Chapter Eight - When - Trey Fischer
"We Wish We Had Known: Everyday Tips from Consultants to Grow Your Business"
#Strategic Planning
#Marketing
WHEN
TREY FISCHER
Kat Lan Tat Services
Contact Center and Customer Service Consultant
katlantat.com / tfischer@katlantat.com
Never underestimate the importance of “when.”
A major East Coast financial investment firm that you have heard of (and you can probably quote their tag line as well) invested heavily in artificial intelligence (AI) to help them identify how they could improve their add-on sales. The AI looked at all their previous customer interactions and marketing attempts to try and identify the patterns of what made their marketing the most successful.
What they found was a fortunate mistake that had been made that had an important outcome.
A couple of years previous, a file intended to send a batch of emails to new customers was corrupted and not sent on time. Nobody realized these emails were not sent until someone stumbled across it a couple months later. Naturally, the company resent the file two months late.
This mistake turned out to be the most successful upsell campaign they had ever run. Why? Not because the advertising was any different, but because of when they sent the advertising. To this particular investment company, that meant millions in additional revenue.
1. Do not overlook the importance of “when!”
A lot of times we get very caught up in answering the other questions, who, what, where and why. I recommend that you spend an equal amount of time thinking about when.
In the example of the investment firm, when they eventually sent the emails, they learned who, what, where and why were not the most important factors.
What they learned is new customers are still getting used to using their services and have not made up their minds yet if they like and/or trust the company in the first three to four months. Customers were, however, more willing to add new services around five to six months after becoming a customer.
2. How to figure out your “when.”
If you sell chocolates and gift baskets, you probably already know your when is tied to Valentine’s Day and Christmas. However, for the rest of us, it can be difficult to figure out.
Sometimes finding your when in marketing might be as easy as reviewing sales data or take-rates you already have recorded. If that does not help, consider performing a test by sending your marketing at different times within the customer lifecycle and record the results so you can identify when marketing is most successful for you.
Trey Fischer has over 26 years of contact center, customer service, and operations leadership experience with companies such as Hewlett-Packard, Duluth Trading Company, Colony Brands (Swiss Colony), Optum and others.
Trey’s contact center service programs have been recognized by CIO Magazine and Consumer Reports as some of the best in the United States for being easy to use and treating customers well.
Kat Lan Tat Services provides consulting to businesses of all sizes. Their customers range in size from sole proprietorships to well-known national and international enterprise brands. Kat Lan Tat Services also provides insurance and human resources consulting.
Trey lives and works out of the Madison, Wis., area.
