Episode Transcript
Will Fraser: Hi, Matt, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for joining us here today.
Matt Barnett: Hi everyone. Glad to be here.
Will Fraser: You know, we just kind of got a quick intro of this show before the audience started hearing us here, but I'd love it if you could just start us off for those who don't know and just give us a quick overview of Bonjoro and what you guys are up to out there.
Matt Barnett: Yep, sure thing. My name's Matt. I'm the Pat Bear and CEO of Bonjoro, based out of Sydney, Australia team scout around the world. So basically we originally were a video messaging tool. So what we do, we have a system that plugs into your customer journey, works with your CRM, with your tools. And what we found is that at certain points on a customer journey, rather than just sending like a two dimensional email or dare say a mass message out to customers, at some point, if you check in in person using video and specifically using asynchronous videos. So rather than a zoom call, quick little like 30 second videos that say, hey, hey Zoe, I saw you sign a couple of days ago, I see that you've done X, Y and Z, but you haven't done this final step which is really important. If you need help, please let us know. Man's Matt, just hit reply, I'll give you a hand. Otherwise, most importantly, welcome on board and I hope you're having a wonderful day. That little 30 second video that you drop into that customer journey, especially kind of with leads and with new inquiries, so powerful in getting across like your brand, your personality and most importantly, making a bit of a human connection by making it asynchronous. AKA you send the video and then you go back to work versus two way. It's extremely fast to do as well. So you can get like across a lot of this humanity, this personality without having to have like a half an hour call. That's about how we started and we built that solve one of our own problems. It kind of worked and kind of built off. And then what we realized over time is that what we really do here, I always say the company's not about video Videos and mediums talk, it's wonderful. But what we really do is help companies create more loyalty because by having that human interaction, as you would do it in your Bristol or on the bricks and mortar shops you go to, that human connection starts to build loyalty with customers. So we start to now expand that and we look at loyalty and we'll talk more about this. But this idea of creating loyalty in a more systematic way and then the other side of loyalty is you can use as well. So we've just released a product that's around an easy way to kind of collect, manage and share video testimonials. Obviously we understand video, so they've collected loyalty and then starting to use this to try and help with conversions. And now we're just going to start to film the pieces in between and build. The goal is to build a platform that essentially has a loyalty first approach to how you build customer journeys and how you keep customers ultimately for life.
Will Fraser: You know, it's interesting, you kind of said you created this originally to scratch your own itch. Where did the idea of trying this en masse come from? Was it just kind of a harebrained moment in a meeting or did you guys have some data? I just love to kind of understand, you know, how did you identify that itch and that this might be a possible way to solve it?
Matt Barnett: Yeah, so we've worked on video for a long time. So we have another company that does. It's basically a research company which I no longer really sell across, based out of the uk and we were using video, this is like super early using basically mobile video to collect qualitative data back from people for research. So we get people to go out shopping on camera, essentially give all that information back to Kraft or to Unilever. And they were using this for quality research. But those clients you talk about, like enterprise and agency clients and like we live in Australia, small market. So all these clients are based in London, Paris, New York, essentially. So we would try building from here and we were doing sales overseas and we build a bit of a funnel. So we have inquiries coming in and we would. Then you're going in using email because time zones to convert them. I'm not a great writer. Like I'm all about the. I'm all about the fate. Like I'm the guy you send in, you know, into the room with the crazy pitch, you know, wearing a kilt, kind of woo and schmooze everyone. Yeah, that's how I can make my connections, kind of an email. So I was Like, I need to get me in front of people. And so we just basically started. Whenever Lee came in, we'd. We built a little hack where I'd record a video, we'd upload it and send it off to them. So first piece comms they would get would be like, me on a boat going past the Opera House in Sydney Harbour. Like, to say, hey, I saw you came aboard. I see you're with Budweiser. We worked with Heineken, yada, yada, yada. And they always wind in my hair. You couldn't really understand me. But what happened was that having that as a first piece comms this crazy guy on a boat, and it helped. It was like, crave agencies and creative teams. They just loved it. They're like, come in and see us. Like, come in. And I walk into the office and everyone would be like, you're the guy on the boat. So people felt like they already knew me. I never met them before. And so you have. It's a connection. You know what? The penny didn't drop, right? It was cool sales hack. It was great. Until one of those clients was like, hey, can we use this video thing with our customers? And we're like, yeah, sure. And then we kind of came back to Australia. Me and my CTO spent a weekend with probably beers and pizza, built it, put them on it. It worked and it was awful. It was still clunky as hell, and it worked. And then that customer's customers came in. They're like, oh, can we also use this? And so you just use these things. Snowball. And what you realize is, I think, but this is party timing, right? Like, five years ago, four or five years ago, trying to make connections online was even harder than it is now. Like, you know, we've seen the rise of video. I don't think Riversides existed back then. Like, zoom was in its infancy. And so you've seen the rise of video. But at the time, people like me, and I'm sure, like, you guys were going, well, how do we connect people online? And you come off this wave where, you know, scale was great, and then suddenly, as humans were like, oh, hang on a minute, I miss a miss human connection again. And we were starting to kind of fill in some of that gap. I think that's.
