High-Touch Onboarding | Hacker News Reader

High-Touch Onboarding

blog.magicbus.io

69 pointsraywu31 comments

Yep, same thing works for us on our HR app for small and medium companies called www.staffsquared.com.

While the automated lifecycle e-mails we generate are great at conveying useful information to new trial customers, one of the things that really set us apart from the competition is our free of charge onboarding customer service.

We tell customers that we'll do literally whatever it takes to get them onboard, even if that means entering their data manually for them. The lifetime revenue from a new paying customer makes this relatively small admin task, which relieves lots of friction, full of win.

We also generate a couple of e-mails to new customers both on a schedule and also when certain user activities are performed. The e-mails are designed to appear handcrafted and ask if we can provide any assistance with a particular feature or process. If our customers need anything they simply hit reply at which point a human picks up the conversation.

FYI those fake personal emails are totally obvious and everyone hates the fake sincerity.

The fact that I can actually just reply to the email and get progress negates the annoyance of a CG starting point.

The amazing thing is how many senders fool themselves into thinking they're fooling users. The first commenter's description ("designed to appear handcrafted") seems to fall into that category.

I hear senders cite an email open rate or click rate, but there's no way to measure groans or "Do they think I've never signed up for a Web app?" reactions. (Heck, maybe it does help for consumer-oriented services, where many users actually haven't ever signed up for a Web app before.)

But you're an early adopter / power user, exposed to this plenty, and most users aren't that savvy.

Though I also find these types of messages annoying, they do seem to get to a higher interaction rate from normal users.

High touch onboarding is definitely worth it in a service where people use it daily and there is a very high lifetime value for the customer.

Out of curiosity how would this service ever make money? Won't it become very capital intensive as it scales while the customer base appears to be driven by price.

Benchmarking against all other modes of transportation definitely makes commuting more of a commodity. All-in Cost of car ownership in a city or all-in cost of multimodal transportation (uberpool to train to bus to walking) are two ends of the spectrum people price against. Scale is actually a great thing for this business.

Ray I am curious how close to the uber end your service falls? Have you done any experiments in how price sensitive your customers are? My gut feeling is that they are expecting uber like levels of service combined with public transport level pricing, but I am more than happy to be corrected.

I'm not sure what you mean. It's not free.

I know it is not free, but capital intensive industries are not the flavour of the month right now.

My question is really how do you maintain decent margins when you have very price sensitive customers. You are effectively offering a Uber-like service with a customer base expecting public transport level prices.

Get people to become habitual users then raise the price and get businesses to pay for it instead of consumers.

It kind of looks like MagicBus' marketing is already setting up to do this.

Seems like a thinly veiled ad for MagicBus, but I guess most blog posts are anyway.

Edit: Just to be clear, I'm not complaining about it, it's a good blog post, just making an observation.

It worked for me - I've never heard about them before but it's definitely a service that I'd use!

Something new we're trying in terms of onboarding. I would have never guessed that people are receptive to random text messages from a service provider.

For one, I get annoyed by T-mobile happy holidays text—but probably also because it's a canned text message.

Is there any particular reason your website goes out of its way to avoid mentioning where you already have service? The map of San Francisco in the background seems to be the only clue.

The reason I mention this is because so many of these services are SF only, but hide that information. I understand you want to gather analytics from people entering addresses, but I don't want to waste my time doing so when the most likely answer is "no service now, no service in the near future, no service in adjacent areas ...". I get that my area isn't worth servicing now, but this also means I can't even consider the service when I am elsewhere or recommend it to anyone else, because service area information is wilfully withheld.

Hi Roger, we have a service map and are trying to figure out the best way to present the information. We can provide a coverage map, but that could also be misleading.

For example, we can mark SF, Palo Alto, and Menlo Park as in service area. It is not at all clear that we only run from SF to Palo Alto and SF to Menlo Park, but not Menlo Park to Palo Alto.

We've been thinking about using some animation to make it more explicit. But I'd love any idea from you.

Lastly, if you want to see a map, it's here: https://www.producthunt.com/tech/magicbus

You can put it as text.

"We currently serve parts of SF, Palo Alto and Menlo Park. Please see ... for a map and how we plan to expand our service."

I have friends that ride MB and they complain about the pickup locations (mission street). Apparently they are worried about their safety in that area because they are being picked up when its still dark or just after sunrise when the street is basically empty.

Valencia seems like it would make a lot more sense from a safety standpoint.

I have personally heard amazing things about MB.

Hey thank you, let us look into that. That's great feedback!

You bet. If I didn't have a commuter shuttle, I would definitely be riding MB. I hope you guys have a ton of success.

If I were you, I would spend some time actually going to shuttle stops at 6:30AM to see what they are like and what the customer deals with first hand. I think there are some other issues like maps not working always or drivers picking up in a 20 minute window (not optimal for knowing when you need to be ready in the AM since its too wide of a window.)

Huge fan of that approach. We'll act on it. Thank you!

If you are unsafe waiting on a street after dark, you are unsafe waiting on a street precisely one block west after dark.

Maybe you don't know the area, but Valencia is full of people going to work at 6:30am on commuter buses. Mission street, not so much. It is desolate and anyone waiting for a daily black car service for 20 minutes definitely stands out and may become a target. The two people that I know that get rides from their are female which sort of compounds the problem.

It sounds like they need to have high-touch onboarding to maintain growth from like, 1 -> 1000 Users, but at some point it'd be outrageous to maintain that process.

If they don't have trust, they have poor Marketing, few Users, or both. To me, this is a clear sign that they need a stronger #brand

We tried to solve the onboarding problem too early with tech (maybe pre-mature?). I imagine the trade-off between mission-criticalness vs willingness-to-try has a similar relationship to BJ Fogg's behavior model http://www.behaviormodel.org/ (motivation vs ease to achieve).

Uh... are you just comparing one 2-dimensional graph with another one? According to BJ Fogg, your automated onboarding should have worked.

My point was that it's fundamentally an issue of trust. High-touch onboarding is not the only solution, but it might work for you right meow.

> but at some point it'd be outrageous to maintain that process

why? plenty of large orgs have human customer services, even fast food. as you scale operations, you'll find efficiencies in any case eg. CS knowledgebase.

How does this work when you are growing at 30,000 users per month?

It doesn't, but I think that's the point - you can do stuff that doesn't scale when you're small and not worry about how to do it at scale until it becomes a problem.

Another way of looking at it: giant existing corporations can't do things that don't scale. If you're small, you can, and that's the competitive edge you stick into the market to carve out a chunk of your own.

If the incremental cost makes sense for 30 users, it makes sense for 30,000.

And you have to put it in perspective: since their business is driving jitneys around the peninsula, acquiring thousands of vans per month would be a much bigger challenge than setting up the routes.

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