and we continue to work on the personas that we have, the information that we have around them so it is applicable to the things that we're actively working on because that is really, really important.
Claudia Zuniga:
Also, diving into what are the jobs that they're hiring us to do. And I'm sure that you have probably heard that a few times by now, but really getting into knowing their pain points, understanding their problems, the reasons why they're coming into a product and just provide them with the best solutions.
Claudia Zuniga:
And of course we want to hear from our customers about that too. We're collecting a bunch of feedback with in-app surveys and PS, but we're also talking to our customers. We actually have this initiative that we call Feedback Fridays where we block some time. Every week from our Fridays, we have a joint calendar and we invite our customers. You schedule like 20 minute call with us. We want to hear about your experience, understand how we can make it better. Let's hear about your goals, your pinpoints. We record all of that and we share it with the company.
Claudia Zuniga:
And actually there was this great one, one of our product managers had recently. It was one of her seasoned customers and they were sharing just a bunch of constructive feedback. And the funny part is that it just went viral. Overnight, everybody in the company was talking about it. Have you seen that interview? Have you heard about it? It's just great. And sometimes that's all you need to actually start having those conversations. So make your customers go viral, just give them a voice. And of course, make them feel heard. And sometimes that means talking to them in their own language.
Claudia Zuniga:
Like Danny was saying, we're working really hard localizing our tools, our training, the educational content that we have created because we did do the research and we found that in some of the key markets where we wanted to enter, we really needed that specific localized content that makes sense to them. Like what you saw with the academy in Chinese. So it is a big effort, but it's definitely worth it. So actually we can maybe talk about some key takeaways that we have got for the past couple of years, things that we have learned, and I guess the most important one; invest in onboarding and adoption sooner rather than later, but make sure that you're documenting and measuring your results. Show your wins early.
Claudia Zuniga:
Sometimes that is going to be a great tool for you to get on with your next initiative and get support. So that is very important. Finding a good balance between passive and active support based on your customers, that is also really, really important. Test and iterate. Of course try to work with that. Again, speak your customer's language, both from understanding the value and the jobs that they want to get done, but also very literally speak their language and talk to them in their local language.
Claudia Zuniga:
Last, but definitely not least, really take the time and make the time to listen and learn from your customers. That is always going to be the never ending story, but you will never, never regret it for sure. And that takes us actually to the end of our presentation.
Danny Villarreal:
Yeah. Thank you guys.
Claudia Zuniga:
Thank you.
Ramli:
Thank you so much for both of you and yeah, we think that was so thorough. Thank you for really digging into showing examples. And for everybody else here, if you have any questions, feel free to unmute yourself or you could just type in the comments. But I have some questions. I hope you don't mind if I jump in myself. I think the first one that you talked about in that takeaway is making sure that you... what's the first one? Making sure you get the-
Danny Villarreal:
The buy-in.
Ramli:
Yeah, the buy-in. Yes. I'm curious, was there already buy-in from the organization level or is this something that you kind of had to fight for and prove? When you showed the support ticket going from 14,000 to 6,000, I'm sure the leadership team was like, "This make sense. We should have been doing this from the first place." Did you have to get that buy-in or was it already there from the get-go?
Danny Villarreal:
Yeah. I think it was a little bit of both. I mean, we had strong advocates, we had a strong executive leader that was sort of backing the lead of this group and these programs early on. And so I think some of that was initial validation of the investment in creating this team in the first place. But I think I shouted that from the rooftops for several months to make sure that people didn't forget where we used to be. And so I think if I could start over from the beginning, I probably would've gone a bit further in kind of making those measures way more visible. And so they weren't so siloed within our department or within our presentations.
Danny Villarreal:
And I think nowadays those are in a company-wide Tableau dashboard where you can see all of those things. And so making those wins more public and making sure that you're tracking those over time, I think it helps get that increased investment. But early on, we were kind of fighting because we were trying to justify growth in a startup, but it's like, how many people? At what point are there diminishing returns for your investment? And that's always the question you're asking early stage.
