Meet Aaron Kassover, co-founder of AgentMethods. They help independent insurance agents with their marketing efforts, and provide an all-in-one website marketing platform. In this case study you'll hear how Aaron improved their onboarding process with Userlist, and how it helps them reduce their support load.
The problem: too much low-value communication, not enough conversions
- Existing solution created more problems and felt chaotic
- The pricing became unreasonable
- The real-time chat created a lot of low-value communication
- Needed better behavior tracking
As AgentMethods grew, Aaron needed to improve his onboarding process to convert more customers and reduce their churn. At the time, Aaron was using Intercom for his onboarding messaging for new customers, but ran into issues quickly.
"We wanted to help our customers with activation, and guide them to use our software better. We began working with Intercom. But it seemed like the longer we used it, the more chaos it created in our lives."
Aaron began to notice that while Intercom encouraged more conversations, it also put more pressure on the customer support team.
"Intercom created a lot of high volume of low-value communication. It didn't get our customers to think through what they wanted to send us before sending it. And customers also expected quick results on problems that may not need immediate support. We saw more headaches with Intercom."
Plus, Intercom's pricing increased month over month without new features or functionality.
"Our bill with Intercom would double from month to month, and we would just be putting out more fires."
This led Aaron to seek out new solutions to tackle onboarding communications. First, it led him to look at MailChimp which didn't meet his needs.
"We looked at MailChimp, and it's not designed for what we needed. MailChimp is super cumbersome for behavior-based automation."
Aaron needed a solution to help customers with activation and guide them to use AgentMethods service better, so customers see success. This ultimately led them to Userlist.
The solution: a simple, focused lifecycle messaging platform
- Switched to Userlist as the primary solution for user onboarding
- Improved user behavior tracking and segmentation
- Created automated campaigns based on specific events
AgentMethods needed a better system than real-time chat to accomplish their goals.
"I can't overemphasize how real-time chat started taking over our lives. You'd come in, feel extremely busy all day and then realize you hadn't accomplished anything because we were putting out little fires that weren't even important."
Aaron and the team understood they had a very specific need in messaging automation, but other tools were not tailored to their SaaS use case.
"One of the things that led me to Userlist was that I was attracted to this idea of a very well-built purpose-specific tool as opposed to this general tool that any business would use, whether they make pies or software."
Userlist was able to create automation by building sequences based on specific customer events.
"Userlist allowed us to create some sequences for our customers based on specific events. This helped us identify some things that people were doing to make them successful."
The results: churn "busted" by 25%
- Enjoying a simple, focused platform
- Reduced churn by 25% in 3 months
- Automated their lifecycle communication process
- Reduced and reshaped their support workload
Userlist provided a platform that allowed Aaron to set up an improved automated process based on his customers' segments and events which in turn impacted the bottom line.
"We cut our churn by about 25% in three months, which has a big impact on our business, our growth. We did that primarily through just a couple messages that we set up in Userlist."
Userlist's simplicity also helped the team focus on sending onboarding messages to their users.
"Simplicity. Userlist is really clean and clear as to what its purpose is. There isn't a lot of unnecessary stuff to wade through and figure out."
AgentMethods now uses Userlist to keep customers engaged as its customer lifecycle communication platform.
"Userlist is our customer lifecycle communication platform. That's how I think of it. Customer journey, key points in that lifecycle.
We use Userlist for product announcements, announcing new features, emails when someone cancels, and email when people don't take specific actions or behaviors in the app. We find those based on attributes in Userlist and use that to message and engage our customers."
For AgentMethods, internal processes and workflows have also improved.
"Userlist helps us reduce the customer support load and shape the customer support load, which has been helpful. We can actually get ahead of the issues and figure out what the problems are going to be."
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