Will Fraser: That's awesome. I love that. You know, I need to see one of these videos of you on a boat going in front of the Opera House there, and just to see how they. How they work. But I love that. I love the idea. You just like, you know, that. Nothing quite like that entrepreneurial spirit. Right. When someone's like, can you do this? It's, yeah, absolutely. We can do this for sure. No problem. 100%. We'll go make it. We're not going to tell you that part necessarily, but I want to go make it and we'll get it back to you. Yeah.
Matt Barnett: And your CTA is always, like, you said what? I'm like, no, come on, go this.
Will Fraser: Yeah, but don't worry, we've got all.
Matt Barnett: Week to deliver it.
Will Fraser: We've got all week. It's totally fine. But as you said, you know, this is kind of about building that, that, that connection, that, that sense of loyalty. And I think that's a really interesting challenge you look at because, you know, I think we have seen video and we do see video more through a sales lens today than. Than we have in the past. But I'd say that it's often missing what you're talking about here, which is like, I think that genuine intention to want to connect, and it's more as like a very perfunctory sales tool. So I love the way you kind of took it, but maybe you can kind of help us understand this idea of how do we use this to build that true loyalty, as you call it, that true loyalty with the customer? Well, I guess, first of all, what do you define as that true loyalty with the customer?
Matt Barnett: Yeah. So the word loyalty has been banded around a lot online. And if you go Google and type in loyalty, you're probably going to start to see either like MPS scoring software or loyalty rewards programs or discount software. Now, it's not saying these are not elements of the loyalty journey, but they've now come to me. Loyalty. I'm like, that's, that's, that's not loyalty. I like those little parts. But loyalty is essentially, I guess, the intention of a customer to stay. To stay with you and stay. Stay with the brand for a longer period of time. And so for me, the loyalty journey starts from the first interaction you ever have with somebody, which can be a visit to your website, could be the first time they come in the shop until the last interaction you have with them, which hopefully should be many, many years in the future. They don't even have to stay as a customer for this time. You have loyal people, loyalty brands who are not necessarily purchases. And so the loyalty journey is that whole piece. And then when you look at weight about loyalty and how it matters to business, again, there's these two flywheels that I like to think about which is creating more loyal customers. You know, and this is kind of like same thing about customers. They bet they basically fall into, into five like baskets. So you have like passive, once again, customer, you have passive customers, you have active, you have engaged, which means they're talking to you. You have what we call advocates, who, who are massive fans of your brand. And then you have what we like to call super fans, which is the next stage, which are the people who will tattoo you on their arm or go and tell everyone they know about. And you take, you can systematically take customers like up a number of stages across the journey. And you could do this from again, loyalty, customer experience kind of point of view. So you create more loyal customers. The benefit being that they stay with you longer. So ultimately, you know, this comes out to the value of like lifetime value. Customers spend a certain amount. The longer they stay with you, the more they're going to spend over that time. So that customer might, might be a $50 customer, but they become a $5,000 customer because they stay for 10 years. So it does pay back. The other flywheel is once you have load customers, they can also become, become a growth channel, you know. And so this is another area I think the businesses kind of fail at, not through intention, but it's quite hard to do. And to get your head around and to understand is that if you have advocates and super fans in that age, they will tell other people about you, they will refer business in, they will do case studies, they will do testimonies, they will come in and help you build a better product or better service by, by giving you feedback and doing research and being early testers for you. They will hop into communities and chat and help your other customers and start forums about you. So there's a big, slightly more intangible way that you can use customers which will start to build your funnel. And the companies do its best. It means your marketing budgets can't fall down because you've already got your channel here. So again, like, to bring it back, you need to create more loyalty, which is the entire journey. It's not just certain things like rewards and discounts. And then you need to leverage those. And there's. Which is one of the tools that you can use along this journey.
Will Fraser: And you kind of quickly touched on them there. But you kind of had a few different stages of that journey. And you know, you kind of mentioned the super fan and the advocate. And I think those are probably the ones that our audience are, you know, Maybe able to picture the best, but kind of what were those earlier stages you said there again? And kind of what did those look like in your mind? How do you kind of identify someone moving through those stages?
