Proactive not reactive
I have recently been phoning up a large number of learning technologists from universities who we work with, to try and gather feedback about how we’re performing as a customer success team at Vevox. This takes a long time as it inevitably involves leaving a lot of voicemails and then sending follow-up emails. To my surprise, a large percentage of people responded and booked in a call in the coming weeks.
Once we began the calls (one had to reschedule) the conversations were brilliant. We were able to talk in depth about how our customers experienced our customer success efforts, what worked well and what additional things we could be doing. They were fabulous insights, but in about two weeks, I spoke with three people.
Interaction and collaboration
We have also recently had our quarterly all hands town hall at Vevox. These are always awesome, if for no other reason because most colleagues come into the office to attend in person, so it’s a great chance to catch up with those unable to make it joining virtually through MS Teams.
The town halls are a great chance to hear about any business updates, share in our successes and map out where we would like to be next quarter. We have Vevox running throughout for colleagues to ask questions anonymously through the Q&A, we intersperse presentations with short quizzes to keep engagement levels high and then we have a survey through Vevox at the end to help us improve future meetings.
I’m always impressed with how many people complete the survey (although it was a little bit slower this time as we had our Christmas party straight after the meeting!) The survey is great and allows us to make immediate changes to our internal meeting – the quiz being one such change implemented from a survey at a previous town hall. But you can only get so much information from a survey. They can’t be too long, or people won’t bother completing it at all and if they involve people having to do too much writing, they might not bother either. We go for mostly multiple choice and rating questions with a few open texts.
Understanding pain points
Finally, I’ve been sitting down with some of our university customers recently to discuss with them some feature requests they have for the product. For these, I get to take more of a back seat as I’m joined by members of our fantastic product team who will interview them and try to get to the heart of the problem that they would like Vevox to be able to solve. Setting up these interviews always take a little bit of a leap of faith as you’re having to be open and say “Vevox isn’t able to do that for you right now” but if you look at most features within Vevox today, they have probably come from conversations just like this. Watch this space for the next one……
