Leadership
April 12, 2022

Customer service is at the heart of our DNA

By
Emilie Peythieux
Head of Customer Service
As far as I can remember, almost 95% of Letsignit's customers renew their contracts. As Customer Service Manager for more than 5 years, maintaining such a figure is a real challenge and helps to demonstrate the importance of Customer Care in a company.

In 5 years, Letsignit has become unrecognizable: Capucine Roche, our CMO, talks about it very well in her article, but to summarize, I'm talking about growth in turnover; a lead-gen that has reached 100% in 3 years; an increasing number of staff and above all... customers who are multiplying (quickly, very quickly).

One issue quickly becomes key: with the exponential increase in new customers, how do you offer the same level of satisfaction and maintain the 95% renewal rate? The Customer Care department has to keep up with the pace imposed by the massive influx of new customers.

And to keep up with this fast pace, we had to transform ourselves - that's the price of our success.

💡 Recognizing the right time to reorganize

It is important to recognize the warning signs so as not to be overwhelmed by too much growth.

In the Customer Care department, we have identified two strong signals:

  1. The increase in the number of clients
  2. The increase in processing time for customer service requests

The good news? These indicators are so visible that they are impossible to miss. So far, it's not a big deal, but from now on, things will get tougher.

Our main challenge? Tripling our customers without tripling our teams.

To meet this challenge, we have followed 3 guidelines:

  1. Accelerate digitalization for our customers
  2. Develop our tool stack
  3. Refocus our business expertise and internal organization

Make the customer experience as digital as possible and review our recruitment criteria

Before recruiting in a hurry to absorb the increase in new customers, it is better to optimize the existing staff. And that means digitalizing the experience offered to our customers.

We have two challenges on the management side:

  • Hiring new profiles without increasing our workforce. We had to manage a large wave of recruitment in order to reorganize ourselves. In the space of a year, nearly 7 newcomers have joined the team.
  • Supporting existing teams in this digitalization.

One of our rather evocative choices in this digitalization was the choice to considerably reduce incoming calls by educating customers. One might naturally think that this decision could degrade the customer experience (frustration at not being able to reach anyone by phone). But the opposite is true.

Rather than a call that mobilizes an agent for a customer, our users are referred to our chat. An agent can handle an average of 6-7 conversations at a time with a first response time of less than a minute. In the end, the customer never waits and the digitalized customer experience is more efficient.

In addition to our chat, we have also redesigned and expanded our knowledge base. Rather than a simple FAQ in question/answer mode, we shot explanatory videos; organized webinars; produced synthetic one-pagers; added screenshots and even GIFs.

Keeping in mind that Letsignit is a digital tool – it is easier to show than to tell about our solution. After a quick customer education, the chat was widely adopted. Thus, we proved the efficiency of this new approach in record time.

🗝️ Equip your employees to be more efficient

The advantage of working in Tech is that certain technologies are more easily accepted. In order to better understand and anticipate the behavior of certain users, we have integrated certain technologies such as Artificial Intelligence.

To continue with the example of our chat (Intercom), we have linked this tool with our knowledge base (also Intercom). Thus, when certain keywords are spotted in the conversation, the AI can find the meaning of the question or the problem and go and get the information from our knowledge base. In parallel, the AI feeds on recurring queries or words to inspire us and expand our knowledge base.

Thanks to Artificial Intelligence, we can process 15 to 20% more tickets without overloading our teams and without impacting the quality of service.

In addition, we are leveraging AI to optimise the customer journey in our chat:

  • Needs analysis (e.g. what can we improve in our customer support?)
  • Demand analysis (e.g. should we increase the frequency of our webinars?)
  • Journey analysis (e.g. analysis of clicks, bounce rate, where do we lose customers? etc.)

It is at this precise moment that the handover between the machine and the human takes place. This information allows our employees to ask our customers for feedback.

Refocus your business expertise

Transformation of our department does not only mean recruitment. Before our change of direction, some employees held what are now different jobs at the same time: project manager, success manager, support manager, etc.

Today, the bodies of expertise are refocused to gain in fluidity and efficiency:

  • Project Manager: aims to accompany the client until the solution is deployed
  • Success Manager: aims to accompany the customer until the solution is used
  • Technical Support: is responsible for technical support (no catch)

We silo this expertise to optimize our teams' time. When we listened to our project managers, we realised how complex it was to run each business in parallel. In particular, support was taking up a lot of their time, to the detriment of the project and/or success.

The result of this refocusing? With better monitored and trained customers, the support load is reduced and deployment time is shortened.

❤️ Care at the heart of the Letsignit DNA

The Customer Care team is a central department in the company.

On the commercial side, with Anthony Poyac's team, we work in tandem with sales on many aspects: in particular, bringing in business, detecting needs, and setting up proof-of-concepts (POCs).

With Capucine Roche, we feed the marketing department according to their needs: testimonials; customer references; quotes; etc.

And that's not all. We are integrated into the Agile process set up by the technical teams. We report and prioritize bugs; propose new features during product committees; manage customer reminders; and help the accounting department with unpaid invoices, etc. Moreover, our insights are directly imported into our CRM.

This interdependence of departments is formalized by recurring meetings (weekly meetings, account reviews, committees, etc.). But one thing is certain: the real success of a redesigned organization depends on the DNA of the company and a culture of change. There is no perfect format, no miracle process sequencing, no flawless organization. No, the answer lies in the culture of your company and in the way you constantly question yourself.

At Letsignit, the Care department is not just a service that answers tickets. It is a fundamental meeting point between project management and technology.

We have also created a relationship marketing position in charge of transcribing this voice of the customer into our actions. It is held by Justine Landel. The aim is to be able to create and deploy an effective loyalty strategy, analyse the customer journey, and transcribe this voice of the customer internally.

And how is satisfaction measured in all this?

Our main KPIs are the NPS (Net Promoter Score) and the CSAT (customer satisfaction). The NPS differentiates our promoters from our detractors; i.e. the propensity of users to recommend Letsignit. This indicator is calculated using 3 main sources of information:

  1. Email surveys on closing a ticket (compliance with SLAs, deadlines, etc.)
  2. Surveys at the end of the deployment of the solution with our customers
  3. Chat rating - we have 96-98% satisfied/very satisfied

What should the Customer Care department do next?

The transformations in the customer journey and in our expertise do not stop there. Naturally, these optimizations have enabled us to keep pace with the company's growth.

I will share with you our future teachings. In the meantime, here are the next steps we would like to achieve:

  • Increase our efforts on e-learning and self-care to improve customer training
  • Rethink our automation to relieve the department's three trades
  • Establish a community of Letsignit ambassadors to create an internal enthusiasm, disseminate the knowledge collected about our customers to better understand them, serve them better and co-construct.

Ultimately, it was our anticipation of growth that triggered our transformation. And it is this same transformation that supports our growth. The one cannot be separated from the other, just as our departments work in total interdependence with one goal in mind: to continue to bring the voice of our clients to every corridor of Letsignit.

About the author
Emilie is our Head of Customer Service. As the focal point of customer service, she has been helping us to support our customers for the past ten years – structuring our teams, internationalizing our support… She makes sure that customer service is efficient and meets the customers' needs. To achieve this, she doesn't hesitate for a single second to expand her teams and integrate new tools. She makes a real point of ensuring that her teams work in the best possible conditions! Her stress-buster: several handball training sessions a week!
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