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Q.

Dear Abby Hammer,

One of our 2021 initiatives revolves around taking more opportunities to surprise and delight our customers. We view these as a great opportunity to elevate our brand and overall CX.

We once relied upon touchpoints like direct mailings, but this has become difficult with remote work. Do you have any suggestions of how we can leverage your tool to surprise and delight customers inside our application?

— Seeking to Stand Out

A.

Dear Seeking to Stand Out, 

Many of us thrive on unexpected moments. Likewise, when customers experience surprises while interacting with your brand, their experience will be memorable.  

If you’re wondering where to start, check out these 3 ideas. They’re great ways to use ChurnZero to delight your customers. 

Using Plays for Congratulatory Messages 

ChurnZero’s automation (known as Plays) can do more than simplify the repetitive parts of your day. Plays are a great tool for congratulating customers on usage milestones or other pertinent news.   

Take a moment to think through the usage data you already collect using ChurnZero. Consider how that information can be applied to create surprises and personalized experiences for your customers.  

When utilizing this usage data, automated Plays can be created for milestones. Ideas include: 

• Customer Anniversary 

• • Your Chief Customer Officer receives a task to send a Happy Anniversary message to the executive sponsor of the customer. 

• Usage Milestones 

• • Use automation to send a congratulatory in-app message to users when they reach key milestones, such as their 100th login or their 1000th minute spent inside your application. 
  • Best of all, promoting and celebrating product adoption within your app allows you to celebrate these achievements in real time. 

Be sure not to forget the information your team gathers regularly from outside sources like LinkedIn or on calls. These are fantastic opportunities to celebrate your clients. A few of my favorite Plays using external data sources include: 

• Funding Congratulations 

• • A customer who recently received funding or reached a major corporate milestone can be congratulated with a personalized In-App message (and perhaps with a fun GIF!) 

• Promotions 

• • If you happen to see on LinkedIn that a customer recently received a promotion, you can automatically deploy a congratulatory email from their CSM. 

• Online Reviews 

• • Did your customer just write a review on G2 Crowd or TrustRadius for your organization? Send them a quick In-App thank you message from your Marketing or Customer Success Team. 

  

Gamifying Your Product Usage 

Gamification offers another opportunity to engage your clients in unexpected ways. Applying game mechanics like points and badges to your product helps boost engagement and encourages successful product usage. 

Consider creating a Play that measures key milestones along your customer’s journey. Leverage your usage data such as Logins or Activities to create a scoring system for your customer’s users. From there, you can identify and congratulate specific users based on their recent activity.  

Here's one play for gamifying product use: 

1. Identify which types of activities generate success on your platform. 

1. 1. Is it the number of email campaigns you send? Or other types of activities completed within your product? 
2. For each 30-day interval, measure these activity types on a user-by-user basis. Use reporting to identify each month’s “Power Users."
3. Using In-App Messages, create an automated Play to deliver Award Badges. These fun graphics can be sent to your Power Users to celebrate their achievement. 

 

Incentivizing Customer Onboarding 

We all know that onboarding has the power to make or break a customer relationship. Proper onboarding encourages success behaviors and ensures customers start on the right foot. 

Some of our most successful customers incentivize user activity during onboarding. They do so as both an accelerator to onboarding and to delight their new users. 

As with gamifying usage, consider the behaviors that drive successful client outcomes. For some organizations this may be the number of logins or the time spent in your app. For others, characteristics like messages sent or content created may be better suited. 

Here are two ways to incentivize your own onboarding process (while delighting your users): 

• Rewards 

• • Just prior to going live, the account’s CSM can announce a competition awarding a gift card or another token of appreciation to the most active user.  
  • This is a great way to create friendly competition among your users while also accelerating product use, incentivizing important activities and of course, surprising and delighting your new customers.  

• Extending Your Free Trial 

• • If your business offers free trials, consider this unconventional approach. Enable trial users to extend their free trial by completing certain onboarding milestones.  
  • This approach helps encourage new users to effectively utilize your product while, at the same time, incentivizing your users to complete onboarding in order to extend their trial period.  

 

Submit your Dear Abby Hammer Question: 

Do you have a question for ChurnZero’s Chief Customer Officer? Submit your question to Abby Hammer using the following form. 

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