Hi!

I’m Eric, and I’m one of the people working on Emetti.

I figure you’re either researching customer support solutions or are curious about what we’re up to. In either event, this is a little letter from me to you. It should answer some of your questions.

Let’s get started…

The Emetti vision

Retention > Acquisition

When it comes to growing revenue, most focus on selling. This is understandable, as more potential buyers can’t be a bad thing. That said, it’s harder than most realize. This is because most people don’t like being sold to.

Worse yet, a lot of companies get caught up in hunting for new business. Then, they fail to take care of those who’re already buying. As a result, they lose qualified customers, for the promise of ones that never materialize.

In our work, we noticed that it’s easier to keep customers than reach new ones. So, we generally let prospects find us. Then, we put all our effort into supporting those who buy our products.

We think these people come to us knowing what they want, which means we don’t need to pester them. Also, once we start to work together, it’s easier to convince them of the value we can provide. In time, these relationships result in more dependable cash-flow. This makes our company healthier—which means we can offer even better service.

Patrons not buyers

We run a design studio called smashLAB. Some years ago, we changed how we looked upon our customers. Instead of seeing them as buyers, we started to treat them as our patrons.

This might seem like a minor distinction. In actuality, it’s a pretty big deal. Most of us see buyers as transactional and transitory. The patron/vendor arrangement is a longer-term relationship. It’s through our patron’s continuing support that we can practice our craft and build our product.

Again, some would dismiss this as trivial—but it’s game-changing. Try out this viewpoint. You’ll soon see that you pay patrons more attention than buyers. You also take more time to understand their needs. Also, you start to appreciate that these patrons’ support is your lifeblood.

We commit to the notion that if you focus on your patrons, you’ll build a stable business.

Trust is everything

At some point, we all believed in companies’ promises. Advertising changed that. Now, we all know that there’s little consequence to lying—and that leads many companies to do it. Sometimes these lies are tiny; at other times they’re egregious.

In either event, few of us believe what we hear in advertising any longer. This leads to marketing promises that mean almost nothing. It also makes trust a rare and valuable commodity. Few have it, but those that do get rewarded for it.

Through my work, I’ve seen how trust builds over time. You grow this faith by being of service. That means truly helping where you can, even if doing so means losing a sale. It means putting someone else’s needs above yours. When you do this, you earn trust. With time, this can form a powerful bond.

How we’re building this product

A support focus

As you know, many tools like Emetti already exist. From what we can tell, though, most are sales-focused. Since we base our vision on retention, we focus on building an essential support tool. This helps frame the product, and the decisions we make about it.

In our opinion, support is human. For that reason, we avoid shortcuts. We do so because great support is rarely ever a hurried experience. Take chatbots. Although they offer efficiency, we have yet to experience a good one. Until that changes, you won’t find them listed as an Emetti feature.

We try to bring the human nature of business into our product. This means featuring individual team members in newsfeed posts. This extends to profiles. These offer added information about the individual lending support. And there are other personalization features that we have in the works. One-to-one relationships are important—so we’re baking this idea into our product.

An all-in-one solution

We have no shortage of competitors. We’ve used some of these tools in the past, and many are excellent. That said, we found some shortcomings with them, too.

One was the need to cobble together many different tools. These sometimes overlapped or conflicted—and required coordination between multiple workspaces. As such, we aim to reduce some of this clutter with Emetti, by offering a more integrated support solution.

This means your website visitors see a single user interface discreetly tucked into your website. It’s there when they need it but it doesn’t get in the way of your site content. Plus, on your end, there’s only one workspace for your team to get familiar with.

Inform; engage; assist

At Emetti, we consider support as a layered practice. It involves:

• Informing customers of what you’re doing
• Assisting customers with their questions/challenges
• Engaging customers when something notable occurs

As a result, we are building 4 key tools for delivering this support:

1. A newsfeed for sharing updates
2. Chat for responding to customers
3. Messages for re-engaging your audience
4. A knowledge base as a support repository

We back these tools up with a few supporting pieces. These include:

• A CRM with information about who you’re helping
• A collaborative workspace for your team
• Reporting on activity and trends

As you can likely imagine, this is no small undertaking. As such, some of these pieces aren’t quite there yet. Make no mistake, though, they’re all part of the plan—and well underway. 🙂

The approach we’re taking

For us, by us

We are not only building Emetti. We use it every day with our other products. You’ll see it in use on the websites for Campnab, Pixaver, and even our design studio: smashLAB.

So, we don’t build blindly and hope for the best. Rather, we use Emetti as much as any of our customers. This helps us see what this product needs. It allows us to spot issues we need to fix, and features that could be useful.

Try the product and you’ll see how actively we work on it. Over time, Emetti continues to improve and evolve.

A reasonable fee

Software as a service (SaaS) subscriptions start cheap and sneak up in price. We had this our experience with one popular product. It was handy, but a bit like a puppy that never stopped growing. Soon it cost a small fortune to feed that beast.

We don’t want to do that. Instead, we’re working to keep our rates so low that you hardly notice them. Sure, we have some work to sort out our pricing. It’s still not right, and we admit that. We are on it though.

We hope that every Emetti customer considers their monthly subscription fee insignificant in light of the value we offer.

Fanatical support

I already told you how support-focused we are. I doubt this means much though, as so many say the same. For us, though, support is more than an afterthought; it’s our core marketing approach.

We don’t buy ads, attempt to grow large followings on social media, or have a sales force. Instead, we put our effort into two things: building the product and supporting our customers. We believe that if we offer a good product, and put all our attention into our patrons—we’ll make a company that’s built to last.

This is of huge importance to us because we aren’t in this to build a user-base and flip the product. We want to build something great. Truthfully, it isn’t there yet, but, we continue to strive for that. In time, we’ll get there. 🙂

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I hope the above clarifies what we’re doing, here at Emetti—and why we’re doing it. If you have any questions, please ask. You can start a conversation via chat, or call me at 604-683-2250.

We’d love to help you grow your business healthily and sustainably.

Eric Karjaluoto