Danny Villarreal:
And so that goes back to the balance question is proving the ROI of your efforts, showing that you're bringing to the table what the business wants to. Someone said this so I didn't make this up, but turning decisions into dollars. How do you do that? How do you take something that's a concept and make it real? And I think that's kind of what's on all of our backs in some ways is being able to prove that in a meaningful way.
Ramli:
That's true. That's such an interesting point. And it seems like the customer success team was really the one that championed onboarding. Are you finding that still the case now where it is the customer success team that is owning this and really tapping into this cross functional? I heard you talked about making sure product is there and marketing and sales, or now it's become a formalized onboarding or activation team where you guys are consistently meeting?
Danny Villarreal:
Yeah. I mean, I think it started in sort of an interesting way. And I'll let Claudia talk a little bit more about it. But we started as a standalone customer success team. When that leader left, we actually ended up in product, which to be honest, I wasn't sure how that was going to work out, but it turned out to be a really strong synergistic effect to be able to be right in the middle of all the people that we wanted to affect change with. And so getting their buy-in and their understanding of what was important was really key. But I think recently we talked about some of the changes and now I'm leading a more standalone customer success team again, and Claudia's team, sadly, I'm not managing them anymore, but she is now moved in to a team that is more focused on that. And she can talk a little bit more about what that structure is like now.
Claudia Zuniga:
Yeah. So we actually are now in the marketing organization, but I find customer experience to be the connecting point between a lot of this teams. Because we have so much information from our customers, what they want and what they need, we're constantly working with different teams all across the company. So the efforts I say are definitely driven by customer experience, but they are being done in conjunction and collaboration with a lot of other teams. So we have been working really closely with design that is now actually in our larger group that designed the website team. All of this things so we can create a cohesive journey and that the experiences are kind of guiding the customers to the right path with all the prompts that we use, the emails, the in-app, all of that makes sense. And we guide them better, for sure.
Ramli:
I guess that kind of leads me to another question I had about finding that balance between active and passive onboarding. I love the way you put it there, but what would be your advice for figuring that out? You don't want to be too, pop ups and it's super annoying and you don't want to be too nonchalant that they feel neglected. What are your tips for making sure that people find that balance between passive and active?
Danny Villarreal:
Okay. I've got a few, but I think Claudia has... We have differing opinions here, but I think that's good because that's where innovation comes from. I come from more of a traditional enterprise training background where we were doing these large scale projects that would take months. So there was a lot of in-person, face-to-face training, and so I've seen those strong relationships that that builds with customers and the value that that can drive. But I think we're in a different world, not just with COVI but technology is changing the world too. And so that means you can now digest in a video what you may have had to go to a personalized training before. And so I think finding a balance is really... it should be based on value.
Danny Villarreal:
So what is the value of that pop-up? If that pop-up is getting me to a resource that I really should be going to, that's going to be a key activation point. I think that's why we still have some of those pop-ups because they are critical things that we know aligns with value for both the customer and us as a business. But I think there's not a hard and fast rule and that's where the testing part comes in a little bit more. Claudia, I'll let you talk because I know you've got your own ideas about some of those too.
Claudia Zuniga:
I was actually going to say a hundred percent test. It's going to be, of course, based on you have customers, what they want in your tool. Our tool is a little bit more technical, so we did see the value that our customers got from having those live interactions. But we are now diving into a more personalized experience so we can just guide our customers to reach their goals faster. And what I actually wanted to do was get in more into the activities. So we are working a lot with product and to first the personalized set up flow that I mentioned, but understanding the activation points and the journey so we can send the right prompts at the right time.
Claudia Zuniga:
We're still testing some of that. We have found success in some of them and we are constantly building new ways and coming up with new offerings, but definitely it will depend on your customer base and how technical your product might be.
