Contextual

Blog

  • Context Marketing – Everyone MUST Be Part of Customer Success

    Context Marketing – Everyone MUST Be Part of Customer Success

    Naval just tweeted: “You’re doing sales because you failed at marketing.You’re doing marketing because you failed at product.”**

    News Flash: Most Product team members don’t actually use their own App. As an App user, we’ve all thought “wtf were these developers thinking” (I’m looking at you Microsoft Teams ????).

    These teams are Product-centric but not Customer-centric – it’s a lack of empathy and you need people in your team that are champions for the customer. I’ve written elsewhere about why Customer Support/Care is a key input to Product. But can we develop cultures of Customer Success?

    Customer-Centric

    Customer centricity is essential for a 21st-century product company and should be a focus for the product team. In this series, “Context Marketing” is the focus/lens that Product Teams can use to view the User’s Journey.

    “Marketing” may be a dirty word for Product Managers, Developers and Customer Success – if they wanted a career in Sales or Marketing, they would have chosen it – maybe they see it as “the dark-side”. But, but, but…great Marketing and Sales seeks (with empathy) to speak to the customer’s needs.

    Product Teams with customer-centric cultures make products that:

    • Do the “Job-to-be-done”
    • Surprise and delight customers.

    So “Context Marketing” isn’t a dirty word but making an App infused with the very same “user” curiosity and empathy that Sales and Marketing folks have.

    Context marketing is, by nature, user-oriented, individually analysing and displaying content that would be of interest to the client in question – in this moment. Product-led growth and customer success are inevitable.

    Credit: superoffice.com

    3 Benefits of a Customer-Centric Mindset

    • Understanding the User Journey
    • Increasing Customer Satisfaction
    • Reducing User Churn

    The bottom of this post details each of these goals. Context Marketing puts features, offers and help that a customer needs at each point during the User Journey – context matters when it comes to inApp messaging, help, feature releases, and so on. 

    At Contextual, even a simple tooltip for the right-person at the right time aims to meet these 3 goals.

    Can Product Teams afford Customer-centricity?

    One (unamed) Company developed a successful B2B app, they have a good customer base and product-market fit. What a dream! Or is it?

     

    While things look perfect on paper, what can’t be seen from the outside is that they are overloaded. Their engineering led culture codes everything in-house – the founders were super-coders so all engineering copy-cats that hairy chested style. The App is loaded with features (developers build whatever customers ask). So the App has grown to be complex….customers need to be onboarded, features need to be explained and guides need to be released.

     

    The Customer Success and Customer Care teams are overwhelmed with a backlog of customer tasks/followups that need to be done and consider giving extra responsibilities to the developers. While hard coding was once the main option in these situations, now it feels outdated, and it only adds to the problem. Designers could fix these issues, but it would be costly, and it would only add to the development backlog.

     

    This scenario is a vicious circle: by letting the developers handle it, the company loses money and time.

    Customer related costs

    Poor App customer-centricity results in these top-line problem:

    • Increased load on Customer Care
    • Lags in resolving Customer problems
    • User Churn
    • Poor revenue
    • Poor reviews and referrals (the engine of low cost marketing and acquisition)

    Opportunity cost

    By hard-coding every aspect of a product, there is less time to develop new features, more effort goes into contextual customisations, if each user (cohort) is manually analyzed, and there is no analytics that proves the success of any of these aspects.

     

    Another lost opportunity is the lack of performance/usability data flowing back into Customer Success systems. Lack of this data means the organisation can’t adapt and learn from lessons.

    Engineering Costs

    Keeping super-coders employed is expensive, there are many job opportunities for coders and it’s unlikely that coding tips, guides, marketing will lead to employee retention.

     

    In addition, recruiters now demand fees of 18-20% of salary. Every dissatisfied departing engineer has a devastating impact on corporate memory.

    Customer Care and Customer Success Costs

    With Increased load on Customer Care, this results in unhappiness and churn in your staffing.

     

    Recruitment and retraining may not be as expensive as engineering churn but every green, newbie, clueless customer support rep will be a bad experience for the customer.

     

    This is a huge risk!

