CX & Customer Success resources

Recognizing the need to create more customer advocates (“Promoters”) and improve retention, Reciprocity wanted to better utilize unbiased feedback from the customer contacts that matter most (that is, Buying Committee members, not just end-users) to drive its product, customer experience and company. Implementing Waypoint Group’s TopBox^TM Customer Engagement platform, Reciprocity realized significant benefits within just 12 months:

• 50%+ increase in CSM team productivity
• Feedback-driven product update and improvement process improves product adoption and utilization
• Metrics to gauge product improvement plus customer experience and satisfaction
• Actionable insights for more productive and meaningful CSM customer interactions
• Concrete customer input removed the guesswork from internal communications
• Deeper insights helping marketing create excellent customer-company interactions 

Reciprocity strengthens customer relationships while increasing CSM team productivity by 50%+

Reciprocity, Inc. develops cutting-edge enterprise Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) software. Founded in 2009 by Ken Lynch, Reciprocity is based in San Francisco. Its hosted GRC solution, ZenGRC, helps compliance and audit managers go beyond spreadsheets to better execute their enterprise programs. ZenGRC is very flexible and integrates with Google Apps and JIRA, with a lightning-fast ROI.

Reciprocity is a customer-focused company with CSMs who’ve always done a very good job of getting feedback. According to Paul Piazza, Head of Customer Success, “Our CSMs are really engaged with our customers. But the meaning of verbal feedback received during customer calls was based on the CSM’s interpretation.” And, according to Alejandro Ocampo, Reciprocity’s first Customer Success team member, gathering customer feedback was a manual, time-consuming process due to the delays of the back-and-forth involved in scheduling each customer meeting. He said it was challenging to gauge progress within an account without a means to objectively measure it.

Seeking trustworthy feedback

The company wanted to use customer feedback to more effectively drive their product, customer experience and company. Unfortunately, the feedback they had wasn’t black and white, making internal conversations around it more difficult. According to Paul, “I wanted trustworthy and measurable feedback, something directly from the customer’s mouth telling me their sentiment – and why – without any bias. We needed feedback that is easy to share internally and with the right metrics to help us quickly identify what levers need to be pulled.”

Shortly after Paul started with Reciprocity, the company started pursuing a solution to gain the kind of insights they needed. They investigated other options but wanted a solution paired with the right expertise. That’s why they decided to leverage Waypoint Group’s TopBox^TM SaaS platform for B2B Customer Engagement, combined with Waypoint Group’s in-depth understanding of customer feedback.  According to Paul, “Anybody can run an NPS survey, but NPS’s weakness is that it’s made for consumer companies. Having somebody like Waypoint that has the B2B expertise to go with putting feedback to work really amplifies the feedback you get.”

Implementation – Building an internal collaboration and coalition

Implementation included an in-depth process to create questionnaires tailored to Reciprocity’s business, and training of all who would be using the system, especially the CSMs who use the program in their day-to-day routine. According to Paul, implementation went smoothly and was completed in less than a month. Waypoint worked with a team of key stakeholders at Reciprocity to build persona-based questionnaires that ask the right questions of the right people at the right time. 

Building it as a team created shared responsibility and, as Paul explained, “built a collaboration and coalition amongst all our different departments so all the feedback would be measurable and useful to all of us together. The key was having access to the expertise to guide the process because we all had ideas, but we didn’t know what was best.”

Paul said that implementation went very smoothly. They launched on time with the Waypoint team setting proper expectations, managing them effectively through the process. And Paul is so excited with the clarity Reciprocity receives from the data generated each time a questionnaire is submitted. Paul said, “Having the data to immediately pull and then watch it transform in front of my eyes is amazing! And now my company’s use of the data is, too. How fast we were able to actualize the data is great!” 

Alejandro’s implementation experience, as an end user of TopBox, was also positive. As he said, “I personally found it fairly intuitive. Once a client submits feedback via the online link, I look at the results and use the account-based reporting. Customer responses are extremely powerful!”

