Rainy Day Ideas For Things You Can Build To Grow Your Business

https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/rainy_day_ideas

by fraXis • 13 years ago

184 57 13 years ago

training.kalzumeus.com

Zikes4• 13 years ago

> You don't get Bob's phone number on sign-up? Oh come on, that's a weak excuse. You have his name, email address, and Google. You an almost certainly locate most customers in this circumstance if you cared to.

I wouldn't mind at all if I received such communication via any means I had provided to a business, but I'd be fairly upset if Random Startup B - whose service I demoed for a month and ultimately decided against - suddenly called me on a number I never gave them after I had already decided not to do any further business with them.

An email asking for a phone number would be perfectly acceptable. It would positively affect my opinion of the company and could go some distance towards gaining me back as a customer, but calling me on a number I never gave would be a pretty significant final nail in that coffin.

dpcx• 13 years ago

I think this is directed towards paying clients who are cancelling. Not to someone who demo'd an app.

Zikes4• 13 years ago

I should clarify, sometimes I'll pay for a month of a service and consider that a demo/trial.

simonswords82• 13 years ago

You're sold to on a daily basis by people who you've never had the faintest communication with...

Therefore, if an app owner genuinely felt that his app was going to fix your problem, and you have displayed an interest in having your problem fixed by signing up to his app, why wouldn't you want the app owner to understand more about why his app didn't work for you? Hypothetically let's say that the 5 minute conversation he had with you then led to a change to the app that actually solved your headache - would that make the phone call acceptable?

I completely understand that we all hate cold calls, me included, I'm just trying to understand why you would be so upset.

Zikes4• 13 years ago

I'm personally rather sensitive to unsolicited phone calls because they are both interruptive and unexpected. There are only a few windows in my day when I would be interested in talking to someone on the phone, and if I need to communicate with someone outside of those windows of availability I generally need to take some special actions to make myself available.

I have made it a point to put myself on the national Do Not Call registry, so I know that any phone calls I would receive during the day are generally important enough to justify the interruption and I will try to answer rather than let it go to voicemail.

You know that junk mail you'll get sometimes that has no sender information, but is made to look in some way important or personal? Maybe it looks like a bill, or it's in a greeting card envelope. So you have to open it up to find out what's in there, and lo and behold it's an offer for 50% off six months of DirecTV and three months of free HBO to boot. Maybe it's just me, but that's the sort of thing that drives me crazy, and I look at those sorts of phone calls the same way.

pyrocat• 13 years ago

Because it's a shocking invasion of privacy.

patio112• 13 years ago

This is feedback which, candidly, you just won't hear that often when you call up office manager Mary at Happy Teeth Dental at the landline number (distributed to several hundred thousand people) which routes to a box on Mary's desk that she is, quite literally, employed to answer. Mary can authorize purchases of thousands of dollars of software. In addition to not being offended by phone calls (Mary is quite good with cutting them short, politely, if she doesn't want to continue them -- c.f. this is her job), Mary can give you very useful and immediately actionable feedback on them, such as "We couldn't use your application because it doesn't work on the doctor's iPad and that's the only screen he can access in the back of the office." You want to hear that even if you have 0% chance of ever getting a penny from Mary.

If one hypothetically is mortally terrified of sounding like a salesman, you could preface the call with "I don't want your money since $SOFTWARE wasn't right for you, but if you have two minutes, I'd like to hear what went wrong so I can fix it and help our other customers."

Zikes4• 13 years ago

I would say there's a significant difference in this scenario between calling a customer company and a customer individual. Your article painted the picture of calling an individual named "Bob", not "the receptionist of Bob's Law LLC". I think the practice would be perfectly acceptable in the latter case.

bdunn• 13 years ago

Another option would be to simply ask someone when canceling why they're canceling. It's not as conversational as a phone call, but you can get juicy bits of info like...

"Out of business. Too little, too late..."

"Working on-site with corporate clients for foreseeable future, so using their project management software."

"Not integrated with zapier or basecamp."

...Which I would not have been able to get just by seeing so-and-so canceled. Very rarely does anyone Christmas-tree the textarea, and it literally takes a few minutes to add to your "Close Account" page.

(Takeaways for future planning: Help low tier accounts stay in business, e.g. education; Whitepaper on convincing your clients to use Planscope; Think about Zapier/Basecamp integration)

orangethirty3• 13 years ago

People. Read this every day. Then hit the phones. Patio just made you a million bucks with this comment.

aaronbrethorst• 13 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cf.

joeag2• 13 years ago

This is such good advice and it works. For anyone who's afraid to do this, let me know and I'll do it for you, I'll call it CCCAAS (calling cancelled customers as a service) and I'll generate a report that shows all customers contacted, why they cancelled, or didn't renew, and as a bonus, how many we reactivated for you!

tlogan• 13 years ago

I hate calling people like that (as all developers), but nice follow up call does wonders. Much more than follow up email.