    Solution

    Few product teams have enough development resources to write features AND have a framework of inApp messaging and help. Hard coding is costly, slow and precious.
    The solution is to:

    1. 1. Have developers focus on improving the product itself – the “feature layer”.
    2. 2. Use “engagement layer” tools like Contextual to help the User Journey.

    No-Code inApp tips, guides, walkthroughs, announcements and feedback can be delivered on the Engagement Layer without consuming developer resources – much more affordable.

    By choosing to let go of the “NIH”*** mindset, any product-led company would do themselves a favour. Precious time is saved, and less effort goes into satisfying your customers. 

    No-code engagement layer tools like Contextual are not a silver bullet but can help significantly to reduce costs and risk discussed above.

    Why Context Marketing ⇒ Customer Success

    The JTBD (jobs-to-be-done) framework helps product companies achieve product-market fit, as well as the level of satisfaction their users have while using the product.

    Context Marketing is a similar framework
    By recognizing the need for context marketing (and platforms that deliver contextual help), the workload could be lighter and stress more manageable in Customer Care and Customer Success teams. Also, by using this method, Product Management can be more empathetic towards the customers as well.

    Context Marketing can be even just a simple tooltip. Users can self-serve help, and they will feel closer to the product if right-place-right-time content is shown throughout their user journey.

    We now have mutually beneficial ROI (return on investment) between the company/product and its clients.

    The key is the customer – not the product.

    The product is in service to the customer. The drip emails are in service to the customer. The chat widget or support button are in service to the customer. The help desk is in service to the customer. No touch point should lack customer-centric empathy.

    More importantly: product management, developers, designers, scrum-masters are thinking customer-centric.

    By using this framework, customer success is increased.

    What’s Next?

    Consider the Contextual ROI Toolkit.

    We take care of your announcements, guides, and feedback, so you won’t have to think about ‘Build or Buy?’ ever again. By choosing us, you can have access to the above-mentioned analytics to see if we help your users in their workflow, as well as lighten the workload of the design and development team. This way, you can focus only on coming up with new and exciting features for your product!

    ** Lots of Tweeps got grumpy and argued with Naval. Of course. Its rare to find a product today that doesn’t have competitors, so S&M play a function even for the most loved products.

    *** “NIH” is Not invented here – it is very common in large silicon valley companies like google because of the massive profitability and the huge scale. But nowadays we find even larger companies consider using SaaS platforms to solve problems that arn’t their core competency. E.g Analytics or Product Adoption.

    Appendix – 3 Goals in Detail

    Understanding the User Journey

    Product-led companies can be tempted to focus more on their product rather than their users. As they put a lot of effort into the creation of an app, they tend to forget about their audience’s happiness – “growth” gets bolted-on as a tactic without customer empathy.

    By allowing the users to be the centre of attention, instead of the product itself, product companies are more likely to understand the user journey and the exact steps a customer might go through in a session. 

    This is important for future user journey mapping too, as it reveals possible weak points, parts of the product that need to be improved, as well as its strengths. By taking time to understand the before, during, and after parts of the user journey, context marketing can also be better targeted, uncovering the exact needs a user has while using an app. 

    Increasing Customer Satisfaction

    Users make or break a product and the developing company as well. Their opinions are essential for product-led growth, and so is their happiness. 

    Customer satisfaction is not a new term in the marketing world. Context marketing especially focuses on this concept, as it plays a great role in what type of content users are shown while working with a product. The right place and the right time are crucial elements of customer success.

    Customer centricity helps product-led companies to recognize and adjust their practices that increase user satisfaction and offer a positive user experience. 

    Reducing User Churn

    By placing the user in the centre of the product development, product-led companies can observe the patterns and behaviours of their clients. This not only helps in the user journey mapping task, but it can be a great starting point in reducing user churn. 

    Analysing the possible reasons why users may or may not like different features, conducting A/B testing on them, displaying different tips to guide them in their user journey are all beneficial in determining reasons why churn might occur. With these and a problem-solving attitude, solutions can be found to reduce user churn.

    The key is the customer. Their satisfaction matters in the success of a product. By looking at their journey and adopting a customer-centric mindset, it’s obvious how much context matters when it comes to marketing, feature releases, and so on. Here, at Contextual, we understand the need for context the best!

