Each and every one of you—our customers and partners—play a vital role in the success of ActiveCampaign. For this, on behalf of our whole ActiveCampaign team, I want to say thank you.
Over the past few years, ActiveCampaign has added over 100,000 new customers and has grown all aspects of the business at an accelerated pace, including:
- Scaling our team from 20 employees in 2016 to over 900 today
- Growing our hubs from one in Chicago to six hubs throughout the world, in addition to our remote team members
- Building upon our international momentum with customers growing in 180 countries and expanding our localized language support
- Delivering over 250 billion customer experiences on behalf of our customers
- Improving our platform processing performance (by over 10x)
- Aggressively growing our app ecosystem to over 900 apps and integrations
- Bringing new marketing and sales capabilities to market, including the new ActiveCampaign AI
- Investing in the next-generation foundation of the ActiveCampaign platform
This journey has been, and continues to be, very exciting. However, it is also important to acknowledge that our rapid pace of growth has had some consequences that have adversely impacted many of you.
Our customer experience of late hasn’t been up to our own standards, nor has it been the consistent type of experience we must provide. We have also made several organizational changes and moved quickly on platform rollouts without affording you, our customers and partners, the time to fully absorb the scope of the changes. This has resulted in increased volume for our support team and response times that are far longer than you should expect or deserve. Timely responses to your chat and ticket inquiries should be the expectation, and I assure you that this is our highest priority, and you will see improvement.
We are moving swiftly to dramatically improve your customer experience while massively improving product performance and reliability. You use ActiveCampaign products because you expect and deserve the best. We will meet your expectations. How?
Customer experience initiatives and investments underway:
- Improving our responsiveness
We have rallied over 500 of our employees across the organization, not just those in Support, to tackle our backlog of support tickets and improve response times. Since making this move, we have reduced our average response time by 95%. We’re committed to reducing this even further. - Introducing new channels of helping customers in-app with screen sharing
We will continue to add additional channels to ensure that you can reach us in any manner convenient to you. Operationally, our focus will shift to ensuring that we respond in a timely manner every time, resolve your questions as quickly as possible, and help you evolve your knowledge of ActiveCampaign and become more sophisticated in growing your business. - Designing a new approach to serving customers
We have restructured our Customer Organization to serve you better. In addition to our Onboarding, Implementation, and Client Success teams, two new teams will round out the customer organization—a team of Customer Experience Specialists (your primary contact for all things ActiveCampaign) and a Global Enablement Organization (to help you and your teams become ActiveCampaign product experts). This cleaner approach will simplify how you get answers to all your ActiveCampaign questions. - Launching a new hub in San Jose, Costa Rica to extend hours of support
In May, we opened a hub in Costa Rica, which is customer experience-focused. All employees are either responsible for customer success or platform reliability and performance. By opening a hub here rather than headcount in our existing hubs, we can reach more customers during your working hours, thus improving your experience. - Greater integration of partners and advisors into our product teams
We activated a Customer Advisory Board to help us shape our future product strategy and feature prioritization and advise us on any market-related changes being considered by our board. That means you have more say in what the future of our platform looks like.
Platform initiatives and investments underway:
- Investing in the core of our platform & innovation
Over the past six months, a new email designer was launched, and within the next few months, a new email design workflow will be delivered. AI continues to offer opportunities to automate more efficiently, and new content generation features will be rapidly delivered to complement existing AI features such as predictive sending, predictive content, and win probability. - A new cell-based platform architecture
Moving into multiple data centers, the architecture of ActiveCampaign has been completely reimagined for improved consistency and reliability. We currently have customers live in an EU data center and will open an APAC data center in the second half of 2023. The new cell-based architecture will allow data centers to be located close to where our customers are, anywhere in the world. - Improving our processing speed and capabilities
Since the start of 2023, we have been rolling out a new processing infrastructure, resulting in 10x gains in performance and reliability of processing of campaigns and automations. This is an over 80% improvement in speed and stability of segmentation in recent months, alongside improved platform load times. This is not the end state but rather a step towards continued improvements to enable greater scale, performance, speed, and reliability. - A greater investment in quality
In addition to improving support responsiveness, product managers and engineers are getting closer to our customers and are rotating into support, giving them first-hand knowledge and experience in solving the questions that our clients have. We expect this experience to translate into better product experiences. - Investing in our partner program with a product-led focus
Our partners enable a significant portion of our growth. We are investing in building upon the “product” aspect of our partner programs. Improving the technical capabilities of managing accounts, whether it be basic account management or impacting change across groups of accounts at once.
Our commitment to you is that we will strive to do better—better at responding to your platform questions, better at seeking and implementing your feedback, better at keeping everyone informed about any product changes or trending issues, and lastly, better at anticipating how the business changes we make will impact each of you and your businesses.
Thanks,
Jason
