Episode 3: Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning

Podcast Transcript

Emily (00:06):

Hey guys, it's Emily here again and very, very warm welcome to episode three of Turning the HubSpot flywheel. Today we are chatting to the customer base, customer one-on-one and we're in very good company, Brad from Markezing, a Kiwi owned HubSpot agency, working with accountants and bookkeepers all around the world. Brad, thanks so much for joining us.

Brad (00:25):

Hi Emily. Hi guys. It's great to be here with you guys.

Emily (00:30):

Awesome! All right. Let's start by telling us a little bit about Markezing.

Brad (00:36):

Yeah, Markezing, we started back in 2017. So we are a HubSpot agency, but we only work with accountants and bookkeepers all around the world, our main client base companies and New Zealand and Australia, but we have clients in UK, Canada, UK, US as well. So we use HubSpot to help accountants and bookkeepers streamline the backend of the business as well as the marketing sales and customer support.

Emily (01:08):

Okay, great. So I'm going to put a little scenario to you and if you could describe the usual process. So say your sales team has worked its magic and they've now closed new customer. How do you turn them into evangelist?

Brad (01:22):

I'm going to answer this question from from our client's point of view as a, as accounting firm, rather than as agency, because I have an accounting firm that I use HubSpot for and especially in accounting, it's very important to have those advantages because most of the people choose their accountant based on a referral. So referral sources get clients for accountants. And so you want to send those fonts. I think one of the missing points is the onboarding process in their accounting firms. So when you sign up as a client, you have to make sure you're onboard them and you have a process in place that you provide the best experience for them when they become your client. Because that's a, that's a time that they're going to judge you on, you know, see how your services are. And it's very important to create that first impression.

Brad (02:19):

So they usually for our firm and our clients, we create a six month onboarding process to make sure that the client is being trained. Who's the account manager, what system we're gonna use, how they're gonna interact with us, what telephone number they call, what email address they should email on all of these makes that onboarding process very easy. And at the end of the six months, we'll send the survey to see how they feel about our services and that's a very kind of gauge to see whether they become evangelists, hopefully, and whether they're going to refer us to their friends.

Emily (02:59):

So you've spoken about how the usual processes, when it comes to a customer for you, what is the most important part of that journey?

Brad (03:08):

The important part of that journey is communication. So the ease of communication is important and people are different. Each of them, they understand information in a different way. Some of them like videos. Some of them like, emails, texts. Some of them like calls. Some of them. We have a client that is specific to say, never call me. Okay. If they don't call you, we have lots of clients that they want to receive a call from. So having those, understanding the client and seeing what are the needs as far as communication, to make sure that we can, you can basically give them the information and the way that they can digest and understand.

Emily (03:53):

Okay. And how has HubSpot enabled your customer success?

Brad (03:58):

So, first thing is just basically having all that communication, but the client from any of the team members in one place where there's a meeting where there's email, where there's a text, where there's a telephone call, where there's a zoom meeting. So all of that, having all of those communication and contact points in one place that helps a lot. Because if you go back before the HubSpot time for us, we wouldn't know if another staff member and a firm communicated with the client and said something that's either different or a different tone. Doesn't have to be totally different. But if they say about tomorrow and I say, no, it's by the day after tomorrow, then that's two different boards coming from the same company, which is not, nice. So having all that communication in one place helps a lot. So make sure that you have the best communication. So when you're talking on the phone, you can go to HubSpot and see conversations with any of the staff members and in the last 10 days or last month about that subject, that could be a deal. So we can go to the deal level or we can look at the ticket level, if that was the issue that we had to sort out and find out what was the conversation, and then align our conversation that you're having now with the client, with those past conversation, from any of the staff member as well.

Emily (05:22):

Okay. I'm interested for you. You've been in this job before in this industry for years and years. I feel like the customers who has rotten into has been the mantra, but do you feel it's becoming more and more complicated given how, you know these NPS now net promoter scores, and everyone can kind of get online and say what they think about businesses? Do you find it hard to keep in check? Or do you feel like HubSpot and systems like Cradle kind of really help fight off those risks happening?

Brad (05:57):

As I say is usually things get missed on communication and that's most, I just give you one example. My one experience I had today. I bought a car. I was getting on that Saturday. I contacted the insurance company to get the insurance and they wouldn't get back to me on Friday afternoon. I finally got ahold of somebody and the sent me a confirmation that my insurance I'm done here as a certificate of currency with your car insurance. And today I had a call from the insurance company, the same insurance company to say, oh, we call you to get your cover sorted. So you gave me the cover on Friday. So no, there's no record of the email.

Brad (06:41):

I've got the cover. So I used to have a system, had the system in place, which you would have expect from a big insurance company that would have seen that somebody and other staff from that company send me an email with the cover. And I've got address in my hand, that kind of puts me on edge that if I had the accident on yesterday, between the Friday and the call today on Monday, I wouldn't have been covered because somebody mocked it up here, either that, or if I had to cover, did they want to put the second cover? I don't know, but that's a good example of, you know, missing that communication. And that would have, I'm not that type of person, but if I was one of those people I would jump on Google and leave a bad review for that company. I, I would keep on doing, making a mistake like that, a loss of going back to that onboarding example.

Brad (07:35):

I said my onboarding experience with this insurance companies is very bad. So if they asked me if I'm going to refer somebody else to them to answer, there would be no. And if it asks me for a review, obviously that review would be bad because just the first day you just got your policy and the whole thing gone, gone back. The other thing is the same company on Friday. I wanted to, and that comes back to cradle on Friday, I was on the screenshot. I was on the phone for 46 minutes and no answer. I was on a hold with the bad music. So if they had the system cradle, they could have set up the automated email, say, okay, we are busy. We get back to you on 5 25 or whatever time they have available, or set up a task as urgent, do something like that.

