During our co-founder, Mark’s, recent US roadtrip, he was able to capture some fantastic customer case studies.
Gigmasters.com is a company, 17 years young, recently acquired by XO Group (congratulations guys). Based in Norwalk, CT, they are an event marketplace, bringing together buyers and sellers of all things event-related.
Mark met with their team, found out how they were using the service and Jeremy Jones, their Operations Director talked about their experiences on camera.
Three things really came to mind after our conversation:
- Successful software companies tend to focus on their core business, rather than trying to reinvent wheels and develop their operational tools. 1-click satisfaction surveys already exist, it’s our core business – and so “why try to start from scratch?” was the message we got loud and clear.
- Good businesses use feedback tools to encourage and coach employees and agents – not use them as a stick.
- Keeping an open mind about how to survey is a good thing. Testing out our 1-click survey absolutely has worked for Gigmasters, despite their pre-conceived ideas about wanting multiple questions.
Watch our Gigmasters case study to see the results
You can view and read the Gigmasters case study below. A big thank you to Mike Caldwell, CEO and Jeremy and the team for being so generous with their time.
GigMasters is an online event services booking platform, where if you wanted for instance find a deejay for your prom or a band for your wedding you can come do that. We offer email and phone support. We get hundreds of calls, hundreds of emails everyday day. We are very service-oriented brand I’d say, we’ve built our model on that and try to put a human face to a website which maybe isn’t that common I think.
We started this process looking for client satisfaction serving thinking we knew what we wanted. That was a multi question survey, we want this that, that these five things, we know we have to ask everybody these things. The more we looked, the less we’d found that we really liked until we really got to customers’ thermometer. That’s a point where we sort of transitioned into buying internet, say the one question model.
Each time a client or member calls in and they talk to a rapid ticket gets generated and we trigger an email about 30 minutes later just asking them, hey how did this rep do for you. The one question is giving us what we didn’t know that we needed. We’re seeing response rates of about 50 percent, it hovers around there. Which is great and way higher than I think we would have expected using a multi question survey and forcing people through to a page where they get way too involved.
One simple question, one button click and then we’re good to go. We got what we wanted out of it and they can help us improve too.
Feedback we use for positive reinforcement first and foremost. We get gold stuff feedback for our account services reps, and we forward those along when they have great comments also. That’s a great reinforcement tool. On the flip side of that, in the rare occasions where we get yellow or red, we actually have sit down meetings with our account services manager, a senior member of the team we review those calls to see where we could have done better, what could have been improved. So that’s real time immediate improvement, it’s been transformative for the team also.
We’ve gotten the lengths into the sort of issues that they’re hard to find. It really helps pull that stuff to the surface and it’s been really helpful for these guys so far.
I would recommend Customer Thermometer to others because it’s really been a great product for us, it’s super easy to set up, it was very easy to get started with this. The development work that we did have to do was not particularly complicated, and it really saved us a lot of time, definitely a lot of money. I’m very pleased.
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