  • Forget Content Marketing. Context Marketing Has Arrived!

    Forget Content Marketing. Context Marketing Has Arrived!

    By now you are overwhelmed by the daily volume of blog post notifications, newsletters, and relentless social posts on LinkedIn and Twitter. 

     

    A daily tsunami of content marketing fills our inboxes powered by platforms automating: cold-email, drip email and newsletters. Product-led companies use email as low-hanging fruit. The problem is as McLuhan said: “the medium is the message“*.

     

    Your Content Marketing  competes for your user’s inbox attention along with: other SaaS/App/PLG products, marketing companies, e-commerce platforms and plain-old-spammers.  I’ve even noticed one smart startup only emails on Saturday (no weekend rest for you dear reader!)

     

    Your Content Marketing might be well-targeted, but McLuhan tells us the user will just see it as more junk mail. Add to that floods of App push notifications, social media posts, PR strategies, inbound marketing etc. 

     

    The user is fatigued.

     

    Content marketing** in an internet (SaaS/Mobile App) product was popularised by one of the most successful SaaS companies, HubSpot.

    A Brief Description of HubSpot

    HubSpot’s slogan reads: Helping millions grow better. 
    When the company started out in 2004, they were considered trendsetters from the get-go. HubSpot was the first one to recognize that the disruptive marketing strategies of those days were outdated and didn’t seem to work anymore. 
    Hubspot created inbound marketing  – this focuses on offering help to users and clients instead of interrupting and harassing them with advertisements and solely sale-oriented strategies. 
    HubSpot’s strategies attempt effective content marketing, to help the user solve their problem they indicated they had.

    The only problem is:

    1. a) not all leads are qualified
    2. b) the granularity of audience segmentation is rarely nuanced.
    3. c) it often has no way to update based on a user’s journey. (similar to when you still see ads after you bought a product!)

    If Content (inbound) Marketing is perceived by the recipient (not you as the sender) as spam, then we should all stop spamming right? ????
    Well, no….Content/Inbound is a valuable component of bringing the user back into the app – so lets just get better at segmentation.

    From Content to Context

    Product Led Growth is about making your software at the center of the users happiness (and buying) journey.

    Context marketing is the conscious recognition of the 80:20 rule:

    1. a) new user acquisition is costly – 80%
    2. b) existing user retention (if you have a product that solves the user’s JTBD) costs 20%.  Retention is the most effective spend you can make.
    3. c) your App is a Context marketing platform.

    Like Content Marketing, we aim to help and educate the user – but with Context:

    1. a) Your UX and the customers data 
    2. b) the timing of the user journey is available to you. 

    Being contextual is critical when it comes to user journey and experience. The key point here is to be there for the right person, at the right time, in order to deliver the right content. 

    Product-led companies should deliver (or allow self-service) targeted helpful InApp content to their users; then user engagement deepens and user happiness increases.

    Tools, such as Contextual, can simplify parts of the user journey: such as onboarding or feedback. User journey data also helps with identify the best time to trigger availability of specific and unique content based on the user experience.

    Credit: thewayofdamasio.com

    The Importance of Context Marketing

    Context matters. But why? 

     

    Because of the 80:20 rule discussed earlier, we argue that Product Managers and inApp Growth teams are significantly better contributors to company revenue than acquisition personnel!

     

    As mentioned earlier, timing is one of the defining elements of context marketing. With proper timing, product-led companies can easily deliver useful, helpful content that adds to the user experience and boosts user engagement.

     

    But there are other reasons why context is important. 

     

    Let’s consider Dave McClure’s AARRR! Pirate Metrics through the lens of content and context marketing. McClure’s Pirate Metric is a simple tool created to help with product and business growth by analyzing five concepts, as follows:

    • Acquisition
    • Activation
    • Retention
    • Referral
    • Revenue

     

    The five parts of this model each represent a tactic that, once focused on, can help with product adoption and user retention.

    Does Context Matter?

    Based on this model, content marketing responds to Acquisition. Content (or inbound) represents the channel through which potential users get to know your product and your company. They might hear about you through SEO, social media, content creators, and so on. However, this step alone might not be enough to get to Activation, no matter how diversified your content marketing is.

