Growth is a double-edged sword. Startups need to expand to sustain themselves. But if they grow too fast too quickly, they run the risk of delivering a poor customer experience.
At Kard, we’re trying to strike a balance — and the way we’re doing that is by proactively streamlining our operations.
As our product team builds a fully self-service rewards platform, my ad ops team is filling in the gaps, decreasing the time account managers have to spend helping customers configure campaigns and increasing the time they have to surface key insights, offer strategic guidance, and build deep relationships.
Below, I share what we’re doing, how we’re doing it, and the impact these changes have had on our agility.
Reinventing reporting
Having worked at an ads agency in the past, I know the critical role reporting plays in merchant marketing. Merchants need transaction and redemption offer data to:
- Keep track of budgets
- Understand pacing
- Monitor burn
- Show overall performance aggregated with other channels
- Make strategic decisions
Before, we would share relevant offer data on a monthly basis, and account managers would pull out potential stories in the data. While this exercise was certainly helpful to our merchants, it wasn’t as impactful as it could be.
Working with my team, we created a standard weekly reporting template, with all the information merchants needed for their analysis. This report gets sent to Kard users every Monday, enabling them to:
- Share progress in their afternoon status meetings
- Action on the data throughout the week
- Measure the results of their efforts next week
Accelerating campaign launches
Historically, Kard’s account managers would configure campaign launches on their own. This took hours of hands-on keyboard time that they could’ve spent servicing customer requests. And it also led to inconsistencies across campaigns — every AM had their own way of using Kard.
To give AMs their time back (and to establish best practices that could be baked into Kard’s product in the future), my team created a campaign template and standard operating procedure (SOP). All the AM has to do is submit the customer’s offer preferences and commission rates.
Just three months into using this new template, we were launching campaigns 25% faster.
At the same time, we were able to recognize and advocate for several product updates, such as automatically pulling store lists and building an asset upload portal.
Restructuring the onboarding process
I know there will always be anomalies in any workflow, no matter how much I try to refine it. But the best way I’ve found to streamline things is to identify the things that need to happen every single time and make them go faster.
For example, every time we launch a new merchant’s offers, we need their:
- Ad copy
- Logo
- Banner
- Landing page URL
Instead of trying to hunt these down at various stages of the onboarding process, we’ve moved the request up in the workflow. As soon as a Kard account executive closes a deal, they ask for these assets — even before they intro the customer to an account manager.
It’s a very small change, but getting these materials upfront has: (1) allowed our team to reduce wait time and (2) allowed our customers to finalize and launch their campaign much quicker.
Cutting time to launch in half
My ultimate goal for ad ops is to cut customer launch time in half by the end of 2024. That deadline is fast-approaching — and we’re almost there! To get us across the finish line, I’m taking an even harder look at our processes to see where we can make slight adjustments for maximum impact.
Being an advocate for customers is my passion. So as we make these changes, I’m always thinking about how we can build some of them into the Kard product to make it easier for merchants and issuers to get up to speed.
To follow our journey and stay up to date with Kard’s latest product-related announcements, follow us on LinkedIn.
And if you’re on the fence about card-linked offers or want to learn more about their benefits, you might like another post I contributed to: How the best merchants integrate card-linked offers into their omnichannel strategy.
