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Customer profile

Pagely

We had the opportunity to speak with Pagely’s Director of Marketing, Dave Amirault, and Strategic Account Manager, Kirill Mendeleyev, to learn how the inventors of Managed WordPress Hosting use Delighted to help their scaling CX operations.

Tell us about your roles at Pagely.

Dave: I’m Dave Amirault, I’m the Director of Marketing for Pagely. With us today is also Kirill Mendeleyev.

Kirill: I’m Kirill. I’m a Strategic Account Manager and an Onboarding Specialist. I work as a middleman between all departments including Marketing, Support, and DevOps. We’ve been using Delighted for a bit now and I’m very eager to talk about the platform in detail. Delighted is definitely better than what we used previously.

How do you differentiate yourself from your competitors?

Dave: Pagely is an enterprise-grade WordPress hosting solution. We host the big WordPress sites for Fortune 500 companies and make them shine, perform, and be secure. We’re actually the originators of this type of solution and we differentiate ourselves from others with our exceptional speed, security, service, and support.

We’ve engineered our company to be the leaders in service and knowledge. So, making sure that people are satisfied with our services is paramount for us.

Can you explain why your company started an experience management program?

Dave: We’ve always “kind of” had an experience management program, but we’re so focused on providing great service and support, we needed to find a way to quantify our customers’ experiences.

I’ve launched a few satisfaction CX programs in my previous roles and I wanted to make sure that we were getting real-time feedback from our customers to ensure that we’re meeting their needs. It also helps Kirill because he’s in charge of reducing churn and making sure that we have happy customers.

Kirill: Exactly. It’s very important to listen to our customers. Feedback is also crucial for our company’s growth. Pagely is expanding as we speak and any tools that can help us speed things along in our expansion is definitely helpful.

How is your Delighted program set up currently?

Dave: We use Customer Effort Score (CES) and NPS software surveys for our survey types and take full advantage of the API and integration features.

Our program is set up so that everyone in our company can have real-time knowledge and understanding as to how we’re performing and how our customers are reacting to us.

In fact, aside from it being very affordable, that was a major reason why we went with Delighted. We wanted to make sure that we had an experience program that was not overwhelming and that everyone could be in the loop on. Visibility is crucial, especially as a fully remote company.

“Delighted blended easily with the tools we used every day [such as] Hubspot, Zendesk, and Slack.”

You mentioned utilizing Delighted’s integrations. Can you expand on that?

Dave: Yes. We really wanted to have a feedback platform that worked with our existing tools, which were HubSpot, Zendesk, and Slack. Our previous experience management tool didn’t integrate well with workflows, so it was kind of in its own sandbox. Delighted blended easily with the tools we used every day.

How do you utilize Delighted’s Zendesk integration?

Dave: We use CES in combination with Zendesk for our support team. When a customer opens a Zendesk support ticket with us and then we go through the process of resolving the ticket, a CES survey is triggered to the customer to gauge their satisfaction on the support team’s work.

Then, the customer’s response is bubbled up into our support channel in Slack. That way, the team knows immediately if a customer is happy or unhappy. If they’re unhappy, then we make sure to re-engage with that customer. That is a big thing that Kirill manages on a day-to-day basis.

You mentioned utilizing Slack regularly. How have you merged Slack with customer feedback?

Dave: We pipe everything through Slack. We see every single customer reaction in a centralized channel called “Customer Success.” Delighted has a wonderful Slack integration that color codes each response for us so we know immediately if the score is from a promoter, passive, or detractor.

The great thing is, if we see a score come in from – let’s say a support ticket and their response is neutral (passive) – then we will comment directly on the score to a team member in Slack with something like “Hey, Luigi, in support, what’s the deal with this? Can you follow up with the customer?”

It starts an entire back-channel dialogue of what’s actually happening with our customer feedback and provides us with a great resource to then see what the customer’s problem is and how to address it.

Tell us how you use Delighted’s Hubspot integration for organizing the customer experience.

Dave: Absolutely. With the Delighted + Hubspot integration, we tie NPS and CES scores directly to Hubspot customer profiles. We use this to sort all the customers by score and organize smart lists from the score data.

We can easily see who our promoters are and can trigger any type of loyalty campaign or ask them directly, “Hey, could you please review us on Trustpilot?”

From a marketing perspective, we can also see if a customer has opened up our emails and if they’ve mentioned us on social. The integration allows us to have a great 360 view of each customer.

“We can't win everyone over, but we have seen a reduced amount of churn since deploying Delighted."

How important is measuring customer feedback?

Dave: Incredibly important. If we’re addressing concerns from people that are scoring us negatively or in a neutral way, then we’re doing a good job of making sure that that business doesn’t walk out the door – because we’re actually trying to solve the problem and listen to their concerns.

I mean, we understand that we can’t win everyone over, but we have seen a reduced amount of churn since deploying Delighted.

Kirill: I’d like to add to what Dave said. Paying attention to feedback over time is necessary.

For example, if we get a 10/10 NPS score from a customer and then we notice a couple of months later, that same customer gives us a 7/10, we take that as a red flag right away and ask the customer directly, “We see you rated us a 7/10. Everything was fine before, what happened?”