Ramli:
Yeah. That totally makes sense. I agree with you. You want to make sure that you're testing that and iterating like you said. A related thing to that is making sure people have an idea or you're also testing who is high value sign up. And this week we talked about the students, we talked about product qualified leads. I'm curious if you have... is that something that's defined at Jungle Scout, or it might not even be called that? I've heard it like this is our tier one signups that we need to focus more time. I'm curious what that looks like for you guys.
Danny Villarreal:
We're definitely heading in that direction. And I think some of the content that you all have been producing has been really critical in just surfacing that as an idea. I think people love the idea of a product qualified lead, but it's like, how do you put that into practice sometimes. You've got a lot of the traditional machine that exists. And there's whole industries built up around supporting the way we've always done sales or the way we've always gotten customers. And we know that everything's changing, but I think this is a good opportunity to start to embrace that. So I know we're on the verge of moving into a more real freemium model and that's been something that we've never really done before. And we've had lower cost offerings that are sort of more feature limited or contain pieces and parts. But I don't think we've ever got it a hundred percent right.
Danny Villarreal:
And I think acknowledging that is a big part of it. Knowing that in order to have good product qualified leads or even a real funnel that comes in that way, the experience has to be tight and you've got to know... just back to what Claudia was saying, what are those activation points? And at what point does someone goes, "Man, I don't just need the free version of this. I need everything. I need it all." And so I think there's still quite a bit of work going on into building that out, but it's something we are launching next year. And on the enterprise side, I think that's going to be a lot of the methodology.
Danny Villarreal:
We're fortunate enough in this space right now that e-commerce is growing so fast that we're not having to do much advertising for our enterprise tools. At this point in time, they're almost all inbound. But with that said, I think as we move forward, having a really good product qualified lead set up is going to be key to our future success.
Ramli:
And I think that leads to what I wanted to know a little bit more is, you talked about enterprise versus the other side of the business, probably more small, medium business. How is onboarding done differently across those two things? Or are they pretty similar?
Danny Villarreal:
No, it's actually completely different at this... So at the enterprise level, you have a dedicated CSM that's doing all the things that we talked about earlier. So they physically kick you off, they basically onboard you, walk you through it. Everything is very much personalized and high touch and we have a CSM that's assigned per customer. We also have sort of an ops person within that team that's helping with support and a few other things. But the CSM is the central point of contact in the high end of this arena.
Danny Villarreal:
And I think what we've seen is that that relationship in and of itself has become a product. It has become a part of the value that the customers recognize because they don't just see it as here's a platform that you can do your work in, or here's something that does the job that you hired us to do. They see that person as being sort of instrumental in the success. And so it's becoming an interesting value proposition by itself. And I think as we continue to refine and optimize on this... I mean, we kicked off that in June and so we're still learning. We went from a team of two, which was me and one other person that I stole from my old customer experience team to now we're at five people and I'm about to almost triple the size of the team next year.
Danny Villarreal:
So this is moving very fast, but I think what we've learned is that that human relationship, that touch at the highest end of this scale for those highest value and revenue customers, that's really where it's worth maybe putting this at scale with the rest of Jungle Scout in which we have 50,000, 75,000 customers. You can't really do that same thing, so you have to get more picky about how that works.
Ramli:
Yeah. Before I ask, David has a question about language, but I just want to follow up on that. You talked about revenue, how do you know that somebody is going towards the enterprise world? They're going to have that high touch point, that dedicated CSM versus the other one. Do you try to get their revenue at the beginning, or what is that cutoff point or the qualification process?
Danny Villarreal:
Yeah. That's a great question. It's actually part of that sign up flow, one of the activation points. And before we were doing this passively and just asking them that question, but they physically sync their accounts with us. And when they do that, by definition of that, we get to understand what tier this customer is. And so I think there's different ways. We have a physical sync with a backend system, but I think even just asking that question as part of the sign up flow or what are the use cases? That may lead you to believe that they're more of an enterprise customer than just maybe a consumer or a small business.
