Removing Friction

Tyler Gillespie interviewed me for his podcast this week. I call him the Godfather of productized services. I LOVE talking to him and so grateful to have him as a mentor.

The biggest thing I’ve learned from Tyler is about customer experience. He is obsessed with making sure clients are ecstatic about your service. Each interaction you have with clients is an opportunity to wow them.

Example:

When a client first signs up for a service, you send them a confirmation email, a receipt. A small “thanks for signing up, follow this for onboarding.”

OR

You could could send them a GIF-laden email making you feel like the greatest human being in the world, which is what I got when I signed up for a course from The Foundation recently.

From there you could fire off a handwritten note from Handwrytten.

There are so many little things you can do to wow a customer.

One other small thing I’ve noticed is that he calls them “customers” instead of “clients.” I need to unpack that a little more but in traditional video production world, they’re always clients.

Every time I talk to him I implement something new in my business. Right now with Edit Video Calls, clients (customers? hah!) either have too many videos and are requesting too many edits (above the 4 per month plan), or the opposite: we’re struggling to finish 4 videos per month. It’s like pulling teeth with some of them to get approvals on videos or to just be handed a raw Zoom recording.

This is bad for business! The videos we actually finish are really good, I just need to make the process easier.

I need to make it easier to finish videos. I need to remove friction.

So starting today I’m going to reach out to those clients and suggesting some ideas to help them out and get more videos to the finish line. Questions to ask off the top of my head:

Are your Zoom recordings in a Dropbox folder you can share with me? From there we can see what you have, make transcripts, and start finding clips.

Have you spoken on a webinar lately? Can I reach out to the host on your behalf and see if they can share the recording? Happy to do that for you.

Can we set up a short check in Zoom call where I can interview you? If you haven’t recorded a Zoom call in a while, this would be a good way to get some new footage. No charge of course.

I’m going to start with these three and see what happens. I know my clients are busy - if they weren’t, they’d be making videos themselves.

I need to figure out how to automate this check in email too, so if they have no activity in their SPP account for 2 weeks, I can automatically fire off this nudge email.

These little touches are important! I have to remember how I felt when I got that awesome email from Foundation, and then try to deliver that feeling to my own clients with every interaction!