Paul continued:

“This isn’t about NPS. This is about feedback. That’s a big difference. TopBox is “customer engagement” and enables a feedback program. Having that methodology gives us more data, makes us smarter leaders and provides our company with a better understanding of our customer base.”

Established baseline brings clarity to progress

Once implementation was complete, Reciprocity started by acquiring feedback from a targeted selection of those customers coming up for renewal the following quarter. This established an initial baseline to launch the program, providing something concrete against which they could gauge whether their actions were improving product, customer experience and customer satisfaction as desired. As Paul explains, “You have to have actionable feedback plus a baseline to track and measure your customer impact to ensure you’re pulling the right levers.”

Saving time due to more productive internal conversations 

Internal conversations at Reciprocity are more productive now that the company  uses TopBox. That’s because these talks are based on actual customer feedback and data to prioritize updates to product, process and performance concerns. Discussions are no longer about what a CSM says a customer said. The feedback and the data allow Reciprocity to have intelligent internal conversations, because the information is all there in black and white.

Actionable insights improved the quality and productivity of customer meetings

TopBox provides the CSMs with actionable insights when preparing for customer meetings. They are much more prepared, and have complete confidence in the discussions around priorities and concerns. The insights gained from TopBox’s visualizations, reporting, and analytics make customer concerns clear, enabling CSMs to focus on what’s most important to the customer for better, more productive customer meetings. According to Alejandro, “TopBox gives me actionable results. Before we started using the program I would have limited insight into what the concerns were. It’s a template for customers to express what’s working well and what needs improvement. Plus it provides a lot of discussion topics of value for us and our customers.”

50%+ increase in CSM team productivity

In only six months, Reciprocity’s CSM team has improved its revenue managed per CSM by 50 percent. So, as the company has grown, the Customer Success team has been able to take on more clients without needing to increase headcount. Better customer engagement and feedback management are a big reason why. Good processes and listening are key to efficiency, but TopBox’s real benefit is stronger customer relationships.  

The marketing department gains valuable insights, too

According to Jordan MacAvoy, Reciprocity’s VP of Marketing, “TopBox is a way to keep our finger on the pulse of customer sentiment. It helps us better understand our customers and what they need from us.” He continued, “It helps identify places where we can leverage our marketing resources to better educate our customers and to ensure they know what’s available to help them push their business forward.” The overall goal that TopBox has enabled, according to Jordan, is to “understand what we can do to deliver not just an amazing product experience, but an amazing experience for our customers’ interactions across our company.” 

Beyond the benefits of more targeted customer marketing, Jordan also gains a valuable pipeline of Promoters that can be activated to accelerate the rate of referrals and references. Jordan adds, “TopBox helps us ensure we’re setting the right customer expectations for new prospects, course-correct through targeted customer marketing activities, and gain a valuable pipeline of newly identified customer-advocates (Promoters) to accelerate new referrals, references, and expansion opportunities.”

 Feedback drives product updates and improvements

The Product Team has gained significant value from TopBox as well. It gives them input directly from customers to help prioritize product updates and improvement. As Alejandro said, “Our product team has really gained a lot of value from TopBox because members can round up all the product feedback provided by our customers and execute off of it.” TopBox has facilitated a simplified product feedback loop so the Product Team has a clearer view of what’s working well and what improvements will drive the biggest “bang for the buck.” According to Alejandro, “It really provides the full circle in terms of feedback. I think one of the biggest fears of customers is that they’re submitting all this great product feedback, but they’re afraid it just simply goes into a black hole. TopBox really helps push that full circle feedback loop that shows our customers we listen and act on what they tell us.” 

Continuous improvement projected

After just a few short months of implementing TopBox with Waypoint Group, Reciprocity has already experienced all these results. With the ability to garner such valuable feedback directly from customers, the company is  armed and ready to provide the high quality product and customer experience that is its goal. As Paul put it, “We embrace feedback as an organization. We use it to better our products. We just want to be at the top of our class and we can’t do it in a vacuum.”