How Brain.fm Achieved a 95% CSAT Score With Help Scout

When you provide a tool that your customers rely on to achieve their daily goals, a common guiding value is a user-first mentality. But what does this actually mean? For Brain.fm, this means achieving as much visibility into and consistency of customer success as possible.

Brain.fm was founded in 2003 by Adam Hewett with the goal of helping people focus, relax, and sleep by way of neuroscience-backed functional music. The team combined experienced musicians and patented technology to create music that synchronizes the brain’s neural activity, helping users achieve their desired state of mind on demand.

It’s safe to say Brain.fm is taking the productivity technology space by storm.

With over 2 million downloads and 100k monthly users (including me as I’m writing this article), power users report an increase of focus by up to 200%, and they’ve been featured in major tech and lifestyle publications like Inc., Forbes, and Lifehacker.

“What our customers love most about the product is the ease in which they’re able to tap into their desired mental state,” said Chandler Perog, Brain.fm’s Chief Operating Officer. “What keeps our customers coming back is the consistency and dependability of the results they get when listening to our music.”

For Perog, this goal of delivering the consistent daily performance of Brain.fm’s product has resulted in an emphasis on excellent customer success interactions.

“Every time we get a support request, we tackle it with a combination of tenacity and compassion," explained Perog. "We’re here to celebrate with our customers when they get a win from using the product and also here when there are questions or concerns."

Brain.fm’s switch to Help Scout in 2018 has helped actualize Brain.fm’s user-first mindset with easy reporting on customer support metrics, tracking and cataloging of common issues, and generating great social proof from positive support experiences.

Brain.fm’s favorite Help Scout features

• Tags: Automatically or manually categorize conversations for easy filtering and product issue triage.

• Workflows: Create events from tags, customer properties, or email content to properly route conversations.

• Reports: Visualize and benchmark customer support performance and identify areas for improvement.

• Happiness report: Discover promoters and happy customers to source social proof.

Measuring and benchmarking great support

Before Help Scout, Brain.fm used Drift and Mailgun for their live chat and shared inbox support. What was lacking with these tools, however, was a bird’s-eye view of the performance of their customer service.

Help Scout solved this pain point: With 10 users and more than 45,000 customer conversations, Brain.fm has used Help Scout to easily visualize their customer success metrics and set data-backed expectations with reports.

Using reports, Brain.fm identified happiness score, first response time, and response to resolution as its most important service metrics — in other words, speed and satisfaction.

“The internal benchmarks of success we like to maintain are keeping our happiness score above 90 and our response time to under an hour. Help Scout makes it effortlessly easy to reference these metrics whenever we need them,” explained Perog.

Reports have not only provided clarity to Brain.fm’s tracking and benchmarking of customer success, but Help Scout’s shared inbox has helped their excellent customer service team thrive.

“In the last 60 days, we have a 95% happiness score, under an hour response time, and a 60% first email resolution," said Perog. "We're excited about these numbers. And yes, it may be because our CS team is listening to Brain.fm while working!”

These positive support experiences have contributed to Brain.fm’s marketing efforts. For example, the customer service team’s tracking of happiness scores easily identifies opportunities to ask customers to share their Brain.fm story.

“We use ‘great’ happiness scores as opportunities for our team to ask our customers for app reviews, which strengthens general positive sentiment, encouraging other prospective customers to purchase, providing great social proof,” said Perog.

Squashing bugs with tags

Help Scout’s easily customizable support flows have helped Brain.fm’s customer service team provide more streamlined conversations. For Perog, the tags feature has proven instrumental in cataloging bugs and visualizing any system-wide issues.

Brain.fm set up Help Scout’s automatic tagging functionality to give real-time insights into any wider issues, as well as isolated incidents — for instance, automatically logging iOS mentions in the email body with an iOS tag.

This enables the customer service team to escalate more complex issues to the right person: “We use workflows to automatically forward particular emails to people outside of the customer service team, so then those Brain.fm employees can provide more context to our customers’ questions,” said Perog.

Help Scout enables the Brain.fm team to provide reliable, intentional, and streamlined customer support, exemplifying user-first values at work.

Get access to scientifically backed music to help you sleep, relax, or focus.

Try the customer support platform your team and customers will love

Teams using Help Scout are set up in minutes, twice as productive, and save up to 80% in annual support costs. Start a free trial to see what it can do for you.

Try for free