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Update: Feb 16th, 2012

We’ve just released some new features and enhancements for Groove :) For the last 3-4 months we’ve been consumed with Biz Dev happenings but we’re glad to announce that we’re starting to crank again on some serious product dev. With 5 full time engineers coming on board March 1, look for a ton of stuff coming down the line the next 3-4 months in prep for our public beta launch!

  • New feature: Categories for canned replies
  • New feature: Agents and end users are able to now to see all comments for a single ticket in one email thread.
  • New feature: Tickets now come into your Inbox in realtime.
  • New feature: For the chat URL, we now allow for wildcards.
  • Enhancement: Agents can now embed videos in Knowledge Base articles
  • Enhancement: We now show the mailbox name in the tickets list page (i.e. support@groovehq.com)
  • Enhancement: After submitting tickets from the help widget end users can now optionally submit another ticket without having to refresh the page.
  • Enhancement: After agents edit a customer’s information and click update it closes the modal.
  • Enhancement: Chats now automatically pop-up in the chat view with the message rather than having to click open first.
  • Enhancement: We now only show ‘New’ and ‘Open’ tickets in the list view.
  • Enhancement: Added a ‘Title field’ in the ‘My info’ settings section which allows agents to use this variable in their email signature.
  • Enhancement: Changed the design for ‘New ticket’ creation.
  • Enhancement: Agents now don’t have to hit the ‘return’ key when adding labels.
  • Enhancement: Agents can now add labels from the ‘Ticket settings’ section under ‘Labels’.
  • Enhancement: Admins can now customize the header text of the help widget when the widget is open.
  • Enhancement: Agents can now add labels when creating tickets.
  • Enhancement: Made the ‘Update’ button much more responsive. No more waiting a few seconds here. Should be instant :)
  • Enhancement: Contact us form in the Knowledge Base is now optional.

What’s coming up over the next few weeks?

Rules, Custom Filters and Recent Activity. Stay tuned for our next update :)

Customers Movin & Groovin: Meet Loclly

This is part of our series “Movin & Groovin” which profiles our amazing customers and how they use Groove. Below is some Q&A with Michael Ferguson of Loclly. 


What does your business do? How many people are working there?

We partner with local businesses to bring amazing introductory offers.  Sort of like Groupon, but our target audience is a bit more high-end.  Loclly features offers for Botox, massages, laser tag and everything in between.  Right now, we’re a team of five but we’re bringing new employees on board consistently. 

How many email inquiries do you get on average per day for your business?

An average deal usually sees somewhere between 80-100 emails.  When we feature an extremely popular deal, this number can double.  Emails are usually from customers with questions and businesses who want to run a promotion with us. 

What did you use to manage customer support before Groove?

In the very beginning we used Gmail, which we quickly outgrew.  From there, we tried both Assitly and Tenderapp and wern’t thrilled with either.  We had a particularly high number of issues with Tenderapp and were glad to see it go!

How do you use Groove?

Our team is on the small side, so we all wear a couple different hats. Groove allows anyone on the team to pitch in and help with customer service, and to see exactly where the conversation was left if another team member had previously been working with a customer, and to assign it to a specific department if necessary.

Why did you choose Groove?

It was easy to integrate Groove into our business and very simple to learn the ropes.  We needed something simple, efficient and, most importantly, reliable.  With past systems, we have had issues with customers not receiving our replies to their inquiries.  It does no good to have an awesome team dedicated to customer satisfaction if they never get the message!

How has Groove helped change the way you manage customer support?

Again, its 100x more reliable than other systems we’ve tried in the past.  Since it flags any aging emails, customers are never left waiting for a response.  When helping a customer, Groove displays a log of all prior communication with them making it super easy to research customer cases and provide them with the answer or help they’re seeking in a matter of seconds.  My team also finds it much easier to understand from a workflow perspective.  

What do you love most about Groove?