Matt Barnett: Yeah. And so these are in terms of like once customers paid as well because it's easy to even because this plays out, doesn't matter pay, this still plays out. So passive is I go and purchase something, I don't need to ever go back. I don't remember the name. I'm not like I'm not engaged with anything at all. I've just purchased the product and that's it. I've satisfied my need and then I'm off and I'll go and purchase me competitor next time and someone else next time and someone else next time. So although I've spent money with you, I'm in no way. There's no guarantee that I'll ever come back to you as well. This goes to be SaaS platforms where you are paying on a monthly basis, but as soon as something better comes along, I'm off. Then you have active, which is somebody who, who is active actively like aware of the brand. They are, you know, they potentially like read some material, consume some more content, done more than just just put down the credit card and purchase the product. You know, again this is in product like a good thing to think about is like in subscription products. We're in there, we are using the product. You know, we're not. I wouldn't say we're like loyal yet, but we're using on a regular basis. We maybe invited some team in. Doesn't mean we won't go away with something better. But we're there, we're primed. If you like, you then have engage which is like I've talked with the team, I've engaged online in social content, I've commented back on some content. I'm reading content on a regular basis. You know, I maybe join the Facebook group or LinkedIn group that follows that. So again I'm, I'm actually actively taking part myself in that brand beyond the purchase. And then you get to advocate, which is when I'm then actively going out and talking about it and saying that I feel great about this. I might. It's just about advocates when I say is like local advocates won't necessarily ever, ever refer you new business not because they don't want to, but because they're not, they're not, it's not top of mind or they haven't been told to do it or there's no reason to. The superfans next level when they are, they do everything they can to refer your business and they go out of their way and they turn up on like your doorstep like these, these are good. Like these are great. But yeah, and this is a pyramid. Right. So so you only ever, you're always probably going to have more passive customers than active than Gary. The bottom of the period could change a bit. Yeah, you can get more active than passive and you can get more engaged and active and passive. I think once you get to like advocate superfans you wouldn't actually see a bit of a trend down because these are potentially certain personality types as well. And then each of us I think is really like an advocate of a small number of brands. And with super fans are probably only like one or two, maybe even one. You know, you see some sports teams on there, I think so everyone only has the capacity to be a super fan of a couple of things. So don't expect to get all your customers there but from engaged up it's all good news and it's all increasing lifetime value and it's all increasing channels.
Will Fraser: Yeah. I like kind of the comment you made there about advocates that they might refer you but it's not top of mind. I think that's in a world of product led growth, that's always an important one to remember that sometimes we have to help people grow whether it's into super fans or whether it's into doing a case study for us or whatever it might be. And definitely, you know, I see that, that, that pyramid play out and, and you're right, it is interesting. It can kind of invert at the bottom and turn maybe into a diamond if you're really good. But yeah, just like I know when I, you know we do a lot of work around social media content creation and you know there's just this reality like there's just 80, 90% of the world that's just never going to post. Yeah, you know, they're just, just not who they are. You know we talked about these stages but now you know, you kind of mentioned, you know, so we can systematically build or progress people through these stages. What have you found as a, as a method to be able to, to bring people along that journey or what kind of thinking do we need to have to be able to develop someone from a passive to, to an advocate or maybe even to a super fan?
Matt Barnett: Yes. There's two parts to this. I'll point like so first of all, you need to understand your customer journey. So I'll chat about that and I think once you have that then you know we chatted before about like this whole idea of like this like a scoring model. Because how do you know if someone's advocate or superfan or engaged. I'll talk about the journey first and then kind of how we look at people. So like you're here described different ways, like customer journey maps, probably one that's quite commonly used. So like after, after you listen to this, go and get a piece of paper or whatever. You use any kind of graphical software, sit down with your team. Basically what you do is work out the customer journey from a comms point of view through your business. And, and there's what I'm not going to talk about here is things like product touch points and stuff, things they do, they'll do off their own. Because the idea is, is that you as a team can increase this by doing like active work. There are some things people will just get walk into a shop and buy your product because it's there on the shelf. That's not something that necessarily you can control from like a my customer success point of view. So you want to do is you want to kind of work out what the targets are that you want to take a customer through. You know, so like how you take them from being, you know, a lead to a paying customer to a repeat customer to again potentially this advocate, super fan, active referrer. And again this journey is from the second they touch your brand in some way which could be social, could be website, could be they see a billboard until they. I was gonna say die, but until they. Until, thank God, until they moved on to the next stage of life. You might want to create user Personas. This depends on your company and how complex you are. So, so we do this to the extent. So we have like e Commerce customers, SaaS customers and we have services customers. We will take those down slightly different journeys because they do have different problems, different buying Personas. If you're simple, if you're just an E commerce platform, you might keep much simpler. So you don't necessarily need to this part. But I think the point here is you need to understand their motivations, their pain points, what they try to solve with your service or product. And again for different customer centers, that might be wrong, it might be different. Look at what they're trying to solve. If you don't know that, go talk to more customers.
Will Fraser: Yeah, go figure that one out. Then come on back yeah.
Matt Barnett: And wants versus needs. It's not necessarily what they want, it's not what they need and what you satisfy. Then the next point, most importantly is you want to map the journey on this piece of paper. How they come through and map the touchpoints you already have. So this might be. They see a social post, you know, they come to the website like these all touch points, you know, they get a pop up message, they sign up, they get you know, a product tour, they get a bunch of emails come through. They get it. They get a push to do a sales call, it might be a sales call. Then they become a customer and then we carry on. They're like, wait, so what happens in the first kind of like two weeks. Okay, I got product in my product activation problems after that in the first three months, you know, which is you kind of like, like your, your car retention window. Like you've got to get active in three months or less. So what are you doing along that with like drip emails? Like different types of comes could be in person stuff. And then what happens for three months to one year? What happens from one year to 10 years? Kind of like that's why I think, man, I'm like day one, day one. Well pre day one, which, which could be like seven touch points. Your day one activation, you know, your first 14 days, your first three months and then you know, one three months, one year, then one year to 10.
