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Here’s a riddle for you:
If you finish your service and move on to the next job, does the customer journey keep going without you? 🤔
The answer: Almost certainly.
Once a service ends, you may consider yourself done, but for a customer, their experience with your service isn’t.
WHY IT MATTERS:
Customers continue to engage with and benefit from the service after you’re done.
With a little research and thoughtfulness, you can create additional value that helps you make more money and can help create more loyal customers.
WHAT’S NEXT:
What a post-service experience is
Adding value to generate word-of-mouth marketing
Adding value to foster customer loyalty
Adding value to make more money
Researching post-service experience opportunities
An example
What A Post-Service Experience Is
Imagine you hired an interior designer to re-decorate your home.
After spending countless hours and dollars getting your home to perfectly suit your life and represent who you are - what do you do?
Do you shake hands with the designer and just go on about your business? Nah. After that much work, you want to show it off.
You might invite friends over for a Renewed House Warming party or share pictures online. You take in feedback from others, and you live in it. Even though the designer left, your experience with what they created for you continues.
This post-service experience time can influence your customer’s memory and ultimate judgment of their overall experience with you.
This is when they compare how they dreamed it would be like after your service to reality. What they were hoping to look, do, or feel after the service is what they’re paying you for—not the service itself.
You can choose to dust your hands and walk away, and you won’t be wrong. This is what is usually done.
Or, you can add value to that post-service experience, amplifying your good work and your return on effort.
Research & A Thought Experiment
In order to add value post-service, you need to know what’s happening for your customers after you walk out the metaphorical (or literal) door.
When you’ve completed your service, what do your customers do right after you’re done?
What about in a week, a month, and up to a year or more?
What events, potential problems, worries, or situations may arise related to your service that you can either help with, elevate, or prepare customers for?
You may be able to piece together what your customers do by reviewing questions or concerns during the sales process, during the service, or after the service.
If you don’t know, it may be time to do customer interviews to learn more about what they do after their service.
If you don’t know and you’re not ready to do customer interviews, you can try to put yourself in your customer’s shoes and make an educated guess.
Remember that even with customer research, you’ll be experimenting to see what has an outsized impact on your customers and your business. So don’t get stuck in perfectionist mode.
Adding Value To Generate Word-of-Mouth Marketing
If you want someone to talk about your services, they need more of a reason beyond just doing you a solid.
People tend to share because it makes them look good in some way. Being the person who “knows a guy” feels good. Make it easy for them to do and make them a hero for sharing.
Let’s revisit your imaginary, wonderfully re-designed home. If an interior designer were to add value post-service, it could be in the form of helping with a renewed housewarming party.
On the high end, the designer could share a design, set up, and provide guidance for being a great host for your housewarming party.
On a smaller scale, they may put together a mood board with links, recipes, and hosting suggestions and give that as a parting gift.
If the designer helps you pull this off, you, the host, will look like a rockstar.
There’s no way the designer’s information isn’t being shared amongst the guests and beyond.
Adding Value To Foster Customer Loyalty
Before we dive into this, let’s make sure we’re on the same page about what customer loyalty means.
How to think about customer loyalty
Think of customer loyalty the same way you think about the people you’re loyal to.
You don’t hang out with your best friend because of proximity or because you both agree on everything, right?
For your best friend, you’d get your shovel and tarp if they said they needed to hide a body. Now, you might be pissy about it and say things like, “I knew you’d land my ass in jail one day,” as you shovel out another layer of dirt. But you’re there, right?
Creating loyalty with customers means being there when things are sticky, so when you’re the one in a sticky situation, they’ll be there with you, too. You all might get pissy with each other, but you show up because you both have earned grace from each other.
The ELI5 of how to earn customer loyalty
Just like it would take more than someone loaning you five bucks once to reach best friend status, it takes consistent, repeated actions to earn customer loyalty.
That feeling of loyalty stems from a few things:
You’ve done something nice for me, so I want to do something nice for you
You’ve helped me in a situation where you didn’t have to
You’ve unexpectedly saved me time, frustration, and/or money
You’ve acted with integrity, even when it didn’t benefit you
Earning customer loyalty takes a lot of effort, but it is worth it. Those people turn into advocates and shout your name from the rooftops, tag you in posts, and defend you when you’re not there to defend your service yourself.
