Can you expect a reply within ten minutes from the online businesses you engage with? Probably not. Many of us have spent valuable hours on the phone with customer service representatives. At times, the wait is over email and takes more than 24 hours.
Now, if you are a Hive customer, chances are you don’t have this issue. In fact, Hive’s team is able to provide answers from simple to complex questions in nine minutes — a remarkable global average response time. Hive also maintains an immediate chat based support versus pure 24-hour turnaround ticketing system. All its investment in customer service pays off.
“Love Hive’s responsiveness — like there’s real people on the other side of the app!,” shared Valerie Van Hoecke from ZIEL Simulation, one of Hive’s customers.
What’s behind this impressive experience?
A co-founder rooted in customer success.
John Furneaux, Hive’s CEO and co-founder, led a Global Customer Success team at Europe’s largest collaborative software firm for over six years. This experience shaped his vision to build a productivity tool for and by people. “If you look at the founders of the companies in our space, every single one is an engineer, and that means they see the world through a software engineer’s eyes,” observes Hive’s CEO.
Furneaux, also a former project manager, brings a unique perspective to the industry and the way he leads Hive’s team. “I grew up on Microsoft Sharepoint. It was almost comical how poorly suited it was to day real business jobs. The good news is that we’ve come a long way from those days.”
A Unique Leadership: pioneering in customer success
John Furneaux stands out as a disruptor in the industry. Although the shift toward Software as a Service (SaaS) started in the beginning of the century, we only started to see the customer success field gaining momentum around 2010. That’s why having a founder with this background makes Hive stand out. “For these [bigtech] companies to come through for people who had a career in customer success is something very new. It’s a new blood that can be at the founder’s table,” explains Furneaux, taking pride in contributing to this transformative shift in the industry.
Hive’s co-founder observes a movement towards bottom-up adoption of quality tools. He believes part of this change in dynamics was motivated by the entry of Millennials in the workforce, citing Slack as a prime example. “Folks who work in big businesses have been delivered terrible software for way too long because it’s been purchased top-down. [For example], no IT manager in history wanted to buy Slack. They didn’t have a choice. It was too good, and it spread bottoms up,” highlights Furneaux.
Innovative organizational structure
Even the organizational structure of Hive is shaped by the co-founders’ dedication to delivering a personalized experience.
“We don’t spend a million dollars on marketing. We don’t have a huge salesforce playing golf trying to get the IT guy to win the big contract. But we do have an army of CS people and we do have voting on features and we do obsess over whether Hive is useful and solves the problem. Why is that? Because our DNA is customer success.”
John Furneaux, Hive Co-founder & CEO
“So, why do we have a sales team? It’s not to do with the product. It’s to do with navigating the sales process at larger organizations,” clarifies Furneaux. The CEO and co-founder elaborates that Hive’s sales team assists by answering security and legal questions and bringing people together to facilitate decision-making. “The biggest realization for me was that if you want a good sales process, the sales is administrative nonsense. It boils down to the same thing. Do people who arrive in the tool find it easy to use? Does it solve the specific problem they have? Is it attractive? Is it a nice place to work? These questions are universal and don’t depend on your organization size,” emphasizes Furneaux.
User-Friendly Platform with a Guarantee
By building an easy-to-use product, Hive’s team guarantees a one path to success for all customers. Whether you are Coca Cola or a one-person freelancer, you get started in the same easy self-paved journey to onboarding. But if you have questions, an army of customer success experts will be ready to answer them.
When Hive asserts its commitment to being a user-friendly platform, it extends to the confidence placed in offering immediate, unassisted free trials to people. For Hive’s founder, the inability of a company to offer such an experience is a significant indicator: “that’s the biggest clue that a company can give, that their software blows because they don’t trust you to see it without someone there to pull the wool over your eyes,” provokes Furneaux.
Hive’s straightforward onboarding journey, friendly navigation and powerful features, give the company the confidence to offer an Adoption Guarantee policy. The productivity tool guarantees that within 90 days, 100% of initial user groups will be trained and using Hive actively – or the company will refund a full three-month subscription value.
Frictionless Onboarding and High Engagement Among Users
Designed for admins bringing their organization onto the platform, Hive University is a self-guided program that teaches the basics of Hive through online courses, tutorials, and webinars. Teams easily learn how to set up their workspace, and count with a library of over 100 templates to kick-off their projects. Hive’s Help Center is another area where new users of the platform can get answers about getting started, automations, integrations, technical resources and more.
The Swarm — a closed community of Hive customers — is another example of Hive’s commitment to serving its customers. The group brings together highly engaged individuals on the platform, driving conversations around the product and helping them to discuss and vote on Hive’s roadmap, in which new features are democratically voted on by customers.
Meeting people where they are
To wrap things up, Hive is the best in class productivity platform thanks to its customer-centric approach. What John Furneaux embedded in the company’s DNA with his background in project management and customer success is a motivation to meet people where they are, offering all the resources they need when they need them.
Have a question about Hive? Whether you’re brewing a cup of coffee or taking a short walk around the block, in just nine minutes, you should get your answer.
Ready to start your path to success? Try Hive today and join the #successguaranteed swarm.