I know I sound like a broken record, but I love that it simply works. Its reliable and I know I can bring on a new employee and they’ll know their way around Groove on day one.  I also like the ratings feature; so far we haven’t had numbers to worry about, but its great to know I can keep tabs on the grade of service being provided so we can make any necessary adjustments if the satisfaction level were to ever dip.   

What features would you like to see in the future?

Overall, I think less is more when it comes to things like this.  It needs to be streamlined and straightforward.  Although, it would be nice to have the option to sort tickets by date rather than simply newest to oldest or vice versa.  

What’s the best tip you have for delivering awesome customer support?

Delivering a speedy, helpful and thoughtful response.  We also keep communication with our customers professional, but friendly- think emoticons and none of that corporate “we” speak.  Most importantly, its key to know when to bend your policies and make exceptions in certain situations.  Groove takes care of the speed and efficiency, and my team adds the magic touch.

We’re hiring a Tech Lead at Groove - 120K salary + meaningful equity!

If this job description sparks your interest please email me at alex@groovehq.com with your resume and any sample work (optional). I’ll get back to you within a day.

About Groove

Groove is a social customer support platform that helps companies manage customer support across all types of channels - email, web, livechat, mobile, Twitter, Facebook and more. From glowing reviews in TheNextWeb (TNW), surging signup interest, an ever exuberant user base and a new capital injection of 1mm, we’re currently in the process of building out our team. 

Compensation

120K + a meaningful equity stake. 

Hours

On average we’ll expect 40 hour weeks and 40+ during crunch times.

Required Skills and Experience

  • 3+ years experience with Ruby on Rails, Javascript, SQL
  • 3+ years experience developing SaaS and/or enterprise software applications
  • Experience with agile, iterative, and test-driven development methods
  • Experience with JQuery, CSS3, semantic markup (sass and haml)
  • Ability to stay motivated and work well independently
  • Ability to thrive in a fast paced startup environment

Location

Providence, Rhode Island. If you’re from Boston making the reverse commute to Providence, traveling expenses will be on us. Also, please note, our office is a 2 minute walk from the train station. 

All Things Groovin’ in 2012

The beginning of every new year gives pause for both retrospective and prospective thought. The platitude “hard work pays off” rang true this past year with the favorable exit of Bantam Live, a start-up which I contributed to as an early founding member. And with the ink just dry, I’m pleased to report that I’ve lost little momentum to publicly deliver a new and exciting product, Groove, which will be unveiled to consumers in the following months. So with much on the horizon and many new developments to share, I anticipate yet another great year of continued growth for Groove in 2012. 

Here is what we can look forward to this year:

Moving Up and Moving Out

As any of the distinguished business leaders and entrepreneurs of today will surely concede, building a team, a company culture, and having an identity is essential to growing a great business. I’ve reflected on the importance of “team” in previous notes, and I sustain that the success of Groove has not merely been the result of determination and leadership, but of shared vision, great execution and elevated collaboration as well. I feel that I’ve done well to create this synergy, and have done so by working with a great agency partner to deliver my vision for Groove. That said, I am proud to report that Groove has already begun to build it’s own team, and that in coming months we will be gradually downscaling our commitment with said agency and creating an internal culture of our own. 

New Capital Injection

This Spring, Groove will be released to the public with pricing and an estimated 500 paying customers. To supplement this newly founded revenue stream we’ve closed an additional 1mm of financing to accelerate the aforementioned team build out. Of the great many VC’s and Angels who’ve contacted me in recent months I couldn’t be happier with the investors that Groove will be working with throughout this next growth period.

Pricing Launch

When it comes to pricing, I believe strongly in real value, and honest value-based price-tiering. We will be revealing our pricing structure this Spring, coinciding with our public release. Pricing will be competitive with Zendesk and Assistly.

Product Maturation

How can I even begin to say it all? We’ve got an overflowing list of amazing enhancements in our pipeline for 2012. With new integration, feature and UX items already in queue, and new ones being spec’d weekly, I’m thrilled to report that we’ve only begun to scratch the surface. Here’s a snapshot of what’s to come in the near future: a beautifully designed native Mac app, the addition of visualized analytics to our already elevated real-time chat support, and all variety of back-end automation features for ticketing, including but not limited to, Groups, Rules, Macros, Custom Filters, Custom Fields, Forums and Facebook integration.