Map out everything you do. And you might need to get your sales team in, your marketing team in, your customer success team in, your product team in as well and get everyone's talk because people will be doing stuff that you might not realize as well. You know, and this is like literally the like little checkers of customers. It might be support reaching out and checking that things been fixed and stuff. Try and get it all out. Like really spend some time on this. Every last little thing events you go to where people come to your booth and see you like the whole lot. So you map that out. Now what you want to look at is are you satisfied? Like are you satisfying these points? Are you injecting some. And I'm biased here about humanity into that journey. You know, if it's all automated, again I'm biased. But I think every single business should have a bit of humanity in it. I think where you have completely automated funnels, you're missing a trick. And apart from the very low, like if you're saying $1 widgets, okay, yeah, maybe not for you. But obviously you have partners that potentially Sellers or shops that sell those who might be a real customer, in which case he frames it. But a point in that journey, somebody turning up and saying thanks is incredibly powerful. And if you're not doing that, needs to go in there somewhere. And I think video is a really good medium to do this because it's very trustworthy, it's very real, it's human, it is quick to do. Now it's easy.
I'd suggest you use that. It doesn't have to be that. But then there's other touch points. You still inject humanity and personalization through email, through social, through everything else. You have some tweets, you have someone replies them individually. People like Gary V. Hate him or love him still, like personally one of highest, like 10 people a day, even today. And it's done that the whole time. Because the system is really key. So look at where you could do this, look at where you could do a better job. Look at where you have too much automation and too little personalization. Or it can look the other way. Like you shouldn't just turn on video every day and be like, hey, hey, hey. Like there's a balance here.
But essentially what you're looking to do is how can you do better and where are the big gaps in this journey? So if you don't talk to people between three months and one year, which is common, other than like maybe your marketing product updates, that's a challenge. Right. Because if they get disengaged at month five, you're not going to know until they've gone. And once someone's gone. And you might Never hear like, SaaS is easy because people cancel their accounts, you have some time. But if you're like an E commerce platform, you're never going to hear, you're just never going to see them again. So you map this journey out, look at where you can do better, look at other tools you can use, look at like, again, human focus pieces you can use where they exist. And then, you know, look at how you do better and buy that some humanity. And the other point is delight as well. I think this kind of comes into, this is like. And the concept of delight is essentially you give them little experiences that are unexpected and like creative. And this can come from anywhere in your company. And by unexpected, I mean you can do the same experience for every single customer. But they.
Will Fraser: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. As long as. Yeah, yeah. As long as it's unique and exciting to each one, you know.
Matt Barnett: Yeah.
Will Fraser: I think we've seen this even with, you know, welcome gifts are maybe more expected, but, like, you know, random check in. Like, just like, hey, we just sent you a new piece of swag, or whatever it is. They don't have to be massive either, in our experience, at least, that you just, you know, something just kind of puts a nice, positive spin on the company and the relationship.
Matt Barnett: Yeah. Like, we send basics to people when they hit, like, 100 videos, and then we're like, oh, they had to make, like, 500 videos. They, like, the number went up because we got so many customers in. But we do this. And so for them, it was pretty random, but for us, it was very much process. And this is the point again for like. Like, process is great. So you build a process here. The points themselves are individual and personalized and creative, but it's on a process. Because you don't want any customers to slip through to the gaps. A good example. When we first started, we. So we obviously 10 videos and welcome every single person that signs up individually. We've had, like, massive influences come through who we had no idea about. Like, there's a guy called Pat Flynn who's a big influence in the. In the kind of SME space, signs up. We do our usual. We send him some videos. We send some, like, some bear suits for his kids when he hits some milestone. And then one day, we get, like, just, like, hundreds of times coming in, and everyone's like, oh, Pat Flynn's talking about you on stage. And we're like, who's this dude? Like, turns out, turns out he's a pretty big deal. None of us ever heard him because we're not in that space, but because we treated him like everyone else. And he put the video up of us welcoming him on screen. He's like, and look what these guys did. And then we've stayed, like, very close to him over the years because he's like, you guys are just good and doing the right thing with the company. And there's been multiple instances of that. Now, we would have missed him if we'd have put. Because if it had based him on his average spend, it would have gone through the cracks. Because he's by no means our highest spender. So treat every customer equal because you just don't know. And this will happen. Okay, so that's. So that's the customer journey part we take. I'll talk about, like, then the scoring part. You actually need to move people up.
Do you want to break for a second first, or do you want me to Just roll in.
Will Fraser: Yeah, no, let's, let's, let's, let's jump into the, let's jump into the scoring. I mean, I think I'm pretty interested to see kind of, you know, I love just, I mean I just, I love what we're hearing here around like that, that systematic individuality, if you can call it that, and the humanity being injected in there and just great, great kind of thoughts in my opinion about that, that space of, you know, instead of trying to find the few that we're going to really treat well, it's like can we just create, create a truly human interaction with everyone?