     

    To get to the next step, you need context. Activation is about a potential user familiarizing themselves with your app or product. For this, you need to be more specific with your marketing by finding a niche that resonates with the potential client. Optimization leads to product adoption and to Retention. 

     

    Just like Activation, according to the Pirate Metrics, Retention is also context-dependent. Through context marketing, customers can better understand the benefits your app brings to their workflow and their life. At this stage, the key focus for product-led companies should be reducing user churn by optimizing the content each user sees, be that through email or in-app notifications. Style the content to the user’s needs to make them feel heard and validate their needs.

     

    Referral represents the likelihood of your users sharing their thoughts about your product with their friends. Think of it as the equivalent of the NPS survey’s question: “How likely are you to recommend this product to a friend?” Happy users lead to more referrals. How to make your users happy? Pay attention to context.

     

    Revenue is the sum of the success of the previous four concepts. It grows exponentially with each happy user. 

    We can see that the majority of these concepts are greatly influenced by context marketing vs. content marketing. Optimizing your marketing strategy to be useful and helpful for your users results in happier people who are more likely to go through with product adoption and spread the word about your app. 

    It’s Time to Focus on Context Marketing

    But how do you do that, you might wonder. That’s simple. Use Contextu.al!

    An easy-to-use and helpful platform such as ours can simplify your life when it comes to context marketing. As our name suggests, we are all about context. 

    Contextu.al knows your users and helps them in their user journey to product adoption and retention by putting the most contextual content in front of them. With us, you can also measure the uplift or increased engagement by the user, to know if we helped them! 

    To get the best tips, notifications, and guides for your users, book a demo with us today at contextu.al!


    * The irony is not lost on us that some readers will have seen this from an email newsletter.

    ** Benjamin Franklin is apparently the first content marketer when he published “Poor Richard’s Almanack”

    *** Banner image credit: freepik.com

  • Product Features and the RICE Score

    Product Features and the RICE Score

    “Impactful” product features are the backbone of every product-led company. “Impact” is one of the axes of the RICE prioritisation method – we revisit this valuable approach to getting the right tasks into your sprints.

    Like most product companies, we struggle to triage and prioritize the mountain of tickets into sprints. Luckily at Contextual we can use our own product to add contextual help instead of making even more tickets for engineering.

    Your Mobile and Web Apps are competing with other apps to get your users attention. You need each of your product features help the user get their Job Done (JTBD) – this means the right features at the right time and with minimum user confusion.

    In the routine of a product-led company, user journey mapping is a crucial task in order to ensure the greatest possible user experience. As there are a lot of things to consider in user journey mapping, prioritisation helps you be more organised with your product features, and it enables your App to become more impactful.

    But, (you may ask ????,) based on what criteria should you prioritize product features? A great place to start is the RICE scoring model, a prioritization framework that shines light on the value of your ideas. It helps your user journey mapping through four factors: Reach, Impact, Confidence, Effort. Together, they form the acronym: RICE.

    RICE – Grain by Grain

    A good prioritization framework can help you see your product features in a new light, so that you can make sure you’re making a good decision for your company. So, when you make time for user journey mapping, having a system that allows you to see your product clearly and objectively comes to your advantage. RICE helps you evaluate the four main areas of any project idea. 

    Reach 

    How many people can you reach with a new product feature in a given timeframe? Will they benefit from it? The score in this case is the number of people you estimate to be reached by the new feature. 

    Impact 

    The Impact score represents, as its name suggests, the estimated impact the new product feature can have on the people you reach. For instance, you could ask: ‘How much will this feature affect product adoption/conversion rates?’ Or, ‘How will the user experience benefit from this?’

     

    As Impact is hard to measure, a multiple-choice scale is usually used for estimation purposes: 

    • 3 – massive impact
    • 2 – high impact
    • 1 – medium impact
    • .5 – low impact
    • .25 – minimal impact 

    Confidence

    A product-led company is always enthusiastic about great ideas and implementing them when it comes to product features. However, to be more realistic, the RICE scoring model advises that you factor in the level of confidence you might have with product features and their releases. In the long run, this estimation will help with product adoption among your users.