Whether something did happen or if the 7/10 was the opinion of a new collaborator, we make sure to pay attention to red flags and survey every single user, not just the owner of the account.

Could you tell us about how you share and act on customer feedback?

Dave: From a marketing perspective, this is something that we address every Monday in our marketing meeting.

Different departments funnel into the meeting and we use the time to let the teams know, “Hey, here’s what happened over the last seven days. Here are the trends that we’re seeing, here is the good looking stuff, and here’s the bad.”

Aside from everyone seeing our feedback in real time, we discuss the score results once a week to see if trends are telling us that there’s something we need to be concerned about or if we need to give someone a high five.

Kirill is the one who actually responds to each person individually. He brings a higher touch to customers and acts immediately if something needs to be resolved.

Kirill, how do you use the rating score when following up with customers?

Kirill: Usually if a score is 9/10, I won’t follow up with the customer unless they provide an open-ended comment to their response. But, if a customer’s score is 8/10 or lower, I like to reach out to the customer directly to thank them for their response and ask them what we could have done better – to make sure they know that we’re listening and that we’re not just sending them an automated message.

I ask them to politely provide me with more feedback on what we could have done better, what tools they would like to see in the future or what support could do better with handling their ticket. There’s always room for improvement.

Also, in my follow-ups, I use G-suite and HubSpot to send and track emails. Because of the Delighted + Hubspot integration, we can see when they open the email, when they leave it, and if they engage with it.

"We’re now at a point where our engineering roadmap is reflective of feedback that we get from surveys."

How has customer feedback been used to make company or product decisions?

Dave: We use Tags to organize our feedback and to get a better idea of what our customers actually want through the data. This has allowed us to group commonalities together and say “Oh, actually, this is what they want, this is what we should be creating for them. Now, let’s get with the engineering team and figure out how we can bring it to market.”

We’re now at a point where our engineering roadmap is reflective of feedback that we get from surveys. This is cool because now we can reach back out to customers and say, “Hey, six months ago, you told us about this, here’s a custom email campaign to say the feature is now live. Thanks for your input.”

You mentioned the importance of internal visibility with customer feedback. Can you expand on that?

Dave: Delighted’s feedback program allows everyone in the company to have transparency into how happy our customers are. It also is a great tool to give someone praise. We do a really good job of elevating customer comments out of our specific Slack channels and giving them attention in our general all-company Slack channels to say, “Hey, I just want to call this moment out. We did a killer job solving this.”

Or, “We just onboarded this new client and after 30 days, they gave us a 10/10 on their NPS survey and said the onboarding experience was amazing.” We would then tag the onboarding team and say, “Great work! That’s why people come to Pagely.”

That’s what we’re about – widening visibility and positivity to the entire company.

"Delighted’s feedback program allows everyone in the company to have transparency into how happy our customers are."

Where does CX fit in a company’s growth trajectory plan?

Dave: It’s a foundational element. We have a rock-solid technical product, but all the things that spur growth, allow us to attract talent, and grow the right way, we were missing. So that’s why we focused on customer experience with Delighted – we needed to. We grew our entire email programming strategy, our marketing automation, and our CX.

If you’re going to grow as a business and you’re not communicating with your customers or gaining insights, you will get blindsided by data.

As Kirill mentioned earlier, with customer feedback, we are never blindsided and there are no real surprises for us because we’re always listening.

We knew we were in tune with the customer before, but now we are hyper-focused on it and meeting their needs almost instantaneously.

What advice would you give someone who’s starting their experience management program?

Kirill: I would say definitely have the right team in place first.

Dave: I agree. I notice a lot of people who are starting an experience management program just focus on the tooling. Instead, you should be focusing on the team to drive it, your ultimate goals, and if the tools can work with your existing platforms.

"[Delighted] will provide actionable feedback, make you grow as a company, and allow you to provide better services."

If we were to take Delighted away, what would be the impact on your business?

Dave: I think for one, people in our company would miss it internally because we’re now used to this kind of dopamine effect that the feedback has for employees. It would be like if you’re driving a car and someone knocked out one of your mirrors for us.

Would you recommend Delighted and why?

Dave: I’ve already recommended it to probably two dozen of my friends.

Delighted is a way to get into CX that isn’t going to overwhelm internal teams. It’s going to provide actionable feedback, make you grow as a company, and allow you to provide better services. I would recommend Delighted 100 ways to Tuesday.

Now, if you ever start to outgrow it and need something else, there are other products there, like Qualtrics. But for a company like ours, we still haven’t even reached the end of what we can do with Delighted.

If you send us a survey, we would be giving you a 10/10.

Location:
Tucson, AZ
Industry:
Website Hosting
Website:

You don’t have to take our word for it

Delighted helps some of the world’s most coveted brands gather actionable customer feedback and make customer satisfaction a competitive advantage.

“Everyone at Bonobos needs a direct line to customers for feedback. I know that due to Delighted, we avoided disaster.”
“Every time we open up Delighted we find a new way to improve, which at the end of the day is why we are doing this.”
“You need users’ thoughtful, raw feedback to correct and improve experiences for all customers in the future.”