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.
Introduction of structured onboarding
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 onboarding specialist.
They were great and we built a small team of generalists that could handle account management, help with integrations, and provide basic recommendations.
We formalized our onboarding playbook so everyone got:
- Dedicated onboarding specialist
- Personalized launch plans
- Product training
Hiring an integration specialist
As Referral Rock grew, we started attracting a broader set of less technical customers who needed more hands-on integration assistance. Our existing team (while awesome) was unprepared for this transition and we needed to hire again.
We brought on an integration specialist to provide direct technical assistance to customers and tier 2 support to our onboarding team.
We also rebuilt our referral tracking script and improved our external integrations to make it easier to capture referrals from your website and connect to your system of record.
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 setup, campaigns are queued up… all you need to do is click “send”.
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Almost “done for you programs”
This next chapter 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.
Every Referral Rock customer gets help from a dedicated program advisor who guides you 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 you how to use Referral Rock (we still do this), we provide recommendations on what you should do to be successful.
- Reward recommendations based on your audience
- Tailored program & campaign messaging written for you
- Technical integration assistance (we help setup the integration)
Next, we help you scale your program so it doesn’t fail due to lack of awareness (the #1 reason referral programs fail). We work with you to optimize your 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.