Support, Support, Support

Offering superior customer support is our touchstone at Groove. With new companies choosing Groove every day, our customer support volume continues to grow. Look out for an increasingly robust Knowledge Base (self help library) to partner with our already effective, and highly user-friendly chat and ticketing support features.  

Design

It’s no secret that I appreciate beautiful design. We’ve received many flattering compliments on the design of the Groove public-facing site (www.groovehq.com), and I’m absolutely appreciative of all the kind words. However, as our product evolves so must our public-facing communications! Many surprises yet to come per the visual design overhaul of www.groovehq.com. Stay tuned. 

Profit Forecast

Until a product can be shopped in the open market - until its truly in the wild, its difficult to exact what the bottom line will look like. The day your product is priced and launched is surely a highly stressful moment, and one that most all product authors anticipate with some degree of relative uncertainty. That said, for those who come prepared it is also a moment that is exciting, and one you welcome. So while I don’t yet have the answers to many of these critical line items such as cost of user acquisition, Free Trial allotment, marketing buys or the like, this next problem set is one that I’m truly looking forward to addressing.

                                                                 • • • 

2011 was a great year. I couldn’t be more elated to share the upcoming milestones for 2012. From glowing reviews in TheNextWeb (TNW), surging Sign Up interest, an ever exuberant user base and a whole mess of VC and Angel solicitation, I’m delighted and humbled to share all that Groove has accomplished in 2011 and what new and exciting developments are in store for 2012.  I look forward to introducing the new Groove internal team in the months to come. 

Thank you for your continued support and interest. 

Sincerely,

Alex Turnbull 

The Death of the MVP (Minimum Viable Product) in Competitive Markets

Recently, its felt more and more part of my morning routine to sit down with my tea, my in-print WSJ daily (thank goodness), and my tablet to discover an eBlast, eInvite or thrice forwarded email from an acquaintance whose son, daughter or former intern has a launch product in need of vetting. Sure, I am rooting for the young and ambitious - the restless intern and the former mailroom staff of America - and I’d even go as far as saying that this underdog mentality is shared by the majority of tech entrepreneurs. However, all entrepreneurial sentiment not withstanding, why are friends of friends pointing their product dev. questions towards me? Following the sale of Bantam Live (acquired by Constant Contact in February of 2011) I became a founding team member in search of a new project. This Fall I launched Groove™, which has been described by The Next Web as a “freshly conceived customer support solution and a beautiful, full-feature iOS application.” And with VC’s and Angels knocking on our door, and our latest, refined enhancement cycle approaching release date, I’m more aware than ever of what real value looks like.
 
Bottom line, there is no shortage of tech start-ups today. In earnest, the “why” is superfluous - I’m not going to discuss macro trends or some of the ridiculous valuations as of late - fundamentals (or lack there of) as they pertain to valuation methodology because its only going to upset me. Let’s just simplify the damned thing and call it what it is: a gold rush; 1849 or 1897, take your pick. It’s sexy, it’s relevant, it’s online and consumable, and apparently it doesn’t require a revenue stream (or proof thereof) to merit a bank-busting buyout. Barriers to entry being what they are, plenty of people are already in the game prospecting. So with so many foaming at the mouth to get in, it comes as no surprise that “ubiquity” is the word that is growing in popularity amongst critics, investment pundits and product dev experts to describe the red ocean of the app boom.
 
The high view: desktop, mobile and emerging platform app market continues to barrel along like an Oregon Trail bound wagon set to “grueling”. Seed and angel capital are increasingly more accessible as blood returns to the knuckles of the less risk averse investor, and new OPM-backed beta’s with 6-month, angel-backed leashes continue to drop every day. With every next drop the sprawling competitive landscape becomes more and more pancaked shaped. In my opinion, its time to sound the alarm; its time that new entrants raise the bar or throw in the towel.
 