Will Fraser: I guess, I guess I have a question though. Just, just before we jump onto that scoring piece, you know, it sounds like this is a bit of an involved process of actually mapping out this entire customer journey and this entire, you know, every single communication. Once you map this out, I can only imagine that it's a continual effort to keep it up to date. Right. Like this is like each team's kind of changing touch points. Like is that a big overhead or is it just because in your organization has it just become kind of par for the course and everyone knows how to keep their part of the map up to date.
Matt Barnett: Look, we can get a massive halt and what like branded culture which is kind of where this goes. Look, I think, I think we'll end up talking like a bit later about like a bit about team structure here. But like I think, I think this is part of your culture as well. You need to understand that it's customer first like attitude now. It doesn't necessarily mean all your time but I think this should be instilled across the whole company. So we'll have it. Yes. Like developers will hop on calls with customers and they're very much customer first as well. I think you have this crystal. It takes a bit of time to get into. Once you're into it, it should become second nature. Now in terms of continual improvement. That's just a cultural thing as well. You should have a cultural continual improvement which is not just about customer comms, it's about products, it's about sales process, everything else. So all these processes, when you have a process, it's only ever the starting point. You need to come back and you should be looking, you know, and there will be areas owned by CS versus sales, but people should be looking back and they should let the other teams who are customer facing know about the changes. It's like if sales finds out that hey, turns out we were bugging to people too much in the first week. If we're giving out two weeks, we get a better example if you have cs and CS is like, okay, cool, I'm going to calm down the number of onboard emails and condense those potentially. So the shared learning between these. And it isn't inter departmental sharing process. Again, the culture part helps, you know, like what we do is we have like a weekly meeting with what we. We call it go to market. But it involves like very much customer success as well. And we'll all chat about what we're doing. So everyone's kind of aware there's that visibility. But yeah, it's still improving. It's continually improving. You know, changing tactics, trying new stuff. Always try new stuff. I mean, like, we're a creative company, I think, but like, we're like, I'll try written messages, we'll try bear suits, we'll try, you know, webinars. Webinars. We'll do. We'll try running a podcast. Customers aren't. We'll try all these different things to try and break through. Like our ultimate goal chat about scoring is like, every customer needs to talk to us. If I'm like, hey, this person's been paying us three months. We've never had a conversation with them. Like, how do we get them to talk to us? Because we know if we do that, they're more likely to like us and stay for longer, you know, irrelevant of their experience with the product. Right. And if they have problems in the products and they talk to us, we can get them through those. Right. Does that kind of answer it?
Will Fraser: Yeah, no, that, that absolutely makes sense. I'd love to dig in and understand the scoring because I think that's. That's kind of where my brain goes is now. Okay, how do we know, how do we know when we've moved them through and how are you looking at that?
Matt Barnett: Yeah. So again, I like these five stages of, you know, passive, active, engaged, advocate, superfan. So you need to have something that can retain scores. So like, if you like any sales CRM or most CRMs, like, we'll be able to like, not. Not all of them. Like some of the marketing ones don't. But you supposed to have like, like lead scoring. This is the easy way to do it. Now you will build this individual. So I'm gonna tell you how kind of we do it, but you'll need to look at how you do it yourself. You're basically trying to feed in Things that tell you about the engagement, advocacy of a customer that can lead to like a certain score. Now this might have a, like the base level, like an NPS CSAT element. Like hey or love. I'm not a fan of nps, I'll be honest.
Will Fraser: Yeah.
Matt Barnett: But it's something that could contribute to that. So this is a very passive way. Engagement's the next one. So like I said, we're trying to get every customer to have a conversation with us. The second they have a conversation, their score goes up if they haven't had a conversation. And this is a big one for us. It's like, it's like a two times multiplier. So somebody. Because what you want to find is people who haven't had conversations we know are going to be passive. They never even get to engage. Engage for us means talking to us. That's what it means. Right. So for us that's a huge multiplier. You might then have something that if they engage multiple times there's an additional benefit because that starts to show them more of an advocate. But essentially that we also do things like, so we also will do things like referral scores as well. So we track and we are product led growth company, we can track this. So if somebody refers other people, if someone's product usage drives other customers sign up, we have a scoring metric there which kind of comes to advocate Superfan. We also do things around the time someone's been with us. So the amount of time they've been with us as a paying customer or if they cancel and come back again, we'll put that in there. We don't do arpu. So like we don't do average revenue and we don't do lifetime value because that, that involves revenue because we've made mistakes there before. Like I said, some small paying users are our biggest referrers. So we like to have time with the company irrespective of what they spend tends to be it. We systematically took out now from that might not work every customer. You might find that ARPU for other reasons actually does define a better, more engaged customer. Things are upgrades and like upgrade is actually a better, I think a better usage of how much they spend versus what they spend on day one because if they upgrade then they're getting more engaged in the platform.
