adminWho has the time?
If your internet provider reached out to you to see if you had 15 minutes for them to check in with you during the week, would you say yes?
Probably not, right? You have important things to do, plus your internet service has been fine and you don’t feel like you have anything to talk about. But what if they reached out to talk about upgrading your speed or showing you how to reduce the likelihood of someone hacking your wifi? A bit more interesting at that point.
Put yourself in your customers shoes. They, like you, probably use a bunch of different software tools, and if they are all just “checking-in”, it’s probably more of a hassle than anything. But, if there is a benefit or value add to them, it’s more compelling to meet.
How we learned
We had scheduled “check-ins” throughout our customers journey, but we were noticing that people almost seemed irritated when we gave them a call (or were just awkward).
We then got a great piece of advice: Only reach out to customers with a value add.
This could be fixing a problem, providing guidance, alerting them of a new feature, etc. Make sure that when you contact them, you are delivering a benefit to them
We instantly found it was a lot easier to talk to people when we could tell them exactly WHY we were calling, and what the benefit to them was.
This type of check-in is best if it is driven by customer actions, not a pre-determined schedule. This leads us to a whole different topic, which is creating a contextual alert system to drive your customer communications.