So what of the proverbial “bar”? I feel like Tony Soprano here (is this reference still relevant?) but the bar commands respect; perhaps more appropriate, and indubitably less relevant is Nicholas Cage in The Rock (1996), “the second you don’t respect this, it kills you.”  So to come full circle, I can’t help but shake my head in disappointment to see so many products for which “the bar” is being pissed on - down right sullied and left in the mud.
 
If you were to ask today’s most successful CEO’s and strategic visionaries what their brand touchstone is, objectively speaking, every single response would acknowledge the proverbial bar, and raising that sucker. I don’t care if you’re IBM, chugging along at 12% (yoy), you’re raising that thing or it is burying you. This is particularly true of markets with high degrees of rivalry, namely the web software and mobile app space. Right? So what happened to this gleaming compass for product dev. standards!? How did these young entrepreneurs come to understand that releasing feature-thin, buggy, broken or unfinished products into the majors is the right play?
 
Traditionally, the MVP (Minimum Viable Product) mantra has been an effective one - kudos to Eric Reis and Steve Blank. The MVP, however, is an objective criteria, and there in the gray area of interpretation does the MVP fall apart. So where do we draw the line? What features make the cut? What UX compromises do we make? And what degree of polish is required of our visual presentation? The easy answer is simply “do more”.
 
More is expensive, and for that reason the ever-iterating MVP is a pretty popular approach.  And with an MVP model you can do a few things very well, most of the time:
 
  • The cost of user acquisition coupled with a more robust launch can be bonkers expensive. Therefore the cost of failing is significantly lower with the MVP model.
  • You benefit from testing with real, organic use cases. No framing. No front-end rigged “imagine ifs”.
  • Low-hanging fruit get pocketed. Easy pickings for quick fixes and obvious missteps.
  • Bring clarity to your business goals: reprioritize and reevaluate realistic milestones
  • Bring clarity to your marketing initiatives - particularly positioning language.
How you test an MVP is a noteworthy pivot point too. If you test internally or in a closed beta, then an MVP is often a great value play. If you release an MVP to the public though, be ready to assume the consequences. Consider whether it will be more more costly to repair a bad impression than it is to make a great impression on your first interaction. Consider the cost of advertising, designing strategic content, marketing material, and creating opportunities to interact with your disenchanted customer. Consider the marginal deficit of every failed conversion; the damage done by the retelling, refeeding - or worse, retweeting - of your failed product experience, and the overall snowballing of negative product sentiment that is eventually proliferated by individuals who may or may not have even demoed your product! Your product’s failure becomes that week’s topic of nervous small talk by smart, dialed-in young persons who should be the army at your back.  
 
In bluer oceans this approach was acceptable, but more and more frequently startup folks seem to think that, by following the MVP strategy, it’s OK to simply launch a “minimal product”. What happened to the “Viable” part? These products have been compromised and rationalized to death, or been simply launched incomplete. As a result, their initial public launch is so sluggish and uninspiring that any launch energy they should have leveraged thereafter quickly dissipates. Note: failure to convert initial launch energy is often times a death sentence.
 
Timing. Burn rate. Investor benchmarks left unmet. It’s all quicksand, and without traction your chances at failing are much greater. Simply put, if you’re launching an app in a competitive B to B market you better bring your A game because an MVP isn’t going to cut it anymore.  
 
Let’s take a step back for a minute. For a young start up, your focal business goal should be “leveraging power”. More than half of the product authors I meet are fresh out of B-school so this isn’t a new idea. Nonetheless, they say, “leveraging power. Ok. I want that; how do I get it?” You get leveraging power with traction. “And that?”. Stop. Sound market research and timing not withstanding, to gain traction in a competitive market your product needs to be polished. Simple concept. “To what degree?”, you ask. Well, is it at least marginally better than existing product substitutes? Yes? Well, then you won’t absolutely fail, but what about switching costs or acquiring new customers? Have you thought about that pain? How do you plan to address that? At the end of the day, customers don’t want more of the same. Even if that differentiation is perceived (not real or substantive, re: “elevated functional benefit”) you need to show them something new, or wait until you have something worth sharing.
 