Danny Villarreal:
But I think at either end of this, we've seen that some of the purchasers of the enterprise product, we would have thought we're a small business. And so there's been some non-traditional things start to surface out of that and so I would say, don't always assume that your buckets are the right buckets. You may be thinking about things in terms of revenue, but maybe it's in terms of what are the jobs to be done and how much people are willing to pay if you can solve bigger problems. And so I think that's something that we're continuing to adapt to right now.
Ramli:
Yeah. I understand. That totally makes sense. I want to jump into David's question and this is the fascinating one with, how do you figure out what language to add next and just to put it in context, how much effort does it actually take to translate the onboarding experience into a totally different language than what it was created in?
Danny Villarreal:
Claudia take this on because I know you're in the middle of everything now.
Claudia Zuniga:
Yes. And there was actually a lot of research that was done by the product team in regards to what was the market and the size of the market that we were going into and the size of the market that we could get? And we also went by the number of Amazon sellers that we had in each market. So we had a better ideas of how much work that was going to be and how much impact we could make in those markets. So we definitely have started with China. As Danny mentioned, it's one of the fastest growing ones that we had. But then based on some of those data points, we were able to define the rest of the markets again, based on the size and what was our... I guess, how much we can get into that market as well. Possibility.
Danny Villarreal:
Yeah. It's a lot of size of the prize kind of stuff. I could say, "Hey, we need to make an investment to localize everything into French." And then you look at well, how much of our revenue comes from French customers or people that speak a French language even. And that helps you come up with prioritization, but it also lets how deep are you willing to go? Do you want to localize the entire app into that? Is it just onboarding? Is it training? Has it helped systems? So I think you want to invest appropriately but you want to also have a plan to fill those gaps as you start to see traction in some of those markets.
Claudia Zuniga:
And I think one thing that we didn't know before it's the work that was, of course, localization as a market. We actually hire a new person that had experienced in localization and he was a great help in just sending in other processes, sending needs. Because one of the biggest mistakes, I guess, that we made was thinking, okay, we have people that speaks this language or that other language, so let's have them start help us localize the content. And no, there is a lot of things that you need to take into consideration. So definitely it's a larger effort, but now that we have a better idea of where and how, then we're just taking small steps, but the right steps, hopefully.
Ramli:
Can you talk a little bit more about that. In my mind it's just like, I'm just going to hire somebody from Fiverr that speaks this language and translate it verbatim, and plug it into my code and I'm done. And in my mind, it's like yeah, it's probably going to take a lot more effort, but what were some of the things that, oh, I wish I knew this before I translated this experience into a different language like Chinese or Spanish or something else?
Claudia Zuniga:
That's a good one. So you have heard us talk about Pendo like a gazillion time. So one of the things that I guess we didn't do the right way is translating verbatim with the help of other people like the first walkthroughs, I guess. But then realizing every time that something changed, we had to go back and change it manually again. So that was a lot of work and we were like, "There has to be a better way to do it."
Claudia Zuniga:
Pendo has this option to actually localize your guides and the prompts that you need. So it's a different type of file X lift that I had never heard about it before. Now I know that it's a localisation type of file. You pretty much download the transcript and the information, and then you can localize it in whatever number of languages that you have. That was a great, great help. And then understanding first we actually use a tool, and then that tool is the one that kind of helps us translate and localize the app.
Claudia Zuniga:
But we also use a service like you said, this service is the one where we're going to go do the translations. But when you hire a service instead of a person, these start collecting and doing what they call translation memory where they know your terms, they know your industry and what you want to say with the things that you are seeing, and they're going to start charging you less as you build on that translation memory. So the costs are going to go down even though the number of words and content that you're translating increases. So that was one of the things that we learned; sending out the processes, finding the right tool, finding the right service to then do it. It's of course going to be the best way.
