SalesTechStar Interview with Auguste Goldman, President, Care and Services at GoDaddy

Auguste Goldman, President, Care and Services at GoDaddy talks about the importance of a strong customer service program while elaborating more about GoDaddy’s CARE model:

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Welcome to this SalesTechStar chat Auguste, tell us about your role at GoDaddy and more about the CARE program…how does CARE run things differently when it comes to customer success?

As head of GoDaddy’s Customer CARE team, I spearhead an extraordinary team of 7,000 customer service professionals who provide assistance and collaborate with our 21+ million customers across 55 countries and 30 languages worldwide.

GoDaddy’s culture is open and diverse and that’s what we bring to our customers. We provide customer-first service through personalized guidance. Our customers can call or chat with us any time and speak with an enthusiastic and passionate GoDaddy Guide representative. We are always ready to help, offering consultative solutions, technological support, and business advice. Our objective is to make our customer’s ventures stronger. We Guide forward, which means we not only support small business owners with any current questions they have, we also look to identify all opportunities to grow our customer’s business. We have a motto in GoDaddy Care, “you are stronger today because you got me.” We take this ethos very seriously.

The guidance and humanity we bring is what makes GoDaddy stand out in our industry. We offer simple, yet powerful and elegant online tools coupled with truly world-class service that spans from “do it with me” guidance to full service “do it for me.”

Oftentimes, entrepreneurship can be lonely and those we serve are sometimes one-person shops, so our team acts more like a business partner, a compassionate confidant, that guides them along their journey.

How is customer service changing as a concept in today’s business environment?

The pandemic caused many of our customers to rethink how they operate. For some, they were taking their brick-and-mortar storefront digital for the first time. During this time, we recognize that small business owners are extremely busy, need their questions solved quickly and to be connected to the right specialist immediately. As a result, we experimented with different ways to enhance our support model and communicate with our customers via SMS and WhatsApp.

Today, we engage with thousands of customers a day via SMS, chat and WhatsApp. Switching from the cost-prohibited outbound phone channel to messaging channels helped us reach entrepreneurs more effectively and also gave our GoDaddy product team real-time insights in order to constantly improve the customer experience.

Customer service will continue to be a vital tool for small business owners to help them innovate and adapt to the changing nature of work, and it’s our job to find new ways to reach them.

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What are some of the customer success / customer service trends that you feel B2B marketing and sales teams need to be paying attention to?

Pairing human interaction with advanced technology will continue to be a strategic advantage to deeply listen to and understand your customer’s journey. While our CARE team provides real-time, live support to our customers, we also use data to track trends in interactions with our customers. In this way, we’re not only attentive to the most common issues our customers face and how to best help them, but this also informs the products we build in the future to address these needs.

For instance, we were able to see a lot of customers contacting us about resetting their password, so we analyzed and rebuilt our password reset process online to make it easier for customers. This drastically reduced the number of contacts we received about passwords, enabling our team to focus on other problems customers are facing.

How can better customer initiatives across areas and stages in the buying journey contribute to better overall customer experiences?

We focus on helping our customers accomplish their goals, not just fix the issue they’re talking to us about. There are times when customers call in seeking support and it turns out there is nothing wrong with the solution they are using – instead the actual issue is that they don’t have the right GoDaddy product or service required to accomplish their goals. Sometimes they are using something too advanced and would be better off with one of the simpler (and less expensive) solutions we offer. Sometimes they need a more advanced offering, and by paying a little more can get exactly the result they want. Having the ability to identify these kinds of product needs and address them immediately during a conversation with Care means that we get our customers to the place they need to be faster and more efficiently. For us, the goal is making sure our customers have the right solutions to meet their needs, even if it is a less expensive solution than the one the currently have, because the happier our customers are – the more loyal they become. Ultimately our goal is simple: make those making their own way win online. We build raving fans through the accomplishments of our customers and the guidance we provide to get them there.

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A few thoughts on the future of digital customer services in B2B?

Customer guidance will continue to be a competitive differentiator and serve as an important advantage for organizations deeply invested in customer success. Creating a successful customer service team starts with personalized training. For example, taking the time to learn the product first-hand and how to best provide guidance that is tailored to the specific customer they are serving. Uniting the entire team around the goal of working to create a “WOW” experience for every customer that calls in with a question.

At GoDaddy, our user base is small business owners, so the language and ways we communicate are geared specifically towards these types of entrepreneurs. Although the problems we solve or questions we receive daily are unique for each business owner, we stay true to our values of being focused on action, selflessly transparent, and driven to create uncommon outcomes for our customers.

Some last thoughts, takeaways, before we wrap up!

Helping small business owners succeed is what we are most passionate about at GoDaddy. Although the last few years have been turbulent, we have seen immense resilience amongst entrepreneurs as they continue to adapt and navigate their business through external changes. In fact, GoDaddy data shows that 2.8 million more microbusinesses were created in 2020 despite the pandemic. Ultimately, our goal is to help alleviate the barriers that prevent an entrepreneur’s journey and help them unlock new economic opportunities for themselves and their greater community. GoDaddy Care is there for the entrepreneurs of the world.

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