     

    Percentages score Confidence, as follows:
    100% – high confidence

    80%   – medium confidence

    50 %  – low confidence

    So, how confident are you about the reach and impact of a new product feature? 

    In order to achieve your product feature’s RICE score, you have to follow the following formula: 

     

    Reach × Impact × Confidence
    ___________________________
    Effort

    Why is Effort Crucial in Prioritization?

    Effort is the denominator in the RICE equation. This factor represents the cost a product-led company pays when implementing a new product feature.

     

    To quantify Effort in this score model, you estimate it in the same manner you do with Reach, Impact, and Confidence. In this case, Effort is estimated by analyzing the work one team member can do in a month. 

     

    The highest possible Impact with the least possible Effort is desirable when it comes to product features and their releases. By minimizing the time and human resources you put into a feature release, you gain them back for other areas of your product. 

     

    Effort is the most important out of the four RICE factors, as it can make or break a good idea. If you have great Reach and Impact, but the feature you envisioned requires most of your team and a significant amount of time, it might be better to rethink the idea or to use a different approach for it.

    How to Minimize Effort?

    That’s an easy question to answer: use Contextu.al!

     

    Of course we jest – there is so many features you have to implement and those require solid development work. But Feature Announcements and Guidance – in fact all elements such as videos that deepen user engagement can be helped by using Contextual.

     

    We strive to deliver product-led growth through announcements, guides, tips regarding product features, the onboarding process, and even feedback!

     

    With Contextu.al, you wouldn’t have to worry about hard-coding, because the Effort on your part would be minimal. Your top priorities are even higher priorities for us!  Putting more effort into implementing new releases is the thing of the past with us. 

     

    As an added bonus, with Contextu.al, the Impact and Confidence are also increasing. How, you ask? With us, you can get rapid feedback and measure results in no time. This will give you and your team the confidence to implement the desired changes later by hard-coding. 

     

    If you want to make your app fly, don’t hesitate to book a demo with us today! You won’t regret it. 

    Image Credit.
  • Customer Support is a Product Managers untapped design resource.

    Customer Support is a Product Managers untapped design resource.

    Call it: Customer Success, Customer Care, Customer Support, Tech Support, HelpDesk – these teams and people are the first line of feedback from customer and the reality is they carry a lot of data from the intimacy and volume of interactions.

    In this Fireside Rachael Neumann (former director of Customer Experience Strategy at EventBrite and now Head of Startups AWS ANZ) talks about the psychological or emotional user experience.

    After an anecdote about how she discovered a different way to implement a product feature, I challenged Rachael about whether she was actually doing the Product Manager’s job.

    Rachael made an important point:

    “But it’s very powerful when you have someone who sits between customer and product because two things happen. If you just have a customer team:

    • they tend to be seen as a cost center instead of a strategic center.
    • They tend to be the first function that is off-shored and
    • they tend to be kind of pushed off to the side and
    • BUT they are basically speaking to hundreds or thousands of customers a day creating rich rich datasets that are never captured mined or used.

    And on the other side you have product managers who all think that they’re Steve Jobs and that they can create products from the vision of their mind…..and never shall the two meet.”

    Rachael’s comment is fairly incendiary but rings true – as teams get larger the Product Management function gets busy with backlog, internal meetings, analytics and lots of other inward-facing actions.

    The original methodology of Customer Development interviews is largely abandoned as its one of the least pleasant thing  to do AND its not usually incented with KPIs.

    What Lens do you use to view your Product? Design or Emotion?

    Careful, this is a trick question – your customer is only going to view THEIR experience of your product through their EMOTION.

    Rachael’s comment “speaking to hundreds or thousands of customers a day creating rich rich datasets that are never captured mined or used” has 3 ramifications:

    1. devaluing this data is a lost opportunity.
    2. your analytics platform never communicates heat or anger of the customer.
    3. qualitative human input  from your CS team is a valuable dimension that you’re tools simply cannot capture.

    In the next post we’ll dive deeper into this statement about customer anger.

    But for now, consider whether you are interacting with customers enough and feeling their heat. Is it possible that Product people are introverts and will naturally arrange their day with tasks that avoid hand-to-hand contact/combat with customers.

