As we head into 2014 we’ve been doing a lot of analysis on things that are working and things that can be improved in Mattermark. It’s fun and exciting to work on brand new features, but some of the other aspects of how we work with customers deserves care and attention, too. With this in mind, we’ve given our own tools a tune up with some changes to the signup process and account management tools.
Self-service account management tools. It’s kind of amazing we “got away with” not offering customers a way to change their plans and payment information in a self-service way for the first 18 months. Customers can now navigate to “Account Settings” within their Mattermark account and make changes whenever they wish:
Internal management tools for customer success. We want to enable customers to self-serve when they want to, but also know the importance of offering white glove assistance when it counts. Investing in tools to help us stay organized and automated is crucial to running a lean customer success team that nurtures existing customers, drives up-sells and protects against churn. Reps can now manage plans and trials from our internal dashboard, without needing access to Stripe or the production database.
Free trials are reduced to 15 days. Since launching in June 2013 we went with a standard 30 day free trial period, but have found this leads to an annoying month effect in our sales metrics and rep’s pipelines. Mattermark is a powerful tool for sourcing leads, and we work hard to get on the phone with each signup within hours of starting a trial. Within two weeks we are confident we can demonstrate the value of what we have to offer.
No more auto-charging at end of trial. We require users to enter their credit card information upon signup as a security measure (hey, this data is valuable!) but we would never keep the money of someone who didn’t actually want our service. This lead to a lot of refunds, and frustrated people, which is certainly not fun for our customer or our sales team. Going forward, at the end of your trial you will not be charged.
On behalf of all of us at Mattermark, we appreciate the feedback from all our customers and hope you will find these improvements beneficial to your experience. They’re not sexy new functionality, but we hope you’ll agree getting the operational details right is crucial to building lasting relationships.