Not everybody is offended (actually very rarely). Also a lot of your potential customers are probably doing their business mainly over a phone.

nthj• 13 years ago

> I hate calling people like that (as all developers)

My assistant loves doing stuff like this, and paying her $MUCH_LOWER_THAN_MY_BILLABLE_RATE to save me time is a no brainer. (patio11 will be along shortly to encourage me to switch to weekly rates to avoid this scenario entirely, but yeah.) Calling up prospects to get their feedback on a product idea and chatting for 10 minutes, sending emails saying "hey, thanks for meeting with us today! We're especially excited about X and you can expect to from from us next week about Y", gently nudging clients about overdue invoices, etc. There's an upfront investment, but then you are able to focus on more higher-level stuff looking forward.

brc• 13 years ago

Sounds suspiciously like 'I don't like people phoning me. I don't like phoning people. I don't want to do this'.

And that's fine, but just be aware that you're leaving money and customers on the table.

terrellm• 13 years ago

I sell a SaaS product with an average price of around $18/month. We (my wife and I) aren't afraid to pick up the phone and call someone... even if it means finding their phone number on a website or online phone book.

The typical account expired / billing problem call is usually along the lines of the customer saying something like "I got your emails and have been meaning to get my billing info updated... can you help me with that now?". Customer saved, churn rate decreased, customer lifetime value increased.

The occasional cancellation request call often starts with us saying "I understand you had some questions about [our product]. How can I help you?". Next, the customer says "I like your product but it [was too expensive / did not have feature X / seemed hard to use] and I want to cancel." We always agree to honor the request but also add a "well did you know...". Our save rate is over 75%. Again customer saved, churn rate decreased, customer lifetime value increased.

If a customer took the time to sign up for your product, try it out, and maybe even give you money... they recognize they have a problem that needs solving. Sometimes a personal call can be a great way to help a customer find a solution to their problem.

I can't recall the last time we had someone be anything but appreciative when we called them. The world moves so fast nowadays and life gets in the way, so people can easily become distracted. A little personal touch can sometimes go a long way.

keiferski• 13 years ago

Good stuff, but:

I really don't want SAAS companies calling me to ask why I canceled. Email is great, thanks. Maybe it's different for larger customers, but if I get a random phone call from a company I pay <$100/month, I'll probably like you less.

dangrossman3• 13 years ago

There's no reason to limit your dunning to a single followup e-mail and 3 days to fix. If that goes out on a Friday, it's almost as bad as just cancelling the customer on the first billing failure.

With Improvely, I follow up and re-try the charge after 1 day, then 3 days after that, then 7 (with an e-mail each time about when the next attempt will be), which gives them almost two weeks. Enough people fix the problem after a few days that this retains a lot of subscriptions that nobody meant to cancel. Often it's just a matter of giving someone time to call their bank to tell them not to decline the charge -- with international customers especially, it's often the bank doing the blocking for fraud-prevention reasons.

Which brings up another thing -- if you can build an "inactive" flag into your app, that's 100% better for retention and recapturing past customers than deleting accounts. If someone accidentally lets their payment lapse and tries to log in to find their account no longer exists, and all the work they've put into setting up or configuring your service has to be redone, they're very likely to stay cancelled. If they log in show them a "welcome back, your account's still here, enter your payment info to reactivate immediately" screen.

As far as Patrick's advice for handling plan upgrades, I'd add one more tip: Build in some logic to never upgrade someone within X days of their billing date. Combined with the automatic warning at 80%/90% usage so they know they're getting close to needing to upgrade, making sure you never surprise them with a higher bill 2 days before their renewal goes a long way to keeping everyone happy. I've only ever had one customer reply to a mail about nearing the limits of his plan that he didn't want to upgrade and pay more, and he was completely happy after I offered a discount off the published cost.

maxkleb12• 13 years ago

Interesting point you bring up around international payments - to move slightly off topic for a minute - we have an issue whereby we are a UK based company yet 75% of our paying (recurring) customers are from the US. We have payment declines each day from our US customers and it is often because their payments have been declined by the "issuing bank" or at least that's what Paypal tells us. We're just about to move to Braintree payments but wanted to see whether in your experience (or anyone else for that matter) when you process payments from overseas do you see declines or is this more of a Paypal issue which should be resolved if we moved to Braintree / other payment solution ?

dangrossman3• 13 years ago

I bill all recurring customers through a traditional merchant account and gateway (like Braintree offers). Making this switch is not likely to solve the problem -- "card declined by issuer" is the exact reason I get for the international payments that get declined for no reason -- usually fixed as soon as the customer calls their bank.

http://i.imgur.com/Uw2Zowz.png

noir_lord• 13 years ago

If you are in the UK and you are billing monthly then I've had nothing but a good experience with these guys so far http://gocardless.com and of course DD's don't expire like a card does.

adrianhoward2• 13 years ago

Just out of curiosity - did you A/B test direct debits vs CC? If you haven't I'd strongly recommend giving it a whirl.

