Introducing Respond 2! Plus Our Transparent Roadmap
Businesses using Respond have helped:
nearly 500,000 customers
Improvements shipped in October ?
400
Average Respond business sends reply to customer
under 3 hours
In October, we started rolling out Respond 2 to customers, shipped lots of product improvements and kicked off our transparent product roadmap.
Rolling out Respond 2 with lots of improvements
In October we pulled back the curtain on Respond 2 and began sharing many of the new product changes customers can expect. Things like our unified social inbox, distraction-free conversations, bulk conversation editing and whole lot more!
We continue to roll out Respond 2 to existing and new customers – and so far the feedback has been nothing short of incredible.
Making the conscious decision to put the Respond 2 beta into the hands of both new and existing customers has allowed us to validate our product decisions and workflow changes in a whole new way.
New customers have given us feedback with a fresh and unbiased mindset. (You only get one chance for a first impression!)
Our existing customers, on the other hand, have been able to share comparison feedback and give us a strong sense if things are improving marginally or dramatically and if we’ve missed the mark or are heading in the right direction.
We seriously couldn’t ask for better customers!
Transparent product roadmap and product release notes
If there’s one thing we hear from customers just about every week it’s “So, what are you working on next?” In October we kicked off our first ever transparent product roadmap with a public Trello board.
Customers can now see exactly what the Respond team is working on, what’s next and what future ideas we’re currently discussing:
But our transparent road map is just one part of our quest to better include our incredible customers on our journey.
In October we also rolled out a new feature inside Respond: product release notes. It’s a short and sweet summary of all the new things we’re shipping each week (and sometimes even each day!):
New Academy
Product betas, customer feedback and managed roll outs
One tough lesson our team learned when we rolled out the last major product change was to be mindful of the pace at which we invite new users to join our product betas. Previously we erred by inviting too many customers early on and were unable to give them a good experience and build a strong product iteration cycle.
This time around we’ve invited only a few folks to start and we’re slowing ramping that number up week over week as we’ve increased our confidence in the product.
This approach has allowed us to be super reactive for customer feedback, fixing issues early on and ensuring a better experience for each new wave of customers joining the beta.
New Customer Support Academy lessons and webinar Nov. 9!
In October we continued to add fresh new content to our Customer Support Academy including two new lessons:
Lesson 7: A Simple Bug Tracking Process – One challenge we often encounter is answering support emails about the same topics again and again. In this lesson we share a simple process for organizing customer feedback and sharing it with the team to improve the product and reduce similar customer inquiries.
Lesson 8: Getting The Most Out Of Twitter Support – Twitter is an incredibly affective customer support and success channel that can be scaled much easier than traditional phone or email support channels. In this lesson we share 8 tips to maximize this channel (like including calls to action in your tweets):
Pssst… are you free on Wednesday Nov 9th?
We’re hosting a free live webinar, “Getting Started with Social Customer Care” with special guest Darcy Peters on Wednesday November 9th at 11am PST / 2pm EST:
We’ll be talking about getting started with customer care on social and the key differences you and your team might experience (when compared to other channels like email and live chat). We’ll even share some tips for scaling the experience with limited resources.
Be sure to grab your seat – it’s free →
Over to you!
Is there anything you’d love to learn more about? Anything we could share more of? We’d love to hear from you in the comments!
Check out more reports from October 2016: