From Reaction to Proaction: Taking Back the Initiative in Educating Customers

Presented at CMS Africa Summit 2015, Nairobi (Kenya)

Topic:
Everyone wants to see their product sales soar but once the transaction is complete, it’s really just begun. Open source CMS tools can be challenging to use and configure and your customers will be looking for help.

When customers begin using our tools, the questions pile up and it is easy to find yourself in a constant state of reaction to customer requests. At WooThemes we’ve made the bold move of supporting all paid users using a support platform. We acknowledge customer requests, questions and input and we want them to have a positive experience. At the same time scaling support has been a huge challenge and WooThemes has often found themselves snowed under in support, under capacity and reactive in our approach. In an attempt to stay on top of the growth we’ve begun taking some proactive approaches for several reasons:

1. Better educated customers have less setup questions
2. Better educated customers know better what our tools can and cannot do
3. Better educated customers are bigger supporters of our products
4. Better educated customers make it possible to support more than 600,000 websites using WooCommerce with a support team of only 30 people

In this session we will look at how companies can scale their support structure to better educate their customers proactively.

Transcript

1. From Reaction to Proaction Taking Back the Initiative in Educating Customers
4. 6,500,000+ downloads 600,000+ websites 50 people
5. Two Strategies Reaction Proaction
6. All users > Customers Reaction
8. Proaction - Customer feedback - Education strategy - Tools - Relationships
10. Job Thomas WooThemes | woothemes.com Education & Training Manager jobthomas.com | @jobtex