“Is Lucky Day real?” 

The app’s free sweepstakes model seemed too good to be true for many new users, and despite the company reporting more than $13 million in awarded cash and prizes since its 2015 launch, the question was the lotto and gaming app’s most commonly asked. 

“Resolving this question is difficult because it’s not easy to build trust over the internet, and it’s even harder to prove the validity of our winners,” Leddy Stroud, Lucky Day’s customer success manager, said. 

Difficult? Yes. Impossible? No.

In 2019, the app added the “Winner’s Community,” a section that continuously populates every Lucky Day winner and subsequent prize. The launch was a result of efforts by Stroud and his colleagues, customer success specialists Esther Cha and Lauren Pruitt, to address user trust.

“We drew out this live feed feature, worked with one of our product managers and pitched it directly to our CEO Josh Javaheri,” Stroud said. “Three months later, engineers made it live on the app.”

Within a few weeks, Stroud said Lucky Day saw new user retention double after they clicked on the “Winner’s Community” feature. 

“The number of users who have contacted us about whether or not Lucky Day is real has also dropped by over 70 percent,” Stroud said.

By quantifying and prioritizing user feedback, responding swiftly to user inquiries, and collaborating across Lucky Day’s teams on new features and branding tactics, Stroud said the customer success team has been able to continue to build user trust. 

Built In LA connected with Stroud, Cha and Pruitt to dive into Lucky Day’s customer feedback strategies and learn how else the CS team, internally referred to as the “voice of the customer,” has supported product iterations that establish user trust.

First off, how did you measure the impact of the “Winner’s Community” feature?

Stroud: One of the first things I set up in my role was a tagging system through Zendesk. As we respond to user inquiries, we can now tag it to gather quantitative data, prioritize the issues people contact us the most about and identify which issues we can solve for the fastest. Our most frequently asked question for a while was, “Is Lucky Day real?” Once we implemented our winner’s feature, we saw that tagged issue significantly drop without the number of users dropping. 

How else does Lucky Day’s CS team share user data across the organization? 

Stroud: We work directly with our data team to identify an issue’s scope, create tickets in Jira, and communicate with our engineering team until a solution is rolled out. Lauren and Esther also prepare a list each morning that categorizes what users are emailing us about that’s shared in a companywide Slack channel. This way, everyone can see what our users are talking about within the last 12 hours, and we can see if any new issues have cropped up or any existing issues remain. I also make three weekly reports based on our user feedback tagging system that I send to every Lucky Day team lead and the product and engineering teams. 

Has the CS team led other initiatives to establish more user trust? 

Cha: The “Winner’s Community” feed on the app is great, but it’s only visible to those within the app. We built out an Instagram handle (@winnersofluckyday) dedicated to winners to show both app and non-app users how real people are winning. Today that handle has more than 50,000 followers. I think it’s gained so much success because people can relate.

Lauren and Esther, we heard your team tackles 15,000 customer inquiries a month. What’s a normal week look like for you? 

Pruitt: We start each week with generally the same priorities, reviewing our backlog of requests and responding between the two of us. As the week goes on, then Esther and I start to handle different responsibilities in managing our social media presence. I go through and read every comment on every post, then I respond to each one in a positive, quick and informative way. We want our users to feel heard. 

Cha: We also get a lot of imposter Instagram accounts posing as Lucky Day and offering winners prizes that don’t exist, so my job is to go through Instagram, play detective, see what they are falsely communicating to our users and report these accounts. Our users have to trust us. 

Walk us through a time users showed frustration with a Lucky Day feature change. What was it, and how did your team respond? 

Stroud:  When users play our games, they have the chance to win cash or tokens, which are redeemed for gift cards and other prizes. We also have a leaderboard that awards $10 to the user who has won the most tokens in a 24-hour period. In our newer version of the app, we introduced a third currency called “trophies” that replaced tokens on certain games to help users move up the leaderboard. Instead of one daily winner with tokens, under the new trophy system, the top five places win cash prizes. Upon rollout, people were upset because they didn’t understand that we actually upped their chances of winning by increasing the number of daily leaderboard winners. 

Pruitt: Our users were quick to voice over email and social media that they didn’t like this feature, which was largely due to confusion. Once we let them know that we were actually creating more chances for them to win by responding directly to their comments and email, we were able to turn that conversation into something positive. 

How is the CS team brought in to collaborate on product changes?

Stroud: I meet weekly with our CEO and every other week separately with our senior engineering manager and head of product to discuss future state. Additionally, our product managers send us materials every two to three weeks for the three of us to review to make sure that what they’re creating, like ad copy or new feature instructions, will resonate with Lucky Day users. 

Lastly, what advice do you have for other CS teams to build trust with users?

Pruitt: If you oversee social media accounts, take a look at how other brands interact with their users. That’s what I did when I started, and I noticed people tend to respond better to things like funny comments, smiley faces and actual help.

Cha: In general, users of apps like Lucky Day’s don’t respond well to change. When new features are released, it’s important to explain to them exactly how it works, why it will improve their experience and then give them time to get used to it. More often than not, they come around to liking it.