To use my most recent product Groove™ as an example: if visitors came to Groove™ and it looked like shit compared to its competitors Assistly or Zendesk, we wouldn’t have a shot in hell at converting anyone. Customers would land, bounce, and migrate to a competing product. However, because we released a gorgeous web app, with rich features from the get-go, we were in the game, competing and gaining traction.

Much of this is frustration and rhetoric, but it stems from a real trend that is happening in the web software space today. I don’t have the answer for what comes next nor do I have a new packaged buzzword or acronym to offer, ie. “Design Thinking” or “Creative Quotient”, I really couldn’t care less, but I suggest that all start ups evaluate their positions and get their thinking caps on. My cold hard advice: MVP’s aren’t for competitive B to B web apps. It’s not OK to launch a shitty app like Guy Kawasaki suggests. We didn’t follow the MVP approach with Bantam Live, and we got bought by Constant Contact in less than 2 years time. If you’re working on a consumer play, or something totally new and outrageous, than sure, you have a little more freedom than most to launch a limited feature app to test the market; grow, and continuously develop around the needs of your customers. In our B to B space, all it takes is a bit of research to know what’s hot and what’s not. Don’t be lazy. If it takes you a bit more time and money, it’ll be worth it. Rule of thumb I learned from a colleague I’ve worked with in my past ventures, “if you’re not confident showing your Grandmother your web app, don’t launch it”.

Customers Movin & Groovin: Meet Buzz Data

This is part of our series “Movin & Groovin” which profiles our amazing customers and how they use Groove. Below is some Q&A with Sarah Facini of Buzzdata. 

What does your business do?

BuzzData.com is a platform for sharing, publishing and collaborating on data. To geeks, we tend to describe it as a “github for data,” but to people like me (a non-geek) it’s more like Facebook — for data.

So for example, on Facebook I might post photos from Saturday night hanging with my friends at a hockey game. My friends would “like” it or make a funny comment. On BuzzData, I’d post a dataset that I compiled of the best places around town to watch the game, the geo-locations and some maps that I generated of that data. My friends in turn could follow the data to keep informed of any updates, engage in discussion about the data and contribute new versions with expansions or improvements to the data I posted.

How many people are working there?

We just brought on some new staff, so we’re about 10 people now. 

How many email inquires do you get on average per day for your business?

We’ve only been in public beta only since the beginning of August, so there’s no such thing as an average day yet :)! While I’m sure that this will eventually level out, the number of emails that we get through our support system seems to be relative to press coverage and new feature releases — when we get coverage, we get new users. Then we get more people emailing in to say everything from “this is amazing!” to “what the heck do I do?” 

How do you use Groove?

We use Groove to channel all of our support emails through support@buzzdata.com. We also have installed the chat widget on our site to allow people to connect with us in a way that doesn’t interrupt their workflow. 

When away from the office, I use the iPhone app to update our support tickets.  It’s really handy because I could be stuck on the streetcar and be working more efficiently than I would be if I was responding via email because the support tickets aren’t lumped in with all my other emails.  We also use the private notes to pass along pertinent information as it helps us make sure that we are all on the same page.

Why did you choose Groove?

Without naming names, I just wasn’t finding what I was looking for in the other apps. In all honesty, I had almost decided on another app when our CTO emailed with a link about Groove.

After browsing the features, I went to sign up and realized Groove was still in private beta, which I worried I wouldn’t get access to. Luckily for us, we got in early. 

When I first started exploring my Groove dashboard, the things that first caught my attention were the easy-to-use interface and the chat/email integration.  The user interface is fantastic. Everything is simple and straightforward and there isn’t a big learning curve. The chat/email integration is a huge bonus as it means that Groove is a one-stop shop and we don’t need to have additional support apps. 

