We’ve spoken to the awesome guys over at Livestorm before, even right here on this blog, but their upbeat team and total dedication to customer success made it a no-brainer that we would have a chat with them.
From personal experience we can say that their platform makes holding webinars a breeze, even for complete beginners. All the features you could want are built in, while the user interface remains straight-forward.
I caught up with Thibaut Davoult, growth engineer, about the changing SaaS marketing landscape, what’s new for Livestorm in 2019, and how they stay on top of customer success.
Tell me a little about your background? What brought you to Livestorm?
I started out working in content marketing for B2B SaaS startups right after graduating from college in 2012. My first role was for an Instagram analytics platform for brands (called TOTEMS, then acquired by Stripe), that was before and during the launch of Instagram ads. This helped me really grasp how acquisition and SEO worked. And also it gave me a sense of what content made people tick, and what didn’t. Of course, many things have changed, content marketing has evolved, but the foundations are still the same.
Then I moved to a more general marketing role, also in a B2B SaaS. There I headed up everything marketing, especially acquisition (mainly SEO, paid, occasional partnerships, etc.), but also Customer Success. Doing that, I realized that not being able to configure, tweak and fix the tools the company’s marketing was relying on by myself was kind of a big issue (and that’s quite the euphemism!). Stuff like making sure the data properly flows between all the tools and choosing the right ones. Or with a concrete example: making sure the automated NPS survey appeared at the right time and triggered proper follow up actions. To sum up, all these things that make a customer’s experience really great with your product.
After some time of having to run all these tasks through our dev team, I thought maybe I could do it myself. So I joined the dev bootcamp Ironhack in Paris in September 2017, and learned enough of Javascript to do just that (plus creating scripts and fun stuff like that!).
During my first job (at TOTEMS) I actually met Gilles, who’s now the CEO of Livestorm. We had worked on a few marketing projects, him on the tech/design side and me on the content. It’s pretty great to have joined him on the Livestorm adventure now 🙂
So that’s how I ended up here in late 2017, and I’m so excited with all the challenges ahead and what’s left to learn!
What was your biggest achievement in 2018?
The biggest achievement was definitely on the product side. We broadened our offering by launching Livestorm Meet, expanding to a fully-fledged live video suite. That was quite a big milestone for us, and we’ll keep working towards making video conferencing and webinars as enjoyable as possible in 2019.
What’s the biggest challenge you see coming in 2019?
In 2019, we’ll solidify our presence and offering to cover all kinds of needs with live video. We originally addressed webinars only, and most of our customers know us specifically for this. We’re working to evolve Livestorm into a fully-fledged live video suite for public-facing relationships (marketing, sales, customer success). This impacts both the product and our communication.
We have a gradual series of updates that we’ll roll out in order to smoothly implement everything. Livestorm Meet (our video meeting software) launched in 2018 and got some good traction among our users. We’ll evolve Livestorm to include Meet in our offering, as a full-packaged live video suite.
Consequently, we’ll keep moving towards bigger companies and clients. When I say bigger, I literally mean bigger, in terms of employees. We’re seeing that the 10–500 employees range of companies is where the full value of Livestorm as a live video suite really shines.
With all of this said, of course, the customers who are only interested in hosting webinars can still do it with Livestorm, exactly the same way they’re used to.
Anything new and exciting happening at Livestorm?
The team is growing! Our first sales rep joined us at the end of January 2019. Can you believe we went almost 3 years without a sales team? Since I’m managing growth and automation along with Gilles (our CEO), I spent a large part of late 2018 to set up the tools to properly onboard and give everything a sales person joining Livestorm would need.
What tool are you loving right now?
We’re still big fans of SatisMeter! 😉 We collect both ratings and product feedback with our NPS survey, and feed the results to all the relevant tools:
- customer.io for follow ups and suggesting leaving us a review on public platforms like Capterra and G2 Crowd
- Productboard to collect feature suggestions
- Slack, for notifications. This helps all the team follow the current health of Livestorm as well as get to know our customers a little bit
- Intercom for the live chat, and displaying in-app on-boarding messages.
Tell us a little about your approach to customer success, do you automate everything or take a more personalised approach?
This is such a cop-out answer but we do a bit of both: automation as well as personal contact. To clarify: we automate everything that has to do with sending data through all our services and platforms (customer.io, Productboard, etc.), but communicate personally.
On the communications side, aside from the usual automated emails (onboarding, transactional emails, etc.), all contacts with the Livestorm team will be with a real person. We have 2 customer success reps replying to customers on Intercom chat. And I’m still amazed at how well they know each and every one of our customers, down to their needs and use cases.
The webinar software industry has a poor reputation when it comes to customer success and NPS, and we take pride in following the exact opposite route: striving to make the webinar experience an actually enjoyable moment, be it with the product itself or interactions with our support team.
Elif, from our our customer success team weighed in with:
“On the NPS side, I manually check the history behind every “neutral” and “detractor” customer each week. I go in and check on Intercom if they had an issue with Livestorm, and if so, what issue it was. This gives me some insights about how this customer’s experience has been and what are they looking for. Once I have a good understanding of their story, I manually reach out with a personal message to see how we can improve their experience with Livestorm.”
Have you noticed any concrete changes that have come with measuring NPS?
Automating the received feedback from NPS comments on SatisMeter has nearly doubled the number of feature requests we log on Productboard.
We increased the average score of NPS ratings per month by 30% YoY between 2017 and 2018, we love knowing that what we’re doing is actually making a difference to user Satisfaction.
Want to try out SatisMeter for yourself? Our free trial is available right here.
