Submitted by: Andrew Mewborn
Learn how Andrew and the rest of the Outreach team use Zight to improve productivity.
About our power user, Andrew Mewborn
Founded in Seattle, Washington in 2013, Outreach is the enterprise communication platform for sales teams and has grown 910% in the last 2 years. From just a handful of employees to now over 100 and $30 million in venture funding. Their customers include companies like Adobe, Zuora, Zillow, Cloudera, Docusign, Domo, Marketo, and hundreds of others.
Q: Tell us about how you’re using CloudApp at Outreach:
“CloudApp has helped our customer success team communicate solutions to our customers. Anytime we’re asked a question like:
‘How do I sync Salesforce?’‘How do I create a sequence?’ ‘How do I create a new template?’
We send them a short custom video created with CloudApp and either embed it directly or include a short URL link to the video. Rather than write out a huge long descriptive text answer we show rather than tell.”
Outreach Workflow, Teams, & Productivity
Customer Success: “In addition to showing customers how to use our product with CloudApp while they’re getting signed up and situated, we also leverage Outreach for churn initiatives and customer management. We use outreach in order to basically list out the folks that we consider likely to churn under our criteria, then we put them in a list, and use Outreach to help us be more intelligent about how we get in touch, in a more personal way.”
Solution Consultants. “Solutions Consultants are constantly doing demos and being asked questions like Wait, can you show me what you just did? Can you show me how to do that in Outreach again? Our team will take a quick gif of a demo, send over the URL link which can then easily be shared to a customer team over email or embedded in Slack. Videos show you how simple it is to use and it really helps start the engine to get a customer going.”
QA/Development: “Whenever our teams come across a bug, or something that just doesn’t seem to be working quite right we use CloudApp to send a gif or video with an issue with a link to how to reproduce rather than writing out all the steps. Our dev team loves to see the full visual process of bug reproduction, and in many cases they even ask us to open the console in Google Chrome so they can see all of the errors”
Tools used at Outreach: Zendesk, Skitch, Github, Google Chrome, Outreach, Slack for messaging, Gmail for external/internal comms, Zoom, Microsoft Office, and Cloudapp.
How’d you get into the Industry:
I grew up in SoCAl, but moved to Seattle for school, studied electrical engineering, worked for a while at Chef in a sales role, and built a startup in Chile that helped offer solar installations in impoverished areas. I’m excited by things that are challenging and that make me feel like I’m growing and changing. After building the solar installation startup for a year, the Chilean Government got interested in the project, and I ended up taking my concept from Chile to Kenya, Africa. Just like anything else, whenever you try to help
What’s the future of customer success & customer support look like?
These days it’s so easy for people to spin up competing products on the web. AWS lets you launch an app in almost no time with such little overhead. The winner in any industry is going to be determined by the one that provides the best experience. Give them the best experience from pilot to signing to onboarding and you’ve got a customer for life. Making them successful is the most challenging.
