Rate It is an Australian start-up which creates easy-to-use customer-service ranking technology for retail and online stores. It allows customers to rate their experience within seconds. Rate It’s CEO Michael Momsen co-hosts Customer Experience Leaders, a fortnightly podcast celebrating great CX with experts from world-leading brands.
The Challenge
The team at Rate It is passionate about delivering great customer experience. Many business-type podcasts lack quality, Michael says, containing “industry-agency jargon …that often have these long, long, long interviews” with just a few nuggets of practical advice. There was a gap in the audio space for deep diving into CX, and Michael thought, “Let’s do it!”
The Audience
The types of people listening to the podcast include CX professionals, like someone from the financial sector who’s focused on initiatives and programs to do with customer experience. Also, the audience may include sales and marketing teams who care about improving their relationships with clients. Listeners also include small business owners who are passionate about delivering quality customer experiences.
Key Insights
Michael equates podcasting to the early days of Instagram.
“If you try to come onto Instagram now and you get a million followers and be an influencer, it’s very, very hard because that space is so noisy and there’s lots of people there. But we’re in this golden window of audio where there’s not really a lot of great stuff out there. It is growing, but it’s not like there’s 15 or 30 other really fantastic customer experience podcast shows,” Michael insists.
“We saw [podcasting] as a really unique opportunity to get in early…build a tribe of listeners and people who believe what we believe, and have that passionate dialogue.” – Michael Momsen, CEO Rate It
Distribution & Amplificaton
Michael says they were very focused on launching the podcast with a bang and having a high number of downloads in a short period of time. (This helps catapult the podcast into the top of Apple’s podcast rankings.)
To do this, the team didn’t tell anyone about the show, until launch date; and then, Michael says, “we went out to all our contacts …to download the show and what that did is in the period of the opening week got us in to the top 10 on the iTunes chart.”
LinkedIn has been an important channel to maximise the podcast’s awareness; as well as getting 50+ five-star ratings and reviews within Apple podcasts. If you type the word “Customer Experience” in the search field of Apple’s podcast app, Customer Experience Leaders podcast is the first show to appear.
The Results
Podcasting is a long-term game for Rate It, Michael says: “We’re not obsessively going ‘how many leads did we get?’ each week. You know, we see this as a long-term play in building both the relationship with the broader community but also how we think about our brand and what it is that we want to be about.”
Nonetheless, the audience numbers have been incredible. “We’ve had weeks where we’ve been doubling our listenership week-on-week compounding,” Michael says.
Michael equates the engagement to speaking at a conference: “How much would you pay as an organisation to have several thousand people fill a hotel lobby room and see the two of you on stage chatting about whatever topic for the next hour or half an hour and the audience is fully engaged from start to finish? You know it’s incredibly valuable from a branding standpoint, from a marketing standpoint.”
Advice to other brands
Michael is convinced that all companies should have an audio strategy. Creating great audio is very hard to do, he insists, “but when you deliver it well the engagement is phenomenal.”
“If you’re going to do audio, you’re going to do podcasting, I think do it well. I think having someone doing it as a hack for five hours a week here and that can work but I don’t think you’re going to build anything that’s meaningful.
“Really great content, meaningful content that’s well produced, that sounds fantastic, that’s well edited, will rise to the top and it will be worth every penny.”
We interviewed Michael Momsen, CEO of Rate It, on BE Podcasting. Listen here