Fostering customer loyalty in your post-service experience
Think about what sticky situations your customers may run into after your service is done.
Pick the stickiest issue and see if you can find a way to preemptively solve it by saving them time, money, or frustration.
*Side note: Sticky doesn’t have to mean a major issue - depending on your service, it could just be an annoyance in the grand scheme of things.
Here’s an example:
If you’re a kitchen garden consultant, you may know that the upcoming season may be particularly harsh. To help your past customers preserve their food, you could reach out and share some quick advice on how to prepare for the harsh weather based on the design you did for them.
Taking the extra time to do this helps prevent a potentially very emotional loss or could even make the difference between someone having enough food to eat.
Adding Value To Make More Money
It feels good to be nice, but at the end of the day, you’re a business and need to make money.
Adding value to your customer’s post-service experience is a fantastic way to do that.
Think about a service you offer and whether there are any timelines, events, or experiences that tie into that service. Then, consider how you can both help them and integrate your services.
Think, “Here’s how you can do it yourself, but here’s this service I offer so you don’t have to.”
Let’s say you offer mobile car detailing services. After you do an interior and exterior clean for a customer, you could send a customized cleaning routine based on their vehicle and needs. In addition to that, you can invite them to an “upkeep” service subscription so they don’t have to do any of it.
Applying Your Post-Service Value
There may be services out there that are purely transactional, and adding to the post-service experience wouldn’t matter. Or, you may not care about doing it, which may work out for you.
But if you’re here, reading this, my guess is that you do care. You get a little extra excitement and joy out of going the extra mile for your customers.
And because you care, you may try to overdo it.
You can’t be there or plan for everything as much as you may want to.
Pick the post-service moments that you think matter the most to your clients, and that also serve you. Go in with an experimental and curious mindset.
Keep in mind that one post-service value add can attain all three of the above goals. You don’t need to create a value add for each one. You may choose something based on what’s the most important to you.
If you want more word-of-mouth marketing, you may lean into moments that help you achieve that.
If you want to make more money with existing clients, you may lean into other ideas.
Example: A HVAC Technician
HVAC technicians know that 82% of people don’t change their air filters monthly like they should.
Not doing so means customers are spending more on air conditioning unnecessarily, damaging their HVAC units and having to spend more on repairs ($352 on average.)
The technician may decide to focus on adding value that also helps them make money. The value to the customer is helping them keep up with maintenance and spend less on unnecessary repairs.
The value add helps the technician make more money by prompting the customer for the annual service check up.
At the end of their service, the technician gives them a double-sided printout:
Side 1 includes:
Instructions for replacing their air filter
Why it’s important to them to keep up with the task
A QR code they can scan to watch a video on how to replace the air filter.
Contact information
Side 2 includes:
Their filter size
How often they should replace their filter
Air filter change log with date replaced, next due date, and filter inventory.
Includes 12 rows, and the 11th row is highlighted to prompt them to schedule their annual system check-up and what it includes
This one sheet of paper does a lot of things:
It gives them something useful to help them save money
The video is something they can refer to and share with others, along with leading to other videos and services that they offer
It prompts for future services
To keep the paper visible, the technician could put it on their customer’s fridge with a magnet. They could also offer to order them a year’s supply of filters so they’re easy to access, eliminating one layer of resistance to following through.
DIG DEEPER
The above example is on the low end of how an HVAC technician might approach helping with a customer’s post-service experience. The cost of the printout is negligible.
If they wanted to take it to another level, they could offer to remind them to change their filter via text in addition to the printout.
If they wanted to get fancy, they could have a small folder that includes the printout, along with other common HVAC-related questions and instructions for DIY solutions. In this situation, they could give the customer two copies - one for them and one to give to a neighbor.
THE TAKEAWAY
Your customer’s experience with your service goes beyond when you’re finished performing the service. There’s ample opportunity for you to add value that benefits both you and your customers.