I'm Chris Hicken, COO of UserTesting. If you have never heard of UserTesting prior to now, let me give you the quick one-liner: Analytics tell you what your visitors are doing on your website; UserTesting.com tells you why they left without buying.
If you're the person or team responsible for the conversion rate or customer experience of your website or mobile app, you can use UserTesting.com to get actionable insights about frustrated customers. We let you recruit any audience out of our panel of nearly a million users, and they'll record their screen and voice as they use your website or app. You'll quickly discover what's working well and how your customers interact with your website as you watch these videos.
As COO, I'm responsible for hiring people (that are better than me), growing revenue, and solving business problems that happen with rapid growth. Teams that are focused on growing revenue report to me — that includes Marketing, Sales, Biz Dev, and Client Success.
Back in the early days of UserTesting, we were using a single shared email account for customer support with shared login credentials amongst the company. I know of many other companies that have initially structured their support this way and they all seem to have similar opinions about it. For us, it was technically functional but certainly not ideal.
One of the primary struggles that our support team faced was not being able to keep track of which messages were awaiting a response. Whether you left it in your inbox as a reminder or archived it and made it a task, many messages were forgotten.
It wasn't only our support team that was feeling the hurt, though. As our company quickly scaled, email became the default means of communication internally - and as you can imagine - an already busy group of people now had even more email to deal with. Naturally, there were some growing pains (which ended up falling pretty heavily on me) leading to the search for a solution.
Finding Boomerang for Gmail was probably one of the best things to happen to our company from a productivity standpoint. As I'm sure you're aware, email impacts nearly everyone who uses the Internet, and while it seems to be crucial it also seems that nobody really enjoys it all that much. Boomerang dramatically improves email for us by adding some powerful and useful features that you wish were there in the first place.
We use Google Apps because of its ease of use and the solid email foundation it provides. With all of the other apps they provide, it just made sense for our company to go with Google - and now that we have Boomerang, we would never consider anything else.
Boomerang has completely transformed the way I process email. With Boomerang, I remove clutter from my inbox, and it returns to me at the moment I need it. I can schedule messages to be sent later, and I never forget to follow up on important emails. I cannot imagine doing business without it.
Our Boomerang subscription has gone from a single user - me, the early adopter - to a few interested users, to a significant chunk of our company. It's easy to get our employees to adopt Boomerang into their workflow. In fact, I think the normal response is along the lines of, "Why didn't I know about this sooner! I could have saved so much time."
Because I am part of UserTesting's executive team, most days end up being far busier than I originally expect. Of course, that's not a bad thing, but it does mean that I often don't end up with ample hours of time to spend in email. In comes Boomerang to save the day! It helps to prioritize my email in a way that works both for me and for the people I'm responding to. I can quickly Boomerang a message to come back at a time when I know I'll be able to write a thorough response or will have all the details on hand rather than letting it sit in my inbox and eventually slip through the cracks.
On the flip side - and I know the other executive team members using Boomerang can agree - it can be difficult to make sure you don't forget important messages. One of my favorite features is the ability to choose whether I want a message to Boomerang only if someone doesn't reply or no matter what. It's really powerful. I have dozens of things going on at any given time, so not having to remember which emails require follow up results in more getting done with less stress and gray hair acquired. Doesn't that sound like a great win-win!?
It's not just me who feels the benefits of Boomerang, though. Our entire company benefits from this amazing extension. We believe in treating customers with love and respect, so we're not happy unless our customers are delighted with their experience. If a customer communicates a question or a problem via email, it's important to make sure they receive our follow-up message. We do this by Boomeranging customer emails back to our inbox the next day, so if we don't hear back we can send a separate email to confirm that the problem was resolved.
Our Client Success team uses Boomerang regularly to ensure that they can close important deals and also that our current clients don't get left in the dust. Think how great it is to schedule your check-in emails with a brand new client for three months out so you don't forget to keep in touch.
On each of our teams, there is at least one person who relies on Boomerang to perform their job better. It's hard to say where we'd be without Boomerang since we've been using it for so long now. I'm happy that we don't have to think about these problems anymore, and I know UserTesting has become a better company because of Boomerang.
"One of my favorite features is the ability to choose whether I want a message to Boomerang only if someone doesn't reply or no matter what. It's really powerful."
"Boomerang has completely transformed the way I process email. With Boomerang, I remove clutter from my inbox and it returns to me at the moment I need it."
