Popmenu Case Study
“Throughout this process of analyzing where to create digital touch points, we also looked at how we wanted our CS team to spend their time interacting with customers on a personal level. We know that their expertise lies in things like training and quarterly business reviews, and this is where we felt CSMs could make a connection with customers and really have an impact.”
OVERVIEW
Popmenu is a leader in cloud-based restaurant technology to help restaurants increase brand visibility, guest engagement, revenue and profitability. The company works with more than 10,000 independent restaurants and hospitality groups.
The company was recently placed No. 57 on the Deloitte Technology Fast 500™, a ranking of the 500 fastest-growing technology, media, telecommunications, life sciences, fintech, and energy tech companies in North America. Popmenu grew 3,102% from 2018 to 2021.
Jess Kitt, Vice President of Client Experience with Popmenu, discusses how during this time of significant company growth they are focused on automation to ensure customer interactions are efficient as well as meaningful. nCloud Integrators assisted Popmenu with their Gainsight Essentials Plus implementation to achieve this goal.
CONTEXT
Popmenu’s Customer Success Managers (CSMs) each work with between 400 to 600 accounts, and because of this, it was important for them to enable some of the client touchpoints to be automated. To start this process, Popmenu looked at their customer journey and used the Eishenhower Maxtrix to break down all activities by urgency and importance, and prioritized items where automation could make an impact.
Jess Kitt, Vice President of Client Experience with Popmenu, states: “Throughout this process of analyzing where to create digital touch points, we also looked at how we wanted our CS team to spend their time interacting with customers on a personal level. We know that their expertise lies in things like training and quarterly business reviews, and this is where we felt CSMs could make a connection with customers and really have an impact.”
In addition, the company was looking to have more communication transparency between the customer success, sales and professional services teams and centralize customer surveys.
“Centralizing survey information seems like a small thing, but because we grew so fast over the past few years, multiple departments had surveys and market research on our customers, so we needed one place where this could live and feed into our customer health scores,” continues Jess.
KEY CHALLENGES
Popmenu needed to transition from a different CS platform to Gainsight without any gaps in their service or processes. nCloud Integrators made sure everything was seamless, and that the implementation was done effectively but quickly within a short window. Popmenu didn’t have to extend their contract with a previous vendor and were able to have the CS team on both systems for three to four weeks, so they could get comfortable with Gainsight and the new processes.
“This transition would have been difficult without nCloud Integrators,” states Jess.
THE SOLUTION
“As a company, we know it is really important to automate, and not hire additional staff unless it is necessary. This helped us make the decision to use Gainsight. Once we made that decision, we knew we needed the expertise to implement this solution using best practices and in an efficient manner,” states Jess. “We didn’t want to hire a new Gainsight administrator full time, so to save on costs we looked to nCloud Integrators to quickly get us live on Gainsight, and then act as our Gainsight administrator to continue to build and improve on our instance based on user feedback and priorities.”
nCloud Integrators assisted Popmenu in effectively using the platform as the team worked through the go-live implementation process. Jess continues, “We were assisted with the technical aspects, such as making sure the data flowed to and from each of our internal systems such as Salesforce, but also with ‘why’ and ‘how’ each piece impacts our customer journey and how various pieces help with automation and accuracy of health scores.”
Now that Popmenu is live on the platform, the company is using nCloud’s Expert Services to build new automated processes in Gainsight and for insight into best practices as its CS strategy evolves.
THE RESULTS
Today, Popmenu has multiple teams in the same system, communicating with one another about client interactions. In addition, all teams are aligned on the same customer journey, and customer interactions are more consistent across the teams.
“Everyone is now seeing and using the same information, so this helps between teams, but also when someone is out of the office. We can’t wait until the next day to take action on an account, so managers can go in and pick up the ball to either assist or assign a task to someone else on the team,” states Jess.
Two specific areas of automation have made a big impact on the CSM team’s ability to service customers efficiently. Jess highlights the following examples around billing and marketing content communications to restaurant owners.
“One of the things that's really important to us, which you can imagine if you think of 10,000 small and medium businesses, is that our customers pay us by credit card. Many customers accidentally miss a payment because they've changed their card or the card was stolen. One of the things that nCloud Integrators helped us do is automate this process so if a payment doesn’t go through, an email is automatically generated to the customer. This automation is so important because each CSM was spending about 10 hours per week contacting customers for new payment methods. Now, our CS team members only receive a notice to follow up after three days if a new form of payment was not added to ensure the customer received the notification,” states Jess.
Jess continues, “Restaurant owners are so busy that they look to Popmenu to help them with marketing and social media tasks, which are necessary to help grow their businesses. So our folks create a content calendar that includes all the messages we will deliver over the course of a month. Automation was put in place to deliver an email message to the restaurant owners to say something like, “Your content calendar for the month has been created. Do you have any changes or additions to this content such as special events or holiday specials?” This may sound simple, but when you have to deliver 70 different customer content calendars, you want to spend time ensuring the content is on brand and correct. A Call-to-Action (CTA) is also created if the team member never hears back from the client or if the client has changes to the content.”