The Hustle

“I worked at 2 fairly large advertising-based publishers and they didn’t do anything to listen to advertisers at this level,” says Adam Ryan, Vice President of Media at The Hustle. At his previous companies, surveys were sent out occasionally, but the experience wasn’t personalized, resulting in poor response rates and scattered feedback.

At The Hustle, Ryan and his team wanted a dedicated, enhanced customer experience program to monitor satisfaction as they onboard new advertisers. Delighted is their solution, providing an easy and scalable way to gather advertiser feedback so they can continue to grow effectively and efficiently.

“It was very easy in terms of doing the first mass survey,” adds Ryan. After a chat with their Delighted Customer Concierge, they quickly realized that sending out surveys is as easy as copy/pasting contacts into Delighted. “Took 5 minutes. Within the day we had 80% of the responses we ended up receiving, and a few more trickled in over the next week.”

After their initial send to jumpstart their feedback program, The Hustle wanted to automate the entire feedback loop for advertisers. Using the Delighted open API, they now automatically trigger Delighted’s 5-star surveys via Salesforce to send 14 days after the advertising campaign ends. So far, they have an impressive 21% response rate.

“If you’re proactive in your approach, it allows you to get ahead of the curve. And that’s why I love this automation.” With this tailored timing, Ryan knows that their advertising partner has just finished reporting on the campaign results. “It’s still fresh. We’re going to get honest, raw feedback, which is exactly what we need.”

What’s more, Ryan has set up a custom workflow for customers who give a low score so they can use a Calendly link to set up a meeting. Although, with a satisfaction benchmark of 4.5 out of 5 stars, they haven’t had to do much follow-up on negative feedback.

Not only is The Hustle gathering 5-star ratings and comments with Delighted, but they are also going deeper with a few additional follow-up questions about the sales experience, customer success experience, cost of advertising, and actual ad performance. “As a business, we need to understand what levers we can pull further and how much,” says Rebecca Sherman, Head of Account Management and Ad Operations at The Hustle.

Using Delighted, The Hustle gains insight into advertiser expectations and the key drivers behind the advertising experience.

“There were more than a few times when marketers who we thought had average experiences put a high rating,” says Ryan. Positive ratings give the sales team an opening to reach out again, and turn a feedback touchpoint into increased business. “Delighted is great for creating new opportunities for us.”

Delighted provides a natural way to follow up with advertisers. “One of the big goals of the customer success team is to increase touchpoints,” adds Sherman. “It can be hard to get a customer to respond. Sending a Delighted survey is an easy way to open up a conversation without being too salesy.”

And Delighted makes it all easy.

“Delighted makes my job easier across the board because it’s easier to get in touch with people,” says Sherman. “It makes it easy to talk to customers, makes it easy to be reactive with them, and it’s all easy to monitor as it builds out.”

In addition to helping with customer-facing interactions, monitoring satisfaction with Delighted has also brought visibility to the customer success team. “It’s easy to overlook account management or customer success and the general impact they’re making,” says Sherman. However, with a customer satisfaction metric to show, they now have a benchmark with testimonials to share with the rest of the company.

Sherman has plans to use these 5-star surveys to gather insight into improving how her team operates as well. With such specific data integrated into Salesforce, she’ll be able to look at customer feedback in the context of renewal data for a better understanding of who might need more training, or who is providing a truly exceptional experience. “It’s something that’s not often done, but can really enhance the account management team and member success team as a whole.”

“From a customer success account management perspective, it already feels so tied into our processes,” adds Sherman. “Delighted just brings so much visibility to what we’re doing.”

“There was always this natural disconnect, particularly with customer feedback, since the advertising office is in Austin and the headquarters are in San Francisco,” says Ryan. TV monitors in each location broadcast key company metrics, but before they started sending customer satisfaction surveys, there was no way for the CEO in San Francisco to access feedback.

“The best day was when the CEO got to log in and see what people were saying about his product for the first time in two years,” adds Ryan. Since implementing Delighted, customer satisfaction metrics have been added to those monitors. If the company improves their baseline score, every employee in the company gets a bonus.

Now, everyone at The Hustle, from the CEO all the way down to front line employees, is focused on improving the customer experience end-to-end with Delighted at the core.