Making Webinars Work — Customer Success at Livestorm

“On paper, webinars are one of the most effective marketing channel for B2B companies, but, in practice, the softwares that were available always fell short of expectations in one way or another.”

A webinar can mean many different things to different businesses, from a chance to generate leads and excitement, to an opportunity to educate customers in how to use your product.

Undeniably, they are a powerful tool for a range of reasons, yet hosting them can be problematic. Enter Livestorm.

Led by CEO Gilles Bertaux, this tech-savvy team is determined to take the unnecessary effort and complexity out of hosting Webinar sessions. While doing so, Customer Success is a serious priority, with users needs helping to build their product roadmap.

NPS has proved to be a valuable tool for them in terms of gathering and utilising feedback. We sat down with their Growth Engineer, Thibaut Davoult, to find out why.

Thibaut Davoult, Growth Engineer at Livestorm

Thibaut Davoult, Growth Engineer at Livestorm

Tell us a bit about the background of Livestorm, how did it all get started?

The initial impulse came from a frustration that Livestorm CEO, Gilles Bertaux, had while organising webinars at Mention during an internship. On paper, webinars are one of the most effective marketing channel for B2B companies, but, in practice, the softwares that were available always fell short of expectations in one way or another.

Poor overall UX, badly designed landing pages and emails, no relevant data on the audience, and no interconnection between tools. Everything that had the potential to be a problem was.After his internship, Gilles went back to finish college and decided to build a webinar software MVP for his final project. Specifically one that would solve all these issues.

He got together with three fellow students to build it and after a few months, they had an MVP that they showed to heavy webinar users like Uberflip and Kissmetrics to get early feedback. Fast-forward to January 2016 and those four students have finished college and become co-founders, focusing fully on building Livestorm.

They released the beta in June and launched the full product in October, 4 months later. At that point they already had great customers like Pipedrive and Mindmeister using Livestorm every day. We’re now a team of 10 people working to provide a smarter webinar experience for hundreds of customers around the world.

The Livestorm team

How would you describe your customer success ideology? Has high satisfaction always been important?

Yes. Customer satisfaction is one of our main priorities, and we make a lot of decisions geared towards increasing it. We try to be as close to our customers as possible in order to give them the support and answers that fit their specific needs. To keep providing tailored service to our growing user base, we hired Elif as our first full time success hero. Our CEO Gilles still follows our clients closely and often loops in with them. I think it’s an absolute must if you want to build a successful SaaS business.

“Using NPS allows us to make a U-turn with customers who give us a poor rating by actually addressing their issue and providing them a helpful reply.”

What do you consider most important when reaching out to your customers?

Prepare to be disappointed with this one but… Being helpful! There’s a lot of discussion about personalising your message, automating answers, etc. At the end of the day all of these are all just ways to reach your goal, which should be ensuring your business solves your clients issues. Our customers use Livestorm for work. Either as employees, CEOs for smaller companies, or entrepreneurs and teachers doing online classes. These profiles don’t have much in common, but one thing’s for sure: they receive way too many emails, and are often disappointed by them. So the first thing we focus on when contacting our users is “does this message provide them value?”. Answering this is easier in some cases than others. When it comes to an NPS survey, the value for the customer can be way down the line, but it’s there!

Webinar

Why did you decide to start measuring NPS?

We’re data freaks at Livestorm. We try our best to gather useful info about our customers before making any decision. So from tracking our app’s activity, the number of support messages sent, to of course NPS, nothing falls between the cracks (because there are no cracks).

“Looking at Capterra alone, we saw a 150% increase in number of reviews from October to November.”

What are you doing with the feedback you gather?

The way we’ve set it up, NPS is useful on several levels. At the most basic, it gives us an understanding of customer satisfaction at any given time. More importantly, it also allows us to gather feedback with a grade associated to it, which for us has proved to be a powerful tool.We automatically send comments associated with NPS ratings to Productboard, which is where we send anything associated with Product Management.Last but not least, we follow up with users.

For our promoters, we point out ways they can promote. That’s an automated email sent to users who gave us a >8 NPS rating, offering them discounts and Amazon gift cards for any review they leave on a suggested list of comparison websites (Capterra, G2 Crowd, etc). This effectively boosted the number of reviews we’ve received. Looking at Capterra alone, we saw a 150% increase in number of reviews from October to November.We also email those who leave lower ratings to see what aspect we should focus on improving for them. Sometimes we’re able to point out to a feature that’s already there but they didn’t see.

Why did you choose SatisMeter, how did you find us?

Gilles had experience with SatisMeter from setting up a similar process at Mention when he was interning as growth expert there. He even made a presentation on it with then-CMO Guillaume Cabane which you can still find here.

Are you using any integrations with SatisMeter?

Yes we are! We have integrations with Customer.io, Help Scout, and ProductBoard. We also send to Segment which disperses our customer’s NPS data to all our tracking dashboards, namely Amplitude, which we use for our product and marketing KPIs reports. Some of these are set up through Zapier, either because there was no built-in integration, or because we needed to create a more elaborate connection than simply a “send if X > Y” relationship. For example, with one Zap we check if the NPS rating has a comment associated with it, if yes we send it to ProductBoard and to Help Scout. This way, we can address the issue within the product as well as on the business side.

Livestorm Webinar

“I can definitely see myself enjoying an app but not taking the time to ask their creators about a missing feature, while I’d gladly provide feedback on it if asked.”

What difference has NPS feedback made to your business as a whole?

On several occasions, it has helped us clarify users’ perception of our product, sometimes we’ve found even paying customers aren’t aware of certain features. Through NPS comments, we noticed that those customers are often only waiting for the right kind of outlet to provide their opinion, they’re unlikely to contact us directly. It makes sense, I can definitely see myself enjoying an app but not taking the time to ask their creators about a missing feature, while I’d gladly provide feedback on it if asked.

For example, a customer recently asked us to add a chat to their webinar room, which is already a default feature for all users! It was associated with a rating of 9, making it very easy for us to delight this customer with a simple reply. NPS comments also made it obvious we needed to add a feature allowing the creation of on-demand webinars, where each participant can decide when to launch the session, instead of having to watch at a specific time. In addition they prompted us to build automated webinars — pre-recorded videos that get presented live at a defined time, allowing the presenters to only animate the session in the chat/questions/quiz and so saving them time.

In a more general way, it’s brought us closer to our customers and helped us push the envelope in delighting the users who were already happy. In addition using NPS allows us to make a U-turn with customers who give us a poor rating by actually addressing their issue and providing them a helpful reply.

Want to see if NPS can provide insight to fuel your product improvement? Try SatisMeter for free.

Previous

Next