This empowers us to present well-grounded design and product choices, sidestepping the protracted debates that stem from speculative opinions like “We believe this aligns with user preferences.” Instead, we confidently state, “Let’s gather additional insights by conversing with 3-5 users and reconvene at the week’s end to dissect the outcomes.”
Before we start
Our sytem
1. Whenever a user doesn't take a crucial action in the app for a month we send them an email
Simple as that, we have an automated system, that checks users activity every day at 5PM.
If any user hasn’t done a our retention activity we send them an email “Hey is everything allright” with a link to typeform.
This email alone nets us about 4 interviews a week.
- Users don’t respond well to direct “Hey we want to talk to you” questions. What we noticed works the best is presenting the interview as an opportunity to ask questions about the product and how they can utilise it more to their benefit
- The other thing we have tried is insterting a “talk to us” prompt right in the product.
2. Allowing users to schedule a call with us right from the product on their own initiative
3. Offer users to book an onboarding call with us after their initial set-up
A very simple and widely used approach that did net us about 2-4 onboarding calls a day.
Since at the time we were mainly worried about our activation and retention rate, it made sense to us to talk to our users at the beginning of their journey and see their experience.
Unfortunately, the no-show rate for these onboarding calls was upwards of 60%. While our automated “How can we help” interview no-show rate was closer to 10-20%, the onboarding calls really suffered from no-shows.
We also did everything in the book to remind users of their commitment by sending a reminder email 24h hours prior, another email 1 hour before the meeting and even an SMS 30 minutes before the call. However, none of these solutions worked, so we ultimately stopped offering onboarding calls.
My main assumption of why the no-show rate was so high compared to existing users was that existing users had already invested time and effort into the product and had a specific problem they wanted to solve.
As opposed to users who after registration most likely thought “Oh I would to learn more” but once push came to shove couldn’t be bothered to disrupt their plans of the day.