Stories from our customer obsessed customers

Sturdy provided the insights necessary to intervene proactively, to improve services, and to strengthen customer relationships.

Hawke Media is the top performance marketing agency in the country. Having successfully grown over 4,500 brands, most of which you've heard of, Hawke Media knows how to drive value for its customers.

Tony Delmercado, Co-founder and President, states, "I'm obsessed with keeping my customers and keeping them happy." However, their challenge is finding customer health insights in the pile of information flowing in through emails, chats, and calls.

"I wanted to lean in and ensure we provided a truly impactful service to every customer. Our challenge was that we had all of this data with all of these teams, and things fell through the cracks. You sometimes need to go in and get your elbows dirty as an executive, but there's just so much data."  - Tony Delmercado, Founder and President of Hawke Media"

‍Hawke’s partnership with Sturdy began after an internal meeting. They recognized that their current, proactive intervention processes weren't scaling well, relied on anecdotes instead of data, and took too long to get the right interventions to the right customers. This realization prompted them to take the plunge and try Sturdy.

Getting up and running with Sturdy took an hour while Sturdy's team prepared integrations with Gong, Gmail, and HubSpot. After a day or so, Sturdy loaded data into the user interface and conducted a "data reveal meeting." During this revelation, Hawk Media and their team grasped the actual value of Sturdy. Sturdy automatically unearthed insights into their customer interactions, leading to process improvements, triage reports, and providing the executives with the profound understanding they sought regarding their customers.

"Sturdy has given us the insights necessary to intervene proactively, to improve services, and to strengthen our customer relationships. Every customer wants that. And that ultimately leads to retention."

What Hawke Media's team realized long before implementing Sturdy was that as a marketing services agency, they didn’t possess usage and engagement data like a pure technology company. Instead, their version of customer insights was trapped in the everyday communications with their customers. As it turns out, these unstructured interactions, in their various forms across many team members, are just the types of data Sturdy turns into valuable insights that ultimately impact the bottom line.

"With Sturdy, we went from largely wasting our most powerful data source, our customer’s voice, to creating easily understandable metrics and interventions that everyone in our company can use. It took less than six weeks to see month-over-month retention improve by 30%.”

‍If you’d like to learn more about Sturdy and how we can change how you look at your business, get in touch today.

‍

With Sturdy, MP achieved a 100% customer retention rate while gaining critical insights about this valuable customer cohort.

Recently, I had the opportunity to sit on a call with our Chief Customer Officer, Jonathan Chenard, and Josh Soroko, Vice President of Operations at MassPay (MP). Josh has been Vice President of Operations for the last 13 years and is responsible for MP’s Implementation, Client Support, Tax, and Training Teams. Josh shared that his goal is to ensure customers have a WOW experience with MP and that his north star metric is customer retention.

During our call, Josh made a striking point; providing a WOW experience in a rapidly growing company is exceptionally challenging. When things don’t go perfectly, he has to triangulate between multiple teams servicing the client to understand what’s happening. Even then, some of what he’s told may only be partially true, and Josh might not get the “straight scoop.” Until he found Sturdy, Josh said it could take hours to figure out what was happening with a client. After talking to his teams, he’d have to sift through support tickets and emails to determine what was happening. The answer was there, but getting to the details was time-consuming and flawed. Josh went on to say,

“Sturdy helps me to do exactly this without having to pull the story together about a client on my own. Before meeting with a client or having client reviews with other executives, I log in to Sturdy. Sturdy tells me what Signals are firing, if clients are happy, upset, confused, if there is a new executive, or if they’re asking for a copy of their contract, and then in minutes, I know exactly what’s going on instead of someone’s interpretation of what’s going on”.

I was blown away by what Josh shared and asked how this correlates to his north star retention. Josh seemed a little slow to answer and hesitant to respond, then with a sly grin and a knock on wood (literally), Josh said,

“Year to date, we haven’t lost any clients in our 100+ segment base, and a big part of that is having our hand on the pulse with Sturdy”.

‍

Sturdy provides Laerdal with the objective voice of the customer so they can improve products, processes, and productivity.

I had the pleasure of sitting down with Laerdal's Mike Evans, Director of Customer Care and Analytics, and Brian Strock, CX Program Manager, to discuss their experience with Sturdy. Laerdal, a multinational company with nearly 2000 employees in 26 countries, develops products and programs for healthcare providers, voluntary organizations, educational institutions, hospitals, and the military worldwide. Laerdal first deployed Sturdy in 2022, then extended its relationship with Sturdy in 2023 and expanded in new divisions and territories, bringing insights to hundreds of their employees daily.

The conversation kicked off with a revelation when Mike shared,

"Before Sturdy, at max, we were getting feedback from 5% of our customer base. What about the other 95%?"

I anticipated a firey follow-up, so I smiled and let Mike continue.

"It doesn't matter what the NPS score is because all the information is scattered everywhere. Everyone relies on surveys and is pointed in the wrong direction entirely. You're seeing a tiny bit of your population. How can you draw objective or quantitatively significant insights from that?"

Naturally, I wanted to know more about the 5% Mike was referring to. He explained that Laerdal has traditionally relied on CSAT and NPS programs for customer feedback. This left Laerdal with a "significant blind spot" in understanding their customers' experiences and identifying product, process, and employee improvement areas. Mike and Brian knew relying on twenty-year-old solutions to modern-day issues wouldn't cut it. Additionally, their employee feedback could have been more reliable as it was subjective and varied significantly between different teams. Brian stated,

"We ran an exercise on a specific enterprise account and asked our client executive, impact manager, and CSM to evaluate how at risk this account was. Their responses were wildly different across the board. We used Sturdy to investigate what's happening and why the three people involved in this account had completely different interpretations.

We wanted an objective means to determine whether there was a risk and proactively find out more, so we turned to Sturdy."

This got me thinking, "You spoke with three different people on three different teams for their feedback on a specific account?" I couldn't imagine how long that process must have taken. That's when Mike chimed in,

"I love Sturdy's objective account summaries. I cannot tell you how much time that saves me and the people in our organization. Taking something that would traditionally take me forever to pull together, and it's done with the press of a button. It's a true lifesaver when, in the past, I'd wade through our Salesforce data."

Through Sturdy's comprehensive and automated approach, Laerdal has improved its understanding of how its customers feel about Laerdal's products and services. This helps them identify risks and areas for improvement and allows them to make proactive data-driven decisions. Moreover, because Sturdy provides this information with "the click of a button," Mike, Brian, and their teams have doubled productivity, significantly reducing time spent sifting through muddled data sources for a source of truth. And as the old adage goes, "Time is money."

‍