Referral Rock has evolved over the years across all areas of the business. In its earliest days, it was just Josh Ho the founder doing everything. Building the product, doing sales calls, establishing marketing with a strong SEO footprint, and a dash of customer support.
The business eventually got off the ground in its first 3 years from beta to first sales hire. Josh often jokes that his job is to “do all the things he hasn’t hired someone else to do” and has always meant to write additional insider stories about Referral Rock but hasn’t gotten around to it yet.
It’s kind of fitting that I will write the next chapter here describing how Referral Rock’s customer services have evolved. It’s a big part of our story where I had a large role.
BTW I’m Mica Longanecker, a partner and Head of Operations at Referral Rock. Here’s the story of how our customer services has evolved:
The first sales -> service rep
I joined Referral Rock in 2017 as the first sales rep.
At the time, we had romanticized the idea of self-service and product-led growth. We thought that if we could just get customers to buy they would be successful and run their own referral programs. But boy were we wrong.
Customers kept coming back to me with questions or worse, would go quiet and suddenly cancel. We quickly realized we needed a better, more human approach to onboarding and I became the first onboarding specialist.
This worked well for a time but didn’t scale.
First onboarding team (V1)
With more and more customers, I was being pulled in too many directions and we could no longer support everyone. So we hired our first full-time customer service rep. Meghan joined us with the promise of hiring more people under her after she nailed the role. Hiring someone with much more experience than ourselves turned out to be a pretty smart move as she brought a wealth of experience in customer education and managing customer situations.
Meghan thrived and ended up hiring, managing, and training multiple reps under her. All of the members of this team were generalists with strong technical skills. They were “figure-outers” who were smart, independent, and did really well under the stress of a fast growing team. They were awesome at account management, doing integrations, and “helping customers set up their programs based on what the customers wanted” (more on that later).
We formalized our onboarding playbook so every customer got:
- Dedicated onboarding specialist
- Personalized launch plans
- Product training
Doing dedicated onboarding turned out to be one of our bigger business win wins. It brought in revenue and led to an increase in customer success.
Ultimately we put too much on their plates without enough help. Help in operations, workflows, product improvements, and documentation would have gone a long way to help this team. Which started us down a road of specialization.
Hiring an application support specialist (V2)
As Referral Rock grew, we started attracting a broader set of less technical customers who needed more hands-on integration assistance. The onboarding team was getting spread too thin and they needed more and more help with customer integrations. The product team was happy to help as Blake (our awesome product designer/manager) took one for the team and made it his mission to help with customer integrations.
Eventually we brought on an application support specialist to provide direct technical assistance to customers and tier 2 support to our onboarding team. This specific role was a huge unlock on the technical support front. It freed us to make drastic improvements to our documentation and tooling for integrations.
Once we took away the team’s biggest pain points, the onboarding team really thrived because they could focus more time on “helping customers manage the launch of their referral program” (more on this later too).
Aspirationally moving to an 11 star experience
In 2017, I listened to Reid Hoffman (co-founder of LinkedIn) interview Brian Chesky (co-founder of Airbnb) on scaling magical experiences.
Brian shares his approach to designing Airbnb’s check-in experience by visualizing an 11-star experience and then working backward to what’s possible.
This framework stuck with me, and I often wonder what an 11-star experience would look like for Referral Rock 💭
Can we get to a “perfectly optimized” referral program at the click of a magical button and referrals just roll in for a business?
Where all the messaging and rewards perfectly resonate, integrations are already set up, campaigns are queued up… all you need to do is click “send”.
✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨
As we have made product improvements over the years. One of the most important lessons we’ve learned is to NOT just build what the customer is asking for. In the early days we took most requests and just appended them on to the product. While it made existing customers happy, over the long-term it made it more difficult for new customers.
If you recall I said I’d get back to a couple of statements.
- Onboarding Team V1 = “… helping customers set up their programs based on what the customers wanted”
- Onboarding Team V2 = “… helping customers manage the launch of their referral program”
Our newer customers were less tech and had a lot less time. They needed everything to be simpler and wanted our opinion of what the right way to do things were. Which leads us to today and our next evolution of our services.
The almost “done for you” era (V2.5)
Based on what we learned by specializing technical support, this next era moves us closer to our vision of an 11-star experience. While we can’t say it’s “100% done for you”, we get as close as possible while keeping you at the helm. (we’ll wait until this is all running on rails before we call it a V3)
Every Referral Rock customer gets help from a dedicated program advisor who guides customers through the 3 phases of implementing a referral system:
- Phase 1: Build the Program – create program plan and setup first program
- Phase 2: Scale the Program – boost engagement and ongoing awareness
- Phase 3: Optimize the Program – analyze data and make improvements
Instead of only teaching customers how to use Referral Rock (we still do this), we provide recommendations on what customers should do to be successful.
- Reward recommendations based on the customer’s audience
- Tailored program & campaign messaging written for them (yeah we hired an awesome copywriter for this)
- Technical integration assistance (we help setup the integration)
Next, we help scale your programs so it doesn’t fail due to lack of awareness (the #1 reason referral programs fail). We work with customers to optimize their program (based on the Referral Funnel) and provide actionable recommendations on where to improve.
We’ve learned that our customers are busy managing multiple projects and don’t have the time (or desire) to learn the intricacies of referral marketing best practices.
What next?
As we roll this new process out across customers. We’ll be looking at ways to tighten this up further by baking the best practices into the product, providing templates, and continuing to “systemize” internally and out.
We’re excited for this new era of referral program best practices based by our own data and learned expertise.
In the spirit of sharing more of our stories, I’ll try to get one written up about how our product has evolved during this same time period.