adminGetting ghosted by a customer sucks. You know you can help them get more value out of the system, but they just won’t respond. This is extra frustrating if their health is trending down or their usage flatlining. So how can you avoid this? I’ve found that the key actually is during the start of the relationship, not when they’re already dormant.
Setting Up the Relationship Early
You need to accept that each relationship won’t be perfect…..deep breath, you can do it. Ok, now it’s time to set expectations for the relationship.
What i’ve done in the past was ask each customer the best way to get ahold of them (text, email, call, carrier pigeon, etc), and let them know that we will reach out if we think we can help them be more successful AND asked permission to contact them if we saw engagement drop off.
This provided a base to the relationship and the expectation that we would contact them when it was beneficial to them, NOT to just “check-in”. It also gave us their preferred mode of contact.
Set Criteria for Reactivation
You need to decide how best to reach out to dormant customers and when you should do that. Along with that, if you can automate any part of the process to reduce the time needed that is fantastic.
We realized with a large number of customers per CSM, it would be really hard to follow up with everyone in a customized way. We decided to automate our attempts to reactivate accounts that had gone dormant as a first pass.
Our criteria was pretty straightforward. If someone hadn’t logged in within 90 days, we would automate an email / text (not able to do this if the customer prefers a call) with basic personalization. We would refer back to our initial conversation and agreement about reaching out if we saw them falling off the path.
We’d also send a reply to that email if they hadn’t logged back in or replied in 2 days (always send a reply email to customers a day or two after if they don’t interact, it’s a great way to increase your response rate by a lot!).
Very simple criteria and setup! The first email has a solid 28% open rate and the reply email has a 29% open rate. The best part is that these emails got about 9% of all dormant accounts to re-activate.
After that, we could prioritize a more personalized outreach via phone or other channel, but automating it this way definitely saved us some time.
For us the most helpful things we did was setting up the relationship upfront, and automating part of the reactivation process to reduce time spent.