Groove Blog

Scroll to Info & Navigation

Customers Movin & Groovin: Limelight

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

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

Nick Jones and I created Limelight, a service that provides app developers with a turn-key way to market their apps on the web. They tell us the name of their app, and our service automatically grabs all the details about their app from the App Store, does a bunch of Photoshop-esque work, and in a few seconds they have a fully functional marketing site for their app. It’s still just the two of us, and we like it that way. :-)

What did you use to manage customer support before Groove?

We’ve been using Groove since shortly after we launched. :-) Before that, requests came in over email and on the phone.

How do you use Groove?

Very passively. I don’t think about it until I get an email notification with a question or comment. When that happens, we address it immediately.

Why did you choose Groove?

First, because I had a good feeling about the people building Groove. Their website was incredible and their blog posts were well written and insightful. The whole package exuded quality. Second, Groove boasted an accompanying iPhone app, which was in line with my early goal of running as much of the company off of my iPhone and iPad as possible.

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

It was a very natural transition for us, but it was even easier for our customers. We get rave reviews from our customers for the quick and complete customer service we provide and Groove has been a big part of that.

What do you love most about Groove?

The thing I most love about Groove is what it does for our customers: Even before they sign-up, when they’re just browsing around our site and checking out our service, that little tab in the bottom corner of the screen communicates to them that we provide quick, awesome customer support. Down the road, the minute they have a question or don’t know what’s going on, they’re not lost for a second. We’ve reinforced it on every single page: We’re right here. Because it’s easy for them to reach out to us, we’re able to jump into action and do whatever it takes to get them on their way. I love providing that level of customer service and I love seeing how happy it makes our customers.

What features would you like to see in the future?

It would be great if Groove automatically took a snapshot of the page, so when customers are running into an issue they don’t have to write so many words describing what they’re seeing. Also, it would be great to be able to register a phone number for customer support that directed to my cell phone, but didn’t go to my personal voicemail if I was unable to answer. Some of our best customer support experiences have come in over the phone.

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

Reduce your customer support burden by focusing on usability. When someone does have a problem and needs to reach out to you, cherish them! Go above and beyond to solve their problem and make them happy. They’ve done you a huge favor by bringing an issue to your attention that many others potential customers would just run into and move on.

New in Groove: Control your Help Widget with our Javascript API

Wait no more!! If you want some advanced control over the behavior of the Groove Help Widget, you can now use the Widget API to open and close the widget and to pre-populate the email and name fields.

Groove Widget Javascript API:

After the Groove Widget is successfully loaded on a host page it exposes the following functions:

GrooveWidget.open() - Opens the widget.

GrooveWidget.close() - Closes the widget.

GrooveWidget.toggle() - Toggles the current widget state between opened and closed states.

GrooveWidget.options(opt) - Accepts widget options opt as a key/value object.

Currently supported options:

  • email - sets the email field
  • name - sets the name field

Example:

Set the widget email field to test@example.com.

GrooveWidget.options({email: "test@example.com"});

Update: April 12th, 2012

We’ve just released some new features and enhancements for Groove :) It’s just a little taste of what’s to come in these next few months. Look for some major upgrades coming up soon! Have fun!! 

  • New feature: Recent activity stream for tickets homepage
  • New feature: Popular labels design for tickets homepage.
  • New feature: Agents and endusers can now see when the other is typing in chat.
  • New feature: Hover preview for tickets on list page.
  • New feature: Automation rules for tickets which agents can set up from within Ticket Settings.. 
  • New feature: Added bcc and cc functionality for replying to tickets.
  • New feature: Welcome page for the Knowledge Base.
  • Enhancement: Increased font size of recently viewed items on left side.
  • Enhancement: Recently viewed items are now preserved across different browsers and different computers. 
  • Enhancement: Copy change for email notification when assigning and adding notes to tickets.
  • Enhancement: Agent’s availability status is now synchronized between all browser tabs.
  • Enhancement: Changed the fonts inside of a ticket view to Helvetica Neue to make them more readable.
  • Enhancement: Added a drop down for setting your chat status from within the login page.
  • Enhancement: Private note email notifications are now threaded in the tickets regular replies giving you more context of the customer request.
  • Enhancement: On the Knowledge Base agents can now embed the help widget.
  • Enhancement: Email notification enhancements for opting out of certain messages that don’t relate directly to you.
  • Enhancement: Removed icons on left side filters to give the design a clean, crisper feel.
  • Bug fix: Fixed video overlap issue for articles in the knowledge base.
  • Bug fix: Fixed a number of chat disconnecting issues, making chat much more stable.
  • Bug fix: If an agent adds a note and assigns the ticket to another agent the note now shows up in the ticket assignment notification email.
  • Bug fix: If a customer closed the chat window on a website and then the agent chat them back the chat window now pops up.

Customers Movin & Groovin: Extreme Member

This is part of our series “Movin & Groovin” which profiles our amazing customers and how they use Groove. Below is some Q&A with Shane Goldberge of Extreme Member.

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

We’re a fully hosted online membership and marketing website provider (SaaS) e.g. all inclusive hosting, membership software, email marketing and SMS broadcasting suite - all in one! Currently there is 4 of us.

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

We’ve set-up our support email to handle all of our support tickets/emails via Groove. It makes it soooo easy to update tickets, assign them to co-workers and keep track of all emails from each of our clients or potential clients. As far as the number of emails we’re getting, It really depends on the day and it does fluctuate alot depending on what we’re doing with our marketing or updates to the system so somedays it could be 20+ other days only 5-10 ;-). 

How do you use Groove?

We use it for our online chat, plus handling all of our support tickets and email enquiries. It’s all about delivering better customer service and doing it the easy way, Groove makes that possible.

Why did you choose Groove?

Good question! We’ve been using another ticketing / bug tracking system for maybe 3+ years now and we’ve had over 6,000 enquires, support emails tracked through it. Then one day it just spat the dummie! (in other words died). It got me thinking maybe I should look around for something else. As it turned out we got things back working but it was a disruption that we didn’t need.

One thing led to another, I saw an article about Groove and what the guys were doing and I was really impressed with what I saw. I then made some contact with the Groove guys and was even more impressed. I like the progressive / forward thinking of the team at Groove and managed to get myself an account. 

So things progressed, we started courting Groove, things progressed further and next thing I know I’m engaged to Groove (hehe) and we migrated over from our existing ticketing system that we’d been married to for 3-4 years and within about 5-10 minutes we were fully using Groove. (No kidding it was so easy to setup I started laughing to myself!! LOL)

What do you love most about Groove

Great web interface, easy to use and navigate. 

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

Be happy! Smile when you write and respond as quick as you can in a personal way. There is such a black hole out there with alot of businesses when it comes to customer service and support and from what I’ve seen people are craving the ‘zappos’ style great customer service.

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”.