Now there's other things you bring to this, things like you know, social like clout, I guess engagement with your online communities. Like for us we found it quite hard to get, get that into a, into into a Lead score and measure that like it's super hard to do. You can always be a bit more manual. You can lay onto this like manual input as well. So also unlike sales calls, if you do sales calls demos, we tag users. That gives them the score as well because we know they talk to us. If they're super engaged in those calls, we'll give them like again a multiplier score as well. So our sales teams input into this, our CS teams input our support team inputs as well. And we try and automate as much of this as we can. We can't automate it all but like the second they, they come into comms or applied something, you know, from intercom, we plug that in, we add that as a score. So you try to build, don't worry too much about the automation part to start with. Try and really work out like what to use signifies like if someone goes from passive to active, AKA they're logging in every day, you know, or they're purchasing more than once, that might be your first signal. If you're E comms, that gives them a score. Engaged comms is the easiest one. But also social, also communicate on social stuff. Can count that. To advocate like we use referral scores here because referring or if they do a case study with us or if they do a testimonial or they leave a review on GT crowd or they talk to my product team about product insight or they join one of our beta groups for early release products. You have multiple things that they can do there. That makes me advocate super fan. Like this is very good. Like we know our superfans because you can't ignore them. And I wouldn't say go from like advocate su fan. It's pretty random. I wouldn't say. We almost have a process there. It just seems like some personality types get there. You know, we get happy, we talk to a lot, a lot, a lot. And they always say as an advocate, they never quite go over that line. So kind of like that one's a bit more off the cuff, but essentially like build the score, decide what you want to have in it, then see if you can measure it. If you can't measure it, use proxies. It might need to have manual inputs initially, but you need to build up your own scoring method. And if you've done sales lead scoring, it's literally the exact same process.
Will Fraser: And when you were building that first version of this score for your company, did you kind of go with a data driven approach? Like were you looking at already Product usage data and stuff like that and behaviors and saying, okay, we know this. Or were you just kind of saying, this seems logical. Let's start here and learn as we go. What was your journey to it?
Matt Barnett: Very much products. I'm a product guy. We're a product driven company. So yes, products helped us fill in a bit of the base, but all it tells me is if they're active or not. That's actually what it tells me. It doesn't tell me. So product usage tells me that, which is a good starting point. The engagement part. Yes. We're like, how do we measure engagement? Who's like, his face. He's like, someone replies to message. He's like, that's it. He's like, you don't need anything else. He's like, the second they reply, that's what he goes. And they apply 10 times. Yeah, they're more engaged. But the important part is like, are they engaged or not at the start? So we've tried to simplify it where possible. You know, the advocate thing is we have a referral score that tends to be our main driver. But then like, we will have to add in, like, get. If someone does a call, they'll tag it. So we do have a manual tagging system on top. It's not perfect. Like, there's human error in there and there's multiple stakeholders. So you get this. This is missed. But it's a lot better than what we had before. We always try and improve this. And like, like, I love to, like, if I could automate the whole thing. So we knew what everyone's score was at every single, like, second without human error. Be great. It's free. Like, it is hard to do. Ultimately, like, hopefully we, like, our goal is to build a platform that could do that for you. So, you know, we will plug into, you know, your revenue data and your like CRM data and into or your social and try and like track engagement across multiple platforms. Because that thing is the only way you can do it. If you do that and you basically have everyone coming in, you're like, here's the, you know, the advocacy score. Any one time, it's beautiful. But to build your own one, you've got to kind of hack it together, you know, for now. But it's not, it's not, it's not overly complicated. Even just tracking a little bit of this. If all you have was mps, it's better than doing nothing. Right, right, right.
Will Fraser: And I like what you're kind of saying. Here it sounds like, you know, you may have gone on a journey where, you know, some of the, some thinking said, okay, well like I said, like one con, one response is engagement. And 10 responses is better engagement. But in reality, actually trying to keep it a bit more of a simplified model is just a little more pragmatic and probably, you know, just as, or just as value or at least close enough of the same value. That's what I think I'm hearing there.
Matt Barnett: The data you can go, you can go as deep down data holes as you like. We all do it again, like, you end up and like, the actual data you've got is so small, you're like, hang on a minute, none of this is relevant. This is pretty random. So you come back up again, you're like, what's the first lever that really starts that funnel? Again, simple, easier to make less. Well, you won't make as many mistakes.
Will Fraser: Now what's interesting here is you're talking about data teams, you're talking about product usage, you're talking about revenue success. This. What's the scope of the team that's involved in creating these kind of scores and these kind of systems. What does that look like for someone who wants to do this?
Matt Barnett: So it depends on the size of your team and company. Right. So this is different for different stages. I'm a huge fan of customer success like LED teams. So I would say that we are customer success more, I think, however, we're also very much an inbound prod led growth company. So we are, we don't have, we don't read. We do do some sales now, but, but, but for most of our history, we never do sales. We do partnership stuff, but we never do sales. So we very much like inbound conversion and then looking and trying to bring forward success through that. Now, customer success does have quite a product, I think traditionally like a product twist to it. Yes. You need to get into product success. We also like to get into like, you know, like, I guess engagement success as well. So CS to us might mean slightly different to other people, but I think customer success needs to have a place in any organization, no matter how small you are. And I am biased here. Customer success is also, by the way, it's a term didn't exist five years ago. It's a framing term. You might, your account manager might be doing this already. So you know, but again, like there's a slight, it's like anything. Like the slight blends and where it starts to touch product and marketing More than it maybe traditionally did. So it's not. It's less sales and more like a. Like a mix of the whole lots. I think one of the best things we ever did is we put somebody. So we. We originally used to talk about this idea of delight a lot. I think before we really came to realize it was. It was like reframing loyalty. Because reframing loyalty is kind of dangerous because it has a. Again, it's all linked awards cards. Right. Like, yeah.