I did it with one client and credit cards came out way ahead on conversions (this was for a B2B app) - as in low double digits better.

jabbernotty• 13 years ago

> credit cards came out way ahead on conversions (this was for a B2B app)

Was this with American businesses?

I'm asking because I find the use of credit cards to be somewhat rare in the most of Europe. I may be mistaken though. I'm wondering if this is likely to hold for Europe.

unreal37• 13 years ago

1) I think that reminding people a month in advance that their credit card will expire next month is better than telling them the payment failed and giving them 3 days to fix it or lose service.

In fact, there's almost no reason you can't give them a week or two to pay since it's SaaS we're talking about. They may need time to get approvals, to get the new company CC number/expiry, etc. 3 days is super short.

2) I like the idea of picking customers who are near the upper limit of their plan, and pitching them a small incremental upgrade to a (not advertised) higher level plan.

So if someone is in the 90 rabbit range, they may be intentionally trying to say below their 100 limit. If you offered them a 200 limit for an extra $X a month, < than the next higher plan of 500 rabbits), they might bite and that would be free revenue.

3) What about ABC? Should you or could you pitch another product as part of the cancellation/update your cc emails? That is an important customer touchpoint and a time to remind them what else you sell.

4) What about offering a pause option? I've had companies (like Audible.com) who contact you when you attempt to cancel and ask if you would rather put your account on hold for a few months. Maybe what they need is more time to make a decision.

kondro• 13 years ago

A reminder a few days before is probably better. I usually don't receive new credit cards until a week or two out from expiration from my banks.

cpursley• 13 years ago

Love it. I've been spending the last week on copy for transactional emails for an app.

But, like other's have said about the phone #... I think it's largely generational, but I won't sign up for a web app that requires my phone # unless I really really have no other options.

miles_matthias• 13 years ago

It's great seeing service ideas from people with experience in the SaaS industry. These ideas spur fun weekend projects.

Paul_D_Santana• 13 years ago

Wow, what a great article! I have a few web applications to automate certain processes that I created for internal use at my corporation. Of course, there are no billing issues since it's for employee use only, but there are other issues like a PC is offline, or someone doesn't have access, etc.

I'm going to take this idea and every time there is an issue like the above, I will have the web app automatically email me AND the person. In this way, the conversation will get started automatically. This will help me to communicate with users and hopefully increase engagement.

If anyone has any other ideas on how to apply this to applications for internal company-use, please post!

plinkplonk2• 13 years ago

In India we have legislation which allows you to put your phone number on a 'Do Not Call' list. Telemarketers have to be registered with central authority and are not supposed to call people on the DNC list. The first violation (call, sms whatever) gets you a warning, and the second gets your telephone disconnected and hits you with a heavy fine.

I am delighted to report all unsolicited SMS es and calls, and get a kick out of "This telemarketer has been disconnected for unsolicited marketing" reports.

The system doesn't work uniformly well across the country yec, but it is getting better and spam SMS and call levels have come down to almost non existent levels, and any occasional calls are reported pronto. Anybody trying these tricks in India had better be prepared to get their telephone disconnected and pay some heavy fines.

teach• 13 years ago

I think you'll find that calling a current customer to find out why they are cancelling does not fall under any country's definition of telemarketing.

plinkplonk2• 13 years ago

oh it does. The law is pretty clear. Here in India, I, the recipient of a call, decide what is unsolicited telemarketing.

Whether a company has/had a commercial relationship with me is irrelevant, especially in a case like the OP provides, where I have not given the company my phone number and the caller got it through some sneaky data mining. If it is an unsolicited call, and the recipient feels it is spam, register a complaint and the caller gets punished.

Pretty good policy imo, keeps such nasty shenanigans down.

EwanG• 13 years ago

Having read through most of the site and being on the newsletter, I find the biggest problem with this being a focus on SaaS. Not that it is a bad thing, but when my business is selling Video Novel/Select Your Own Adventure software, it seems like so little of this applies. Just me?

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