Company: Constant Contact
Entry submitted by: Rosalind Morville/CTCT Community Team (rosmorville) Senior Manager, Community and Social Support
Community: Constant Contact (https://community.constantcontact.com/)
Lithy category: Lithium Platform Innovator
Constant Contact®, Inc. wrote the book on Engagement Marketing™ — the new marketing success formula that helps small organizations create and grow customer relationships in today’s socially connected world. Through its unique combination of online marketing tools and free personalized coaching, Constant Contact helps small businesses, associations, and nonprofits connect and engage with their next great customer, client, or member. Launched in 1998, Constant Contact has long championed the needs of small organizations, providing them with an easy and affordable way to create and build successful, lasting customer relationships.
Headquartered in Waltham, Massachusetts, Constant Contact also has offices in Loveland, CO; Delray Beach, FL; San Francisco, CA; New York, NY and London, England. Constant Contact has been honored with numerous industry accolades and has ranked on Deloitte's Technology Fast 500 for five years running, most recently at number 179.
In 2013, the company continued to make significant product improvements across our offering of online marketing tools. Knowing that change can be difficult and feedback can only make our products stronger, we needed a way to harness our valuable customer feedback without incurring significant cost or introducing a new technology to monitor. We wanted the feedback to be readily available to the Product Owners and easily actionable for varied members of a multi-leveled support team. As a company that highly values the customer experience and promotes transparency, we wanted the feedback to be public and accessible to all of our customers. We also wanted our customers to be able to monitor the status of their ideas. Finally, as our early tests with other tools indicated, many of the “feedback ideas” our customers submitted were actually support issues that required moving out of feedback into a place where that support could be received in a timely manner. By knowing the areas where our customers had the most issues and using their ideas to further the products in the direction the customer wanted, we aimed to increase not just the usability of our products but also customer loyalty.
After evaluating out of the box products, we decided to develop our own “in product feedback widget” that would provide an avenue to learn more about our customers’ reactions to system changes and provide a quick way to incorporate feedback into the product development cycle. We decided to base this widget on the Lithium platform.
We determined that the idea exchange within Lithium provided the features we wanted:
- the ability to vote and raise the most critical ideas to the top;
- a direct line to the customer making the suggestion to ask for more details when needed;
- the capability to rapidly move “Support” issues to the appropriate area of the Community to be answered by peers or our trained Community team;
- a way for our customers to easily see the status of their ideas;
- the ability for multiple people to view, edit and comment on ideas from all areas of the company be it product, support, or another;
- and an easy and visible way for our product team to demonstrate their empathy and involvement with our customers.
We added the widget to multiple pages within our current products and most critically to a new version of our Contacts Management tool. With this widget, a customer clicks one button and provides their feedback directly to the people that can make the changes.
Due to the success of the widget in 2013, in 2014 we are implementing the widget across hundreds pages of our product and dividing this feedback across 16 idea exchanges in the Community. The success of the widget is evident when you glance at how many posts exist today:
In Contacts alone (granted the most active area of our feedback forums, but also the most critical as we rolled out this new tool), we received 4600 ideas, 3498 comments and 274,056 page views to that area alone between July and December! The product team has been able to deliver 71 implemented ideas that are directly attributable to the Lithium feedback widget.
Another area where we launched a redesign was in our Library area. The feedback through the widget was vital for improving the new design. The new design began rolling out on August 28th, 2013. Between this date and December 2013 we received 949 ideas, 624 comments and 12,478 page views. So far, we have been able to implement 14 ideas based on this feedback.
Customers are given a “feedback” button within the flow of a task. Pop ups were not used to avoid distracting an engaged customer while the pervasive nature of the button on multiple screens allows a customer to enter feedback at any friction point.
When a customer clicks the feedback button, a pop up window appears. The customer selects a topic (labels), enters a subject, and then enters text (the idea body). They click “post to public forum” and the idea is posted to the idea exchange as a new idea with the right labels. There is also an opportunity here for the customer to identify that they need help. If the customer chooses “Get Help” from the drop down they post directly into a corresponding product board for help from the Community.
Once an idea is submitted, the window closes and a customer can continue wherever it is they left off. Feedback is a gift to us while not being difficult for the customer to provide.
