How a Software Company Leveraged Amazon Web Services to Improve Customer Experience and Enable User Growth

No marketer is an island. You can’t just succeed in your silo and expect overall success with the customer.

In fact, according to the MECLABS Optimization Sequence, you should optimize your product (Opr) before you optimize the presentation of the product (Oprn) or the channel driving traffic to that presentation on your landing pages (Ocnn).

And here’s the reason why. If you spend money sending traffic to an unoptimized landing page, that investment will just leak out of your funnel. And the same is true if you overly focus on your landing page creation for a product that just isn’t ready for prime time.

There’s a trust trial your customers subconsciously use when deciding whether to do business with your company — and if they should keep doing business with your company. In other words, when your product fails to live up to your marketing propositions, you seriously undercut your marketing.

To help marketers improve digital products, in this case study sponsored by SourceFuse, we took a closer look at a software company that improved its own product

In this interview, Wes Benwick, Vice President of Software Architecture, BluHorn, shares how the software company improved its product, along with key takeaways for marketers from a developer’s point of view, such as …

 Running marketing campaigns in sprints

“Our development effort works in sprints, and we do our marketing in sprints. So coming from a development background, I like to employ some of the things that we’ve learned on the development side into our marketing. And we like to work in these one- or two-week-long sprints where we advertise towards a certain target audience heavily, be it on social media, direct mail, what have you, and try to bring subscribers in rapidly, and then spend the next couple of weeks onboarding them, analyzing results and deciding where we want to go for our next marketing sprint,” Benwick said.

How customers perceive your software

“We might have version numbers internally, but we don’t share version numbers with our customers. They’re expecting a continuous cycle of updates,” he said.

Experimenting with new features

“Experiment efficiently is the key word. I can think just 10 years ago, maybe even five and certainly when I first got into this 25 years ago, if you wanted to experiment with optical character recognition or voice technology, the amount of investment you had to make in hardware, training and software, you could never even do it. It was just a pipe dream. And now, especially when you’re already on the platform [Amazon Web Services], there’s so much example code, so many cookbook ideas, if you will, so many quick ways to just test a concept out and prove if it’s going to work or not, that it’s really changing the way we look at software development,” Benwick said.

We also interviewed Kelly Dyer, CEO, SourceFuse, who gave tips on creating software products that were scalable, reliable and secure, along with questions you can ask your development team or vendor partner. A few takeaways from Kelly …

Find the bottleneck to cost-effectively increase scalability

“Every system has a bottleneck somewhere. That’s just the definition of systems. There’s some component that is going to have the least amount of capacity or scalability. If it’s all one big system and you don’t know, then you hit that cost tradeoff pretty quickly because everything is pretty expensive to scale. But if you split it up properly and you know what it really costs and what that cost driver is, then it’s much more cost efficient to scale,” Dyer said.

Analyze your systems to see what you can smartly automate without hurting the customer experience

“One feature that we did for a local company that’s in the healthcare logistics space … 37% of their call center calls were for this one particular use case where they were calling to verify a patient’s answer. In one sprint, we rolled out a full voice-based interaction to automate the way that works and eliminate that whole call center burden which has a direct cost savings right there,” Dyer said.

Sources

BluHorn

SourceFuse

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