Will Fraser: He has the great euphemism as of rewards that make you spend more money.
Matt Barnett: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's like, I'm like. And I'm like, stuff it. We're gonna go and change the world perception on that. But it's a hard one. We used to talk about delight a lot as well, because that was very much untouched. Delight's not. Again, flight is an element of this. But we. We basically made one of our team our chief delight officer. It was one of our junior team who just had like this. This ripping personality who just like every single customer fell in love with you. Like, she's like. Like a. Like an acting student that's kind of gone that way now. Was like. Like came on the board as like an intern and kind of stayed like this huge personality again. Wasn't, I think, like data driven in terms of CS stuff? Yes, we had CS manager with her, but just like, personality wise was like, I'm like, that's our brand. Like, she. She could be it. And so you basically. We basically made her chief law officer. And I was like, here's the deal. You watch that customer journey. You look at what James is doing on cs, look at what he's doing marketing, look at what Casey's doing on sales. And if you think at any stage the comms is too boring or it's not got a bit of love in it or all those gaps missing out. Yeah. Like, come in and tell us. Like, your job is to make sure that customers are delighted. You know, where you see we're failing. You need to pull us up. You pull the whole senior management up and just shout out that they're going wrong. You know, you need to jump in. And it was quite confronted because she come in and the guys be like, but she's only. And I'm like, doesn't matter if she's junior. Like, this is her goal. So having that really changed, I think the attitude of the whole team that like delight came first. And we still have that within us today. But the point here is we put somebody in charge of it. Now you might, you're probably not going to call them a chief delight officer. It might be like chief Chief loyalty or chief customer. Like however you want to frame that. Somebody needs to own this. Chief advocacy officer. Yeah, somebody's owner. Give it a title because then it holds weight and make it public within the team. Announce it within this, within your team. And it might be somebody who already holds another role. It doesn't need to be a whole new role. But if somebody owns this and they're responsible for this, then as you start to build the scoring and stuff, this is a person who watches that score every day. And like I said, it might just be mp. Maybe you just start with MPS as your base point which is super easy. There's a million tools to do it. This person obsesses about it and they pull it up and they look at it every day. Now it should evolve into more than that. But if somebody's responsible and you're saying to them every week how's that score tracking up or down? And then you announce that in front of the whole company. Like our scores down this week, what else can we do? Or you announce it within the customer facing team. Then it starts to. Your company will build the team around that. I think in its own way again because different teams, different mixes. But they need to be able to pull up sales and they need to be able to pull up marketing and they need to be able to put customer success. They need to be able to pull up products. They need to be. To pull up like anyone you know. And I found like, like genius potentially. Like I quite like genius in this role. It sounds ridiculous because they're less jaded from the world. Right. So you know they like, they have a lot of energy. I think this is a role that needs energy. They have loads of ideas, some which are just like never going to work commercially. But that's kind of the point of this, right? Like you're like, oh you know what, I can't see how we get our. Why, let's just do it anyway.
Will Fraser: Yeah.
Matt Barnett: Because some things again like tracking back to like the ROI side will come out and it'll play out in lifetime value. That's how it plays out. But that's a lagging indicator so it'll take a long time to really realize that. So some of the stuff you just gotta kind of jump into. But like yeah, you need someone a lot of energy and with the right personality for this. Like just think like who is your who do your customers love the most? If you ask that question, that's your person.
Will Fraser: So, so it kind of sounds like, you know, you're saying like the whatever team you wrap around, this might be dependent upon the resources and the size of the company and what you're in, but there's kind of this Nucleus role, this, this, this person that if they're shining a light on, on what is this loyalty score, what's the customer delight factor? That, that that person, as long as they have the authority to kind of, you know, call on every team. You think that's kind of the nugget you need to do this is you need at least one person who is tasked with making sure that this score is created, monitored, and others, you know, understand when they are maybe not living up to the standard needed to keep increasing that score. Is that a fair recap?
Matt Barnett: Yeah, like, it's the simplest way. I'm sure if you're a 20,000 person enterprise company, it gets a bit more complicated than that. But this is something that's way. Just give that one title. I think again from personal experience, by doing that, the team started to form and change around that. It's like. Yeah, it's like, I'm telling like a metaphor. It's like, it's like, it's like a snow machine. The way snow machines work is they spread out like tiny pieces of like dirt or other stuff. And then this, and then that hits, hits the sky and then the snow, the ice forms around and eventually turns into a snowflake. This is that little thing where you chuck it in and eventually things will form around it and then your snowflake will develop, which is your kind of customer like loyalty attitude.
