EMPLOYEE NEWSLETTER
Company Performance Overview
CEO'S CORNER
New Newsletter: First Edition Is Here!
Welcome to the first edition of our revised newsletter! As I noted in the Town Hall, we've redesigned the newsletter to make it more informative and educational. We believe this revised format will make the newsletter a tool to further transparency about our performance and convey knowledge around our products, initiatives and other important information.
Let's talk about transparency around performance first. Each month, the newsletter will start with our performance relative to our KR's. We have designed a simple layout that allows you to see all the KR's at a glance. This is meant to be a simple snapshot so that you can quickly ascertain how we performed the prior month and year-to-date. We will provide more data and context around these during the monthly Town Hall. In full transparency, the gross margin number is not available yet so we have left that graph blank. It will be available by the Town Hall this month and we will do our best to
make sure it's available for publication in the Newsletter in future months.
Please note we felt it necessary to revise the presentation of KR's 2 and 3, logo and revenue churn, which necessitates the restatement of the KR's themselves. Why are we doing this? It turns out that when presenting the KR's concisely in a row, up is good for all the KR's except the churn KR's. That's because more churn is bad. However, it made the quick KR view difficult to interpret. The solution is to present retention instead of churn. Retention measures the same thing as churn, but with retention up is good. With this revision, we can quickly see all the KR's on a common basis instead of having to take time to figure out which way is good… up is always good. Instead of reducing churn to 1%, we are going to increase retention to 99%. The graph below shows the difference in presentation. The concise KR's at the top of the newsletter use the new format.
In addition to the KR data, you will be getting one to three articles each month that will keep you informed about major initiatives, product knowledge, strategy, processes, and/or markets.
For example, this month McGowan's Magic Quadrants touches on both strategy and a major initiative. I strongly encourage you to read it to see how it will impact your job. (Spoiler alert: you should be stoked.) Chad's Chat is an article that helps you to understand our Chat product better. I really love this article because Chad explains the "Why" and provides tremendous data to back it up.
It is a great example of the way intellectually honest education around a product should be done. In fact, a lot of the data Chad cites should be used in discussions with clients and prospects.
You will also notice that we do not have birthdays or workiversaries in this newsletter. We are going to come up with a separate publication that will cover fun, work-related items like birthdays, workiversaries, social squad activities and volunteer activities. HR and the Marketing Team are working on that now and hope to have a version of it available in the next month or so.
Finally, you may have noticed that this newsletter came out later in the month than the old newsletter. That is intentional. Going forward we will be publishing the newsletter on the second Thursday of each month.
We publish on that date because the Town Hall is the fourth Thursday of each month. By publishing the newsletter on the second Thursday and holding the Town Hall on the fourth Thursday, you will receive a regular flow of information from the executive team at approximately equal intervals. We hope this cadence of communication helps to keep you informed at a pace that better satisfies your need for information.
I hope you enjoy this first issue.
STRATEGY AND OPERATIONS
Intro to The Magic Quadrants
Many of you may have noticed, or have actively participated in, changes to the way we are doing our work at MyAdvice. Right now this is particularly true of the DPI group, but at some point will affect everyone in the organization (or in some cases already has). This article is meant to help you understand these changes and how they are going to make your lives better.
I firmly believe in the power of process engineering to dramatically improve the way we operate.
We can deliver more value, to more clients, in a more efficient manner, while at the same time improving the day-to-day experience of our employees. These things are not mutually exclusive. In fact, I hope you'll see over the coming months that they go hand in hand.
Value
I'd like to start by focusing on one word there: value. What is value? What does it mean to our clients? And how do we use it to structure the way we do work. For me this starts with our mission:
"To make our clients' lives better by supporting their professional and personal success". Everything we do as a company, and everything you do as an employee, can be classified according to whether or not it contributes value to our clients. Some great examples include launching a new website, showing a client how to generate positive reviews, or executing
SEO adjustments which improve performance or ranking. Each of these things directly enhances success for our clients. This is where we should be spending our time and energy.
Necessity
Your next thought may be that there are a whole lot of activities you do, which don't meet this narrow definition of contributing value. In fact, you may spend MOST of your time doing things which don't directly add value. I'll give you a great example from my world: billing our clients. I can try really hard, but there is no way I can classify generating invoices, collecting credit card numbers, and transferring money to us as something that directly contributes to our client's professional or personal success. So I'd like to introduce a second word: necessary. Is getting paid by our clients necessary? It's been a decade since I was in business school, but I'm going to go ahead and say yes, this is a necessary activity.
What we end up with here is a simple two-dimensional model for classifying everything we do as a company.
Think about all of the different activities you spend your time on. For each one, big or small, ask two questions. Is this valuable? Is this necessary? Then put it somewhere on this chart:
I believe we spend most of our time in the lower right quadrant, doing things which feel necessary, but are not valuable. Customer billing is a great example. I'll give you some more: extracting Google Analytics data, choosing a theme for a website, setting up a client's Review Power account. I am Mr. Spreadsheet and I promise you that nothing you have ever done with a spreadsheet is valuable, by this definition. These things, by themselves, do not contribute to our clients' professional or personal success. But some of them may be necessary on the way to contributing value.
