Surprising and Delighting Your Customers with ChurnZero

In the last decade, the concept of “surprising and delighting” your customers has become mainstream. For many companies, this has become a major marketing strategy and part of the overall customer experience.

Many of us thrive on unexpected moments. Likewise, when customers experience surprises while interacting with a company, their experience will be memorable. Whether this surprise comes in the form of a birthday wish, a congratulatory note, or another unexpected interaction, these tactics can delight your customers and elevate your brand.

Wondering where to start? Check out these 3 ideas on how your team can surprise and delight customers using ChurnZero.

Using Plays for Congratulatory Messages

ChurnZero’s powerful automation known as Plays can do more than simplify the repetitive parts of your day. Plays can be a fun tool for congratulating your customers on their usage milestones or other pertinent news.  

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

When utilizing product usage data, automated Plays can be created for milestones like these:

• Customer Anniversary
  • Your Chief Customer Officer receives an email to send a Happy Anniversary message to the executive sponsor of the customer.
• Usage Milestones
  • A congratulatory in-app message is automatically sent to users when they reach key milestones, such as their 100^th login or their 100^th or 1000^th minute spent in the application. Promoting and celebrating product adoption within your app allows you to celebrate these achievements in real time.

Also consider the information your team gathers regularly from outside sources like LinkedIn or Google News. Data from external sources like these also provide opportunities to delight your clients. A few of our favorite Plays using external data sources include:

• Funding Congratulations
  • A customer who may have recently received funding or reached a major corporate milestone can be congratulated with a personalized In-App message (and maybe even 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 Customer Success Manager.
• 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.

Plays like these can involve more than just your Customer Success team. Consider ways to get the rest of your company involved:

• A Go-Live Congratulations from your CCO or Sales Team
  • When a customer goes live, a Play can be triggered to create a task for the original Sales Account Executive who closed the client.
  • For this Milestone or any others, a Play can be triggered to post an in-app announcement congratulating the customer on going live, signed by the CCO or CEO.
• A Thank You Message from your Product Team
  • Three months after going live, customers can receive a message you’re your Product team. This note thanks the customer for being part of the community and inviting them to give feedback on their experiences. 

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 way to start:

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

Another approach involves using reporting and external tools like Google Data Studio to create user Leaderboards. Seeing where you rank relative to your peers can be a powerful motivator. Since many people like to keep score, this is a great way to foster user engagement.

Consider this process:

1. ID the 5 top activities that users take within your application. Assign and weight a score to each activity.
2. Each week use Live Exports and analyze this data via 3rd party visualization tools.
3. Using your data visualization tool, develop a leadership dashboard that can be shared with the team.

Above all remember that the most successful Leaderboards are encouraging, never discouraging!

Incentivizing Customer Onboarding

Customer Success professionals know that user onboarding has the power to make or break a customer relationship. Proper onboarding encourages success behaviors and is an essential part of the customer lifecycle, ensuring 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, when incentivizing customer onboarding, 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 ideas of how you can incentivize your own onboarding process:

• 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, here’s an 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 unlock an additional trial period.

Looking for more ways to propel your ChurnZero Experience?
Stay on the lookout for future customer-only webinars and content in our weekly customer newsletter. Each week we’ll bring you tips, answer customer questions and provide new opportunities for you to engage and share with your peers. We hope you’ll join us!