Will Fraser: Yep. Gotta have that condensation nuclei. You know, this is really interesting and what's interesting is we've kind of seen this, this junior narrative a few times in different conversations we've had where whether it might have been success or advocacy or the creation of kind of any of these kind of new roles. And I don't know if anyone's ever captured it so well to be like, it's a little bit of that energy, so like, you know, unlimited ideas. And it's also that like, I mean, you say lack of jadedness, but it's like that lack of like self filtering to be like, well, this is just not a commercially viable idea. It's like you need someone who's almost just like, I don't know what's going to work or not, but I'll Put all the ideas out there and you guys can kind of help me figure out what we can and can't actually do. I love that one. I also just, you know, on a personal note, I just love, I love the energy and I love seeing that energy get applied to fun things like this.
Matt Barnett: Yeah, yeah. Again, we are more creative organization. Like different brands, different things. Sure. But the most creative person, if you're an accounting firm, someone in there is going to be creative, like a different way. So it's all, it's all applicable. You might wear suits and ties, but somebody will still have better, like better ideas.
Will Fraser: Yeah. I think it's been like a great, you know, tour of this, you know, your view of loyalty and I really love this idea of, you know, the advocacy scoring model and how we get there. Any other kind of key pieces of advice that you think the audience really needs to know to be able to effectively apply these, these ideas inside of their organization?
Matt Barnett: Yeah, I think you have to have a bit of faith here. Right. So I think, you know, when again, when you look at how you joint loyalty, there's one part that we talk about too much which is this idea of like active versus passive. Right. So again, back to rewards programs. You see like big airlines, Southwest Airlines have a, have a loyalty program. Yeah. And like, you know, like big, big supermarkets will have it and big, big chains will have it. Those are very, very passive loyalty programs. People opt in to save money. They'll opt themselves in, they will fault themselves and they'll do everything themselves. You never have to talk to them like at all. Now the one caveat there is that they have massive brands and massive recognition and there's real savings and it's a money driven thing. So I wouldn't say it's true loyalty, but people opt into that. Now if you're a small company by small, like below a thousand people, like most people never heard of you. Right. The world's huge, the market is massive. So you need to be more active to generate your stuff. And like every customer counts. Like if you've got 10 customers, like they all count. If you can make them active, you're going to get more customers faster, you can grow faster, but you can't afford to be passive with that until you get massive. The argument is like you should always have active wing. So you need to actually like step in and you need to turn up on video and chat to customers. And back to the referring point where most people don't refer you to ask them, hey, James, can you send us a referral? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. Like, hey, what I'm looking for is this, this and this. He goes, oh yeah, actually I do know somebody. Hey, James, you haven't talked in a while. I need you on some product research. Like you need to actively ask for this stuff and drive it and turn up. I need to give. So if you give enough yourself, you'll get back. I wouldn't obsess over the immediate roi, especially as a smaller team because again, what this plays out with, but it is again, I said lagging. It will take three or six months. As this stuff starts to work, you'll see people stay longer and you'll notice, I mean, when people sign up, put a drop down. How did you hear about this? You'll notice the percentage on referral will start to go up. Right. Like you can track this stuff. It's not necessarily immediate. So you try to track like how much, how much your audience is coming in from existing customers or from looking at social forums, how much, how much they're spending, how long are they staying. So it does come out. But I think again, a leap of faith at the beginning that if you do goodbye your customers, you treat them how you'd like to be treated, like it will work. And the best real world example, I don't know if this completely translates but like Australia is a very coffee driven country. So I always use this barista example. Yes. We have baristas who are like the kings and queens of the city, basically. Like they are the ones who make the coffee. Right. But more importantly, it's not just product. You turn up and they'll remember your name and they'll talk to you five minutes and they'll make your day. You're having, you'll half asleep in the morning and then they wake you up and then off you go and have a great day. When they move, they move from one cafe to another and Sydney's very like small cafe, like small busy cafes. If it's not too far away, you'll go with them. You're not loyal to the cafe, you're loyal to the individual. Or if the individual obviously runs that cafe, then you stay. But you'll go with them and they remember thousands of names and thousands of little me life stories and they deliver their product, which has to be acceptable. And it's a real example of where it's not. It just shows you it's not about the product. The product's gonna be good. But the reason you stay. And the reason you follow them is all about this person or the brand or the people in that cafe. So like I always say, be the barista, be the great barista, still have great products, but take that barista away and you're gonna lose half your customers no matter how good your product is.
Will Fraser: You know, and I think that is a very great metaphor. And I think that kind of that concaps pretty much everything we've talked about here today. You know, that, that humanity just coming through and shining through to really, you know, help us realize that we're loyal to people. Right at the end of the day, we're loyal to people. Awesome, Matt. Well, thank you so much for sharing all this with with us and our listeners. I've really enjoyed learning it. I know I've taken a few things away that I'll definitely be be applying after this. I know our audience did as well. So just thank you very, very much for your time today.
Matt Barnett: No problem. Thanks for having me. Been a pleasure.