Danny Villarreal:
Yeah. Remembering the budget too, Remly. I can tell the leadership I want to do this, but having a good estimate of the cost of going out and doing some of that due diligence, making sure you've got some estimates coming into this. But that also you're linking that to some sort of intrinsic value, that you're not just saying, "Oh, I want to localize it because that's just what we do." You need to have that driving something specifically and then hopefully measure the difference. So the before and after we localized. What was the process? What changed in that cohort? I think Laurel wrote something, but if you do just let regular people at your company, you get all kinds of... you realize that there are regional dialects of certain languages. You realize that there are more just common ways of saying things versus the industry speak. So making sure the language is clear and crisp and putting your best foot forward, I think is always something you want to do too, not skimping on Fiverr people.
Ramli:
So let's go there. You talk about Pendo? What is that tool in service? I mean, that's a great thing about product led. It's like right from the get go, you're global. You're anybody in anywhere in the world can literally sign up and maybe you're finding some people might find they get a lot of signups from Brazil and maybe we should localize it there, but you've already gone in that journey. What are some tools and services you've found help that you can talk about?
Danny Villarreal:
Yeah. I mean, I'll talk about it. Pendo is clearly one. We brought that in shortly after we founded our group, so it was at the core from day one and it sort of evolved along with us. They've grown their capabilities and they've been very open to our feedback, so they've been a really strong partner with us in making a lot of this happen. I know we use some other tools on the development side too Claudia to facilitate some of those. Was it Lokalise?
Claudia Zuniga:
Lokalise is the other one that we use for the in-app one, and that was actually one that was adopted primarily by the team in China when we were doing the first localization from English into Chinese. So we are not a hundred percent sure that is the best solution. We have been working with them. As we mentioned, we have been learning a lot of with this process. So as we grow, we're of course growing in the terms of what are the tools that we're using in the processes, but localizes the one that we are using right now. And we use a separate service, which is the translation service and the one that we are using now is called SeproTec, just in case.
Danny Villarreal:
Yeah. And one of their unique differentiators is that they actually have people that will not only translate, but then someone who would go back and check the translation too. And I think that's one of those layers that you may not think about. Early on, we just hired people online from Italy and they had these backgrounds. They were translators. But again, it was more about but who's... I can't read that. I don't know what it says. So having a secondary pass, I think is one of those small things, but it can pay off again.
Ramli:
That's so good. And what was the second tool, SeproTec?
Claudia Zuniga:
SeproTec. Let me see if I can find it.
Ramli:
Awesome.
Danny Villarreal:
And someone just asked, did we evaluate other tools than Pendo? Actually when I started, we already had Mixpanel and I actually liked Mixpanel a lot. I think there's a lot of value. It has a lot of overlap with Pendo, and so we eventually just kind of chose Pendo as a single source of truth. But Mixpanel had a lot of advocates internally. We were using it very strongly. It has maybe some more advanced use cases in terms of programmatically being able to get at some of the data in different ways. But I think in terms of, you kind of need some shepherds for these products regardless of which one you choose. And so for us, you could have people that maybe weren't as technical that were leading the Pendo initiatives initially and getting them traction, whereas from a Mixpanel perspective, right away, you needed engineering help or other things to kind of get it backed in.
Danny Villarreal:
And I think we're at that stage now with Pendo. We have an engineering team and half the work that they do during a sprint can be adding new stuff to Pendo or creating views for Pendo or pushing things to our data warehouse or to Tableau. So it's become very much ingrained in our process. But yeah, we looked at quite a few. I think we looked at walk me app cues, user IQ. I mean, there was quite a few, but I think for us at the time, Pendo had the most robust offering. It was way more expensive too. For a startup at our level to buy Pendo, it was kind of at the top of our price range. And so I think the pressure was on to show value. And so that's something regardless of which tool that you choose, make sure that you can execute on that value or you're not going to have that tool for very long.
