A micro-case study in CX: CoSchedule

I blog (and podcast) a lot around customer experience, and I’m usually on the go working with clients or at conferences/speeches/etc. Sometimes, though, a micro-case study in customer experience drops right into my lap. This can happen at airports (actually often happens at airports based on how the brands are interacting with harried travelers) or other random places. This past week I had a digital one come up: CoSchedule.

What is CoSchedule? 

Essentially, it’s content marketing editorial calendar software for WordPress. We use it on this blog and on my podcast too. When we put together a post or an episode, we can schedule it and my collaborators can adjust elements of the post. We can also push it out on a social calendar so that it may show up on your Facebook 2-3 weeks later, etc. There are a bunch of cool features, including marketing calendars and social media analytics. If you have a WordPress site, I’d definitely recommend it.

The Pros of CoSchedule from a CX perspective

I don’t deal directly with CoSchedule that much, but my collaborators do — and they are apparently very proactive in dealing with customers and resolving pain points. I love that. And as for my concept of customer-driven growth engines? Well, CoSchedule has tripled in size in the last few years. Focusing on the needs of the customer really does work. They are a great micro-example.

A few months back, as one small example, I wanted a few tweaks to how I shared my podcast on social media. Within the current system, ’twas a challenge. But CoSchedule was able to work with my team and get some things in place that I really liked. Amazing customer experience. I like to see brands building around that.

The flip side

There are a couple of “buggy” elements, though. When the CoSchedule program shares out to LinkedIn, sometimes it will replace the headline of your post with “Image.” This confuses people and leads to less readership. Similarly, my team put our weekly recap emails on Saturdays — that’s when CoSchedule sends you how many posts you did that week, the social shares, etc. The problem? Oftentimes, these numbers are wrong. I generally post twice a week (a podcast and a blog), so each Saturday should say “Two new posts.” Sometimes it does, but sometimes the number is off. And, with all the various automation push-outs we have for social, we average about 36 shares a week. But sometimes this recap email will say “7 shares” (I’ll be confused) or “151 shares” (what?). It’s buggy.

This is less good customer experience, but of course, there’s a path to resolution.

How you wow customers

We contacted them about some of these issues, and they fully explained the backstory and how they’re working on improving them. And we’re back: excellent customer experience.

I bring this story up because there are probably over 100 different marketing/social media automation/editorial calendar options and suites out on the market. Since WordPress is a dominant hosting platform, my team and I could use any number of different plug-ins or concepts. But even when the customer experience of CoSchedule seems less than ideal, they are there trying to solve problems. And that’s always going to lead to retained business (which I am) and organic referral (which is what I’m doing right now; was not paid in any way for this).

A small example, but hopefully a powerful one, on how important CX is to modern business.