SmugMug

The Challenge

SmugMug sought a platform that could help it deliver a level of personalized care that emulated the personal importance its community members place on photos entrusted to the company.

The Results

• By fully understanding the member journey prior to engaging them has resulted in a 10% drop in average replies per conversation.
• The SmugMug team has increased productivity by having all member information on the timeline and no longer having to search across systems.
• SmugMug has been able to reduce the amount of time spent on each member conversation increasing member satisfaction.

“We are able to bring all the details of every transaction a customer has with us directly into the agent’s view, allowing us to spend less time jumping between systems to identify any potential issues and solve them.”

Ben MacAskill, COO, Flickr & SmugMug

SmugMug is a platform where photographers can share their art with the world. Independently owned and bootstrapped for more than 16 years, it remains the best place for passionate photographers to build their online portfolio. In 2018, SmugMug acquired Flickr, the world’s largest photographer centric community. Together, they provide the best ways for photographers around the world to display, share, and sell their photos.

“Photos are deeply personal and important, and our customers entrust them to us. We take that seriously, and we have intentionally built our community to be customer centric,” says Ben MacAskill, COO of SmugMug and Flickr. In fact, SmugMug’s 2nd non-founding hire was in CX, and the first two hires following the Flickr acquisition were to build a brand new CX organization for the platform.

Ben and his team at SmugMug were early adopters of Assistly, which was founded by Kustomer CEO Brad
Birnbaum and CTO Jeremy Suriel. Assistly was eventually sold to Salesforce and became Desk.com. When Ben heard the Assistly founders had created a new platform, he was intrigued.

As with many of our customers, Ben’s favorite platform feature is the customer timeline. He explains, “The timeline view is a simple and elegant way to understand what our customers are doing, and where they are on their journey. We sell subscriptions and also on-demand printed products in an e-commerce marketplace. Being able to rapidly understand what our customers is doing allows us to better help them accomplish their goals.”

“What sold us was the philosophy of how to truly serve the customer. The approach Kustomer set out to build more closely matches how we want to care for our customers than any of the various competitors.”

Ben MacAskill, COO, Flickr & SmugMug