Ramli:
That's so good. We had Todd Olson last week, the CEO of Pendo on and I know Claudia was there and she showed up and yeah, it was a really good chat. I know I'm just about to hit the hour, if there's any other final questions, just feel free to drop it into the thing as a final question, but if there's something else... Wesley, is there anything you wanted to add? Say hi to Claudia and Danny here?
Wesley:
Hi.
Claudia Zuniga:
Hi.
Wesley:
I did have one question. So one thing I really loved about your approach is that you thought about onboarding beyond the product. And so there was the Jungle Scout Academy, there was the Jungle Scout Mastermind, and then you also have those tutorial. I don't know if it's Tutorial Tuesday or just tutorial webinars in general. And so it got me thinking, since I'm moving right now, there's U-Haul. We're using U-Haul. And you initially think of the product. You're like, trucks, yes, that's what I got at. But then you go into the office and you're like, man, you got everything you need for moving. There's the boxes. There's the tape. They really identified the whole job to be done of getting you from point A to point B. Even if you need movers, you have that.
Wesley:
And so what I loved about your approach is you're really fully focused around the whole job to be done. And sometimes there's a product gap, and that can be solved through better onboarding and helping people get to point A to point B in the product easily. But what I really loved that I wanted to make sure everyone was aware of that you're doing was focusing on the knowledge gap and really figuring out, what does someone need to know in order to be truly successful here. So wanted to commend you on that. That was an awesome job. But I also wanted to ask you, how do you decide whether you need to have something that's more focused on tackling the knowledge gap versus the product gap?
Danny Villarreal:
Yeah. I mean like I said, we were kind of fortunate because I think our first job was to attack the knowledge gap. That was just part of the support. The passive onboarding stuff that we started tackling initially. So I think whether or not we chose to do that, it was sort of the initial big rock that we were kind of focused on solving for. And so that helped us really get a good understanding of what the gaps were and how much were knowledge and how much was product. And I think coming out of that effort, it was very clear to us, there was a product gap, but there was also some knowledge gaps that were pretty easily build and some that maybe needed different kinds of content beyond the help to just address them. And then I think from the onboarding side, Claudia was really the one... I sort of pointed it in the right direction, but she's been the one that really innovated all of that. So I'll let her talk to the product gap. I think being in product helps.
Claudia Zuniga:
Definitely. I was actually going to say that the fact that we get to work so closely with the product team, we go to the design meetings, we make sure, does this make sense? Is this intuitive? Is this a flow for going from one feature to the other? Do we need to make it more concise? Because there is so much that you can do. If there's a product gap, you can train people as much as you want, but if they keep falling into that friction, then you're going to hit a wall at some point. So working really, really closely with them and just making sure that they understand from the customers again, what is the value and how to get to that solution, the job that they want to get done and get to that solution fast is definitely very, very important. Again, going through the design meetings, making sure that we gave our feedback before the release is done, and that it makes sense. It's intuitive and it actually flows nicely.
Ramli:
Awesome. Yeah. Thank you so much. I think we just went one minute over the time. So Danny and Claudia, thank you so much for your presentation and just answering our questions. For everybody else, we'll have this video posted up very soon and we'll also share it with you, both Danny and Claudia. But for everybody else, thank you. Have a great weekend. I hope you enjoy it. For Henry, have fun BMXing, and for Danny have fun... What is that? Barbecuing and [crosstalk 00:57:14].
Claudia Zuniga:
Barbecuing and grilling.
Danny Villarreal:
[crosstalk 00:57:15] weekend, thank you for having me.
Ramli:
And Wesley, have fun moving.
Wesley:
Thank you so much for adopting this. This is awesome.
Claudia Zuniga:
Thank you. Have a great weekend, everyone.
Wesley:
You too.
Ramli:
Cheers there.
Wesley:
Bye.
Claudia Zuniga:
Bye.
