Customer Story

Litmus Boosts Customer Retention Rate by 26% with Help Scout

Blog Roll Image Litmus
Company Size
200
Industry
Software

The Challenge: Litmus’ customer conversations weren’t centralized — the company was using Intercom for messages and WordPress for their help center. This had a ripple effect on the entire business. The Customer Experience team was bogged down with manual work, and reporting was a nightmare, making it difficult for the business to measure the Customer Experience team’s impact and progress over time.

The Solution: Since using Help Scout to manage all customer communications, Litmus has been able to work with ease and efficiency to make informed decisions around supporting customers and improving their experience. Help Scout has removed all the frustrations and inefficiencies of working with multiple tools and has aided in increasing the Customer Experience team’s retention rate by 26%.


We recently chatted with Taylor Davis, Senior Director of Customer Experience at Litmus, a SaaS company specializing in helping email marketers build, test, and analyze email campaign results. Today, Litmus helps 700,000+ users work more effectively, catch costly errors, and accelerate campaign performance. 

Help Scout has been the backbone of the Customer Experience team over the past 9 years—making Help Scout an essential tool in Litmus’ tech stack. When asked what it would mean to her team if Help Scout disappeared, Taylor’s quick response reflected the key role the platform plays for the team and its customers.

Haha, well we would be in trouble for sure! That’s our entire customer communication and education platform gone. We would have a very, very, very, hard time replacing Help Scout — and we would also probably spend weeks downloading all of those valuable insights and documentation!

The positive impact of Help Scout for Taylor and her team at the industry-leading SaaS company was a welcome—and necessary—change. To offer more insight into the benefits her team has seen, Taylor shared with us what life was like before Help Scout and the impact of the platform today. 

Looking for an all-in-one customer communication platform, not another add-on tool

Before they adopted Help Scout, Taylor said, Litmus was working without a centralized system to handle customer communication and education, and their support platform lacked the features required to provide the quality of support the company needed for its customers. 

We didn’t have great reporting, organization, workflows, or saved replies prior to Help Scout. It was difficult for us to see the progress our team was making and how it affected the customer experience.

They knew they needed a new solution, but finding the right customer communication tool can be difficult, especially with all the options on the market—each with its own strengths and weaknesses. To be sure they found a platform that met all their needs, the Litmus team developed a list of necessary criteria: 

  • Reporting. To measure performance and show the impact of the Customer Experience team on processes over time, and how it improved the customer experience.

  • Organization. To consolidate customer conversations and provide multiple inboxes for individual teams (Support, Technical Support, Security, and Marketing)

  • Visibility. To bring marketing, sales, product, and engineering teams into the support queue to understand the customer experience and history. 

Having conducted research based on their list, they found their ideal tool in Help Scout, which checked all of their boxes.

How Help Scout became an essential tool for Litmus

When chatting with Taylor, she highlighted four main points on how Help Scout has transformed the way her team and company work day-to-day.

1. Consolidating all customer communications to one platform provides significant benefits

When Litmus first adopted Help Scout, they initially opted to use Mailbox. But the team quickly realized that they actually needed all customer communications — not just email — under one roof in order to efficiently and accurately report on their work.

Having our messaging platform, chat, and help articles in one place has been a lifesaver. Before, we used WordPress to host our help center, Intercom for chat, and Help Scout for emailing customers. Consolidating all of our customer communications within Help Scout allows us to work more efficiently while easily making informed and cohesive decisions around supporting our customers and creating experiences that are as seamless as possible.

Litmus Help Center

Taylor also shared that positive results were immediate when Litmus eliminated Intercom and WordPress and relied on Help Scout to manage all customer communications

We saw the most improvements after consolidating our email, chat, and documentation in Help Scout. Being able to work out of one place, not having to combine reporting from various tools, and having access to the big picture view Help Scout gives us of our support strategy have been essential

2. Analysis revealed a 26% higher customer retention rate 

Consolidating had a ripple effect on the entire business. Not only was the Customer Experience team able to work better, but enhanced reporting made it easy for Taylor to showcase the improvements and business goals her team was achieving. 

With the help of our data team and Help Scout’s detailed reports, we ended up being able to share that customers who interact with our support team within their first three months are retained at a 26% higher rate.

reports in help scout
Example of reports in Help Scout

3. Company-wide visibility into the customer journey has been transformative  

A deep understanding of customers is at the heart of every successful business. But depending on the tools in your tech stack, it can be challenging to have a clear picture of the customer journey, which hinders every department in an organization. 

Taylor explained that the information Help Scout provides and the opportunity the platform offers to better her team and cross-functionally impact the business has been transformative.

My favorite part of Help Scout is the visibility it gives you into the customer journey. All of the conversation history, common issues, and requested feature enhancements are available for the entire company to absorb. We now have Marketing, Sales, Product, and Engineering in Help Scout alongside Support because it’s such an important window into the customer experience and history.

customer profile in help scout
Example of a customer profile in Help Scout

4. Help Scout increases the team's productivity while delivering a quality customer experience

Prior to Help Scout, the Customer Experience team at Litmus was bogged down by inefficiencies and lacked the tools to effectively make decisions to move the company forward. Taylor told us that adopting Help Scout has made a significantly positive difference in both areas.

Help Scout allows us to work more efficiently while making it easy for us to make informed and cohesive decisions around supporting our customers and making their experience as seamless as possible. For example, workflows have really enhanced our experience and automated a lot of manual tagging and ticket movement, saving our teams a great deal of time.

Delivering an experience that retains more customers has never been easier 

By using Help Scout to manage all customer communications, Litmus now delivers a quality and efficient customer experience that increases retention rate and drives revenue. And, Taylor’s team can easily showcase results with Help Scout’s detailed reports and analytics. In addition to Help Scout’s capabilities, the intuitive platform has made it easy for the Customer Experience team to create memorable experiences.  

Help Scout has made it easier for us to work efficiently and thoughtfully across teams. It takes a lot of manual effort, busy work, and aggravation out of the support process, so we can focus on what really matters — helping each other and creating a better experience for our customers.

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