  • How Much Feedback is Enough Feedback?

    How Much Feedback is Enough Feedback?

    An essential component for a well-oiled machine that is a product-led company is feedback. It’s a tool that can help better your product, build meaningful connections with your users, and help you run a successful business.

    But do you need a large quantity of feedback to translate it into valuable product improvements? Is any feedback a good enough lead to make changes? Does context matter?

    This article will give some answers regarding realistic response rates, justifying changes based on feedback, and much more. So, let’s dive in!

    Realistic Response Rates in Context

    The concept of a response rate indicates the percentage of the users who offer feedback for your product, a feature of it, or the business in general. However, as we already know, feedback is contextual.

    According to Survey Any Place, the average feedback response rate is 33%. The infographic shows the impact different mediums have on giving feedback. In contrast with the average rate throughout all feedback channels, a good NPS response rate is anything above 20%.

    This goes to show that you should take into consideration the chosen feedback method when looking at response rates. It might be good practice to combine different ways of asking for feedback for optimal results.

    Another thing you shouldn’t forget is that apps inevitably reach different types of people. This means that you can target your audience with different methods of feedback collecting as well. Diversify your feedback mediums for:

    • Web and Mobile users
    • Different user segments or user roles
    • Different stages of a user journey

    Try different methods for these and see what brings the best results – based on your OKR and JTBD of course! 🙂

    If you have a large sample of feedback (see these articles on statistical significance)  consider A/B testing to determine what medium (mobile or web) of feedback are your users most comfortable with. This means that you give half of the target audience of users one form of feedback, while the other half are offered a different channel to express their opinion on your product. See which method is more successful in attracting your clients’ opinions and go from there.

    There is no “one size fits all” when it comes to feedback. Figure out slowly what works for you and your users best!

    Justifying Change Based on Feedback

    As part of a product-led company, you probably already know that every piece of feedback is valuable. User feedback fills the gap between your expectations and the user experience.  So, reviews are a testament to your efforts and also a great opportunity to improve your product where it is necessary.

    With that being said, when does feedback justify change?

    Surely, one negative comment or response is not something you, as part of a product-led company, should be discouraged by. However, in the next user journey mapping session, you can take a look at the user’s point of view and the reason behind their negative review. While a single piece of negative feedback is not a strong enough reason to implement significant changes, analyzing it might be a good idea for future developments of your product.

    Statistically, change can be justified with just a 20% feedback rate. As response rates are, on average, around 33%, it’s safe to assume that most users who are willing to offer feedback for your app, fall into that 20%.

    With their help, you can identify product improvement areas and plan your next user journey mapping according to the feedback you are getting. If you are able to incorporate feedback and change, your business is in the ideal market-fit bracket.

    Not Receiving Enough Feedback

    Positive feedback is desired, negative feedback can be a good lesson. But what if there is little to no feedback? If you’re a small startup with under 1000 users, you might find it difficult to get the reviews you need to justify changes or even keep your company running.

    In this case, you should especially focus on implementing in-app feedback methods to ensure that you’re reaching your active and engaged users. Their feedback is the most valuable one when you’re working on a smaller scale. Of course, don’t forget about timing, as it is a significant component of feedback. Give your users enough time to experience your app before asking for their opinion.

    Implementing changes with little feedback to back you up can be a risky business, but it can also drive users to give an assessment. It would be wise to start small when it comes to changes. Test the waters, see what triggers responses from your users.

    We mentioned A/B testing earlier in the article. Statistical significance plays an important role in this experiment, and it’s based on a cause-effect relationship. A good example of A/B testing is changing the color of a button within your app. (It can be the button in your in-app feedback survey!).
    Which version drives better response rates from your users? Statistical significance can back you up and give you confidence that the changes you want to implement are positive ones, so that in lieu of enough feedback, you can still make smart moves to improve your app.
    Monitoring the impacts of the changes you make is critical to ensure that you’re not doing damage to your app in the process.

    The Next Steps

    Feedback has an integral part in a successful software business. At Contextual, we can help your journey towards product adoption easier by focusing not only on capturing feedback, but also on onboarding, feature discovery, and much more. Book a demo with us today to learn more!Image Credit