In the end, what eventually sold me on Groove was their customer support. Sure, they have a clean, simple UI, it is super-easy to use and they are getting bigger and better each time they roll out new changes to the site. But they also understand good customer support — every time I connect with them it becomes more and more evident. They set the customer service bar high.

What do you love most about Groove?

The UI. The design of the UI is spot-on.  I really love that there aren’t any unnecessary pieces of functionality or visuals that clutter the page. As I mentioned previously, it’s super intuitive. I think that this is really important because it means that anyone could hop on and take care of support tickets.  

I also love how Groove isn’t trying to be the best app out there by baking in too many bells and whistles. There is an art to keeping things straightforward while not skimping on features.  Groove definitely strikes this balance well.

Probably most importantly, I love that our users love it. We’ve received feedback from our users on a number of occasions that they love the chat widget. People are impressed that when they say hello or send an email, that it actually goes somewhere and that someone responds.

What features would you like to see in the future?

This is hard for us because I think that everything that we wanted to see has been implemented or is on the radar already.

Things that we’re looking forward to is the option to include a screenshot to the widget messages, the Mac App and being able to fully add custom-styling to the widget.

What’s the best tip you have for delivering awesome customer support?

Aside from the obvious (prompt replies, taking time to write the best response possible, etc.), I really think that the best tip I could offer is to avoid canned responses.

It is hard to make canned replies sound genuine. Users can tell when you are writing to them and when you are just using a script. My best tip is keep it personal as much as possible.


Update: Dec 20, 2011

We’ve just released a ton of new features, enhancements and small fixes for Groove today! Lots coming up over the next 1-2 months :) Enjoy and Happy Holidays!!

  • New feature: Keyboard shortcuts
  • New feature: Made all emails plain. The ‘Please REPLY ABOVE this line’ is no more. 
  • New feature: Option to automatically create @mentions for Twitter into tickets or to convert them to tickets once agents reply.
  • New feature: Added Priority (Low, Med, High) field for tickets.
  • New feature: Real-time updates for multiple agents replying to the same ticket.
  • New feature: Contact us form for the Knowledge Base.
  • New feature: For canned replies, you can now use meta information like the customers name to be automatically inserted in the reply.
  • Enhancement: Agents can now configure email templates to use the ‘mailbox’ name as a variable.
  • Enhancement: Pinned articles for the Knowledge Base.
  • Enhancement: Added ‘Attach a file’, ‘Status’ and ‘Labels’ when creating private notes.
  • Enhancement: Made the right side fixed for the tickets page when scrolling. 
  • Enhancement: Now Include subject line of email in your mailbox list view.
  • Enhancement: Agents can now optionally receive email notifications for all replies that are rated (Awesome, OK, Not good).
  • Bug fix: Cleaned up the UI design for searching chats and tickets.
  • Bug fix: Close and reply button now updating the status of the ticket if you just click on ‘Close and Reply’ without adding a reply. 
  • Bug fix: Fixed padding issue for the help widget.
  • Bug fix: Twitter headshots now coming in for all replies in a ticket.
  • Bug fix: Fixed issue with deleting headshots.
  • Bug fix: Now showing pagination links in the people view.

What’s coming up?

A ton of backend automation stuff :) Rules, Macros, Custom Filters, Groups etc. 

Some gems from Twitter this week

Blown away by the Groove beta for managing our customer support! Visit http://prefinery.com and chat with us live to see how it works. -@prefinery

Looking for a tool to handle your customer support? Look no further…GrooveHQ has everything you may need! -@SFInternet

Can’t wait to use Groove - a must if you handle customer support! -@ 

Checking out GrooveHQ. Looks like a nice support desk setup. A Zendesk alternative. Currently free cuz its in beta. -@davidrisley

Just signed up to try a new (multichannel) help desk that looks REALLY hot — . -@powerupcoaching

Groove-Easiest site support you will ever see! -@GregorBorsic

The folks @HipChat recommended  so I signed up for the beta! -@yesware

Just had a phone meeting with a client. They told me at the end they are impressed with my customer support since we changed to  -