Brad (08:25):

But they didn't have a system in place. I would try to an old phone that I had to be on the phone for that long. And the only reason I hung up was because I was sick of it. And I had other calls and other things to do on my day on Fridays. So I hung up. But these are examples of exactly that. So if you have those communications and those processes in place using HubSpot and cradle, then there's less likely that you get those bad, bad reviews. Because even if you've done, everybody makes them stay. But if you can communicate and explain to them, okay, sorry, we made a mistake and this is the reason I can see that miscommunication has been there and try to fix it then obviously those,

Emily (09:12):

And that's very interesting. Thank you gone.

Brad (09:17):

I don't know. I think that communication is most important part of the business. I think the systems like HubSpot and cradle together, they make the magic happen.

Emily (09:27):

Yeah, I was. I was just going to say it must be quite interesting interacting with other businesses because your problems and experience [inaudible]

Brad (09:41):

Exactly, exactly. And he learned the lesson either way. You see that something is very bad. You have to make sure that you're not going to do that with your clients.

Emily (09:50):

Yeah. I speaking up for our listeners tuning in today, what is something, even if it is just one thing that they can do to help give the customers experience, is there anything out of the ordinary or just something really basic and ordinary that people seem to forget?

Brad (10:08):

I think going back on the communication, even if you can't reply to the email, even if he can pretend the call to the client, let them know that he can't, if you just go quiet and don't let them know whether it's automated by workflow in HubSpot, or you actually send them an email, say, okay, I'm busy today. I can get back to you next month or next week or something because people expect fast communication. They don't move, right. The patient is not that long and that can irritate people and changes your relationship with your client. So if he can't reply to the email today, don't just leave it in your inbox and reply to them. End of next week, send them an email. Now say I'm extremely busy. I'm sorry. I'll get back to Friday next week. And that will be fine, probably unless if they have a really urgent matter, but communicate with current and let them know what is the nexus that even if you can't communicate with them the straight away,

Emily (11:13):

Yeah. That's really good advice and something else I want to ask. And I know that people don't seem to talk about this and I'm doubt that you have many, because obviously you're really good at communicating when it comes to, how do you find the best way to deal with people? Because all humans are different and people get upset in different ways.

Brad (11:31):

So dealing with the upset clients, again, it's art, art that you have to have. You know, you learn that through life. It's hard to give advice, and every day you get to how the com you know, the human as evolving, you have more people getting upset in a way. So again, that evolving thing is not the same thing. People vent in a different way these days, some of them that go social media, some of them, they get grumpy over the phone. Some of them, they don't know they would be different. So I think its an art, you have to basically again, learn more about them and try to try to calm them down. It's not that one answer fits all. To be honest, if you find that I would love to know.

Emily (12:28):

Doubt I'm the person to ask, but I will let you know. So over the past few months, well, not a few months im sure it's been, you know, quite a few months now, but what are your customers saying to you that tell you that your communication changed and it is making an impact?

Brad (12:48):

As far as the customer's saying, obviously when we find out that we getting referral and they're happy with our services, finding that our communication is effective and they can find us when they need to, especially like, let's say lockdown, and there are lots of stress business owners out there that they want to get hold of from your point of view, it might not be that urgent, but from their point of views, the livelihood to have to talk to somebody to get the answers straight away. So being there for them, it's very important. So, so getting those referrals or happy clients based on the surveys that you do, it shows that the communication that you had has been good and they're happy with your services, right?

Emily (13:43):

And Brad, just lastly, understanding you are a client of cradle. So why don't you tell us a little bit about what services have really helped you reach customers

Brad (13:55):

Played an important part in our business because as I count all for clients as well, so as accountants or bookkeepers it's very important to have all the communication in one place and having HubSpot and cradle, we can see all the calls and with any of the team members in and out with all the aspect of accounting and bookkeeping, as, as based on a time as a service based. So you just want to see if the certain tires take most of your time through the phone or if you're not basically giving enough love to some of your clients, if you haven't contacted your client, none of your staff call the client or client hasn't called you for the last two months. You want to know that and you want to communicate with them as well. So having these two linked together gives us one source of truth in HubSpot, as well as all those reports and information that we can get from, from Cradle side or credit records in HubSpot.

Brad (14:58):

It also helps us now that we're working from home to be able to always do without John's feeling that we are, we are working from home. All our staff are available. We transferred the calls. Everybody receives the calls as per normal, from a client point of view. They don't know, even if we're working from home, they think it's still you're in the office sometimes. And they were quite surprised. So it helps us a lot during the COVID time, but at all times just the fact that we can see all the records in one place, we can get all the reports and we can see how much communication we have. We, our clients that's very important on a day-to-day basis.

Emily (15:43):

Okay. All right. Well, Ben, thank you so much for sharing your insights. And I feel like I had a lot to take away from that and best of luck for the marketing, by the sounds of things you're really good.

Brad (15:55):

Lovely. Thank you for having me

Emily (16:02):

Now, we've got a couple of other podcasts for you to check out, but before we leave, I found a quote that I might as well be from Brad, given his advice and insight today, but it is in fact from Gill Gates himself, and that is "your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning." So that's just something to remember. Where do you keep an ear out for our next episode of tuning the HubSpot flywheel until then take care and be kind.