My personal mission in 2021 is to help everyone at MyAdvice significantly reduce their time and energy spent in the lower right hand quadrant, so that they can spend more of it in the upper right: delivering more value, to more clients, more efficiently, while feeling better and better about working here.
How do we do this? I'll get into tactics more at the April Town Hall, and in individual conversations with some of you. But there are a few key ideas which will get us moving in this direction.
Key Concepts
The obvious first tool is automation. I believe you should never do anything twice, and ideally not even once. We will never get there 100%, but we have a lot of opportunities to use automation to eliminate activities in the lower right hand quadrant. I encourage you to start thinking about activities you do repetitively, instances where you are moving information from one place to another, or any time you spend searching for, waiting on, or retrieving anything. We have the resources to start automating and eliminating these tasks, thereby allowing you to spend more time adding value.
The second important tool is to visualize processes and create flow. You can see this happening with tools such as Trello and Pipedrive. Both are examples of Kanban, which is a Japanese word you often find in process engineering. This technique allows us to immediately see issues in production, and manage continuous flow of activity.
These are just two ideas, but you will be hearing about a lot more in the coming months. To date, these changes have been mostly imposed directly by myself, and other folks like Brian Burditt and Sara on the development side, and Jeremy in Sales and Marketing.
But the real power in these ideas is in getting the entire organization familiar with them and experimenting with improvements to our processes.
Left Side of the Chart
We haven't spoken about the left side of the chart yet. Needless to say, if you are doing something which is neither valuable nor necessary, it's probably something you don't need to be doing. Keep in mind that there are plenty of necessary things which don't have anything to do with our clients, but are important to keep our company running and our employees happy. The upper left of the chart is where things really start to get interesting. As we begin to get more effective as an organization, we can experiment with ways of contributing MORE value to our clients and employees, over and above what we promise to them today. This is where innovation happens, and we can really start to excel as a company. I am looking forward to working with all of you on driving this transformation forward.
PRODUCT KNOWLEDGE
Chat Power
Did you know that online chat was first used in the 1970s?
I learned that fun fact in my preparation for this article. When I found out that online chat has been around for 50 years, I was blown away. Of course, many questions came to my mind as I pondered the evolution of online chat and how it impacts business today, specifically, how chat impacts MyAdvice's customers.
As you read this article, please consider the following questions:
- Why has chat become so valuable today?
- How will it help our customers become more successful?
- How do we ensure that all of our customers incorporate Chat Power as part of their communication solution?
Why has chat become so valuable today?
Let's face it, changes in buying habits, preferences for communication, and improvements in technology have altered how businesses need to interact with their consumers. Chat has now moved from a 'nice-to-have' product to a 'must-have.'Â A recent study shows that 50% of customers expect live chat to be visible on a website they visit.
If MyAdvice's customers don't have Chat Power, they essentially ignore 50% of their potential consumer base. Experts anticipate that live chat demand will grow by 87% in the next 12-18 months.
THAT'S HUGE!
A recent study by JD Power found that live chat has become the preferred online contact method for consumers. 46% of customers prefer live chat compared to just 29% for email and 16% for social media.
How will it help our customers become more successful?
MyAdvice has been providing live chat to customers for many years.
Chat is so powerful that it has shown a 40% increase in leads when added to an MyAdvice website.
This increase in leads is completely additive. It doesn't replace current website leads from a contact form or a phone call.
Online chat also leads to a dramatic increase in response time. Customers hate waiting and want immediate help, and they want to do it on their mobile phones. Chat has always been fast, but our new Chat Power product, driven by artificial intelligence (AI), averages a response time of fewer than 3 seconds. When you compare the response time of chat to Social Media and Email, 10 hours and 17 hours, respectively, you can see how online chat
helps our small business customers stay at the cutting edge of customer expectations today.
Additional benefits MyAdvice customers will receive with Chat Power:
- More Qualified Leads
- Higher Conversion of Leads to Sales
- Lower Cost Per Chat
- Faster Customer Support
- Frees up Staff Resources
- Helps Prospective Customer When the Office is Closed
- Overcomes Objections Instantly
- AI is Constantly Evolving and Improving
Overcoming an Objection
On occasion, MyAdvice's customers will express a concern about the informal nature of chat, and they even worry that they don't get to talk to each person personally.
Comm100 recently conducted a customer satisfaction comparison study between typical communication channels, including chat, email, social media, phone, and an app.
Live chat scored the highest customer satisfaction rating at 82%, while a phone call came in last at 44%.
This clearly shows that chat is critical to the customer experience and drives the highest satisfaction rates, even above a personal conversation on the phone. We need to help our customers change their mindset, and the data backs it up.
How do we ensure that all of our customers incorporate Chat Power as part of their communication solution?
Let me make this clear; EVERY MyAdvice customer needs Chat Power. It's now as important as having a name, address, and phone number on a website. We need to make this product a part of every client discussion and push them to add it to their website.
To encourage clients to incorporate chat, we've simplified the pricing structure:
- $10 / chat
- No setup fees
Remember, 80% of all chats are viable new leads, which is incredibly additive. If anyone balks at that, ask them if they would like to play blackjack in Vegas with the knowledge that they would win 80% of the hands dealt. Sign Me Up!!!
