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Rule 1: You Must Ask
A few days after my deodorant arrived, I received an email from Native:
To: Kindra Hall
Subject: Thanks for your support, Kindra!
Hey Kindra,
Hope you are doing well! I wanted to thank you for supporting Native
Deodorant. We’re a small, family-owned business and genuinely appreciate
it. :)
Since you’ve had a few days to try Native Deodorant, I’d love to get your
initial thoughts on the product. In particular, I’d love to know what
deodorant you were using prior to switching to Native, and what made you
willing to try Native? Have you enjoyed your experience with Native so far?
If you’ve had a great experience with Native, we’d really appreciate it if you
could post a review of our deodorant here!
Any feedback would be greatly appreciated. If you have any questions,
please don’t hesitate to email me.
Have a fantastic day!
Best,
Best,
Julia
P.S. We’ll send you a free bar of Native if you send us a video of you
reviewing it! Find out more here.
This email is doing some surprising things (more on that below), but its most
important job right now is to get me to write a review. It’s a prompt, a request to
tell my customer story to Native. A request that has yielded 7,008 responses thus
far and counting and now is the center of a TV ad for their product.
This may seem simple, but few companies do it. And it illustrates the most
critical first rule of the customer story: if you want customer stories, you must
ask for them. Sure, you might get the occasional unprompted letter, but it’ll take
you years to curate a body of customer stories if you don’t ask.
Asking is not hard. You just need a system. A follow-up email like the one
Native uses is a super easy system that gets the job done.
Notice, though, that Native takes asking to a new level.
• The email arrives after the product. Anyone can throw an “Add your
review here!” link on an emailed invoice. But that’s not much help when
you haven’t yet received the product. Your ask needs to come after the
customer has experienced your product or service.
• The email is from a real human with a real name: Julia. She’s friendly. She
lets me know I’m important to their family-owned company. And I’ll be
darned if she doesn’t seem completely authentic to me. Unlike an
automated, faceless chatbot, robo-thing. If I reply to Julia, I’ll get a
response.
• I can get a gift. If I create a video review, they’ll send me a free bar of
deodorant. There’s nothing like thank-yous and free stuff to get people to
respond. And if I film my own video, they avoid the possibility of a
McDonald’s debacle completely.
Asking is a skill. But it starts with just asking. Don’t make it harder than it
needs to be. Start asking and tweak as you go.
Rule 2: Ask Specifically and You Shall Receive
Beyond the simple act of asking, the Native email sets the stage for ensuring
another critical piece of the puzzle: guiding my response so I share an actual
story.
This is about story, after all. We don’t just want stars or thumbs-up or basic
praise. We want stories because they work a whole lot better.
Julia’s email specifically asks what I was using before I tried Native and how
things are now that I’ve been using it for a few days. Notice anything? They’re
giving me a framework to deliver a story to them. That framework, lo and
behold, just happens to match up perfectly with our framework. By asking for
comments in this way, Julia is guiding my response so, if I follow her directions,
my comments will come back in the shape of a perfect normal–explosion–new
normal story with Native Deodorant as the explosion in the middle.
And in case I forgot to respond in that manner, these prompts were
reinforced once I went to the review page. There I was subtly prompted again to
shape my review in the form of an effective story.
It is guidance like this that likely led to the multitude of high-quality stories
on the website. Guidance that encouraged Amy to tell the whole story. It’s what
encouraged Carolyn to include the part about finding it on her bathroom counter
and trying her granddaughter’s deodorant, which, if you think about it, is a little
rebellious and makes the whole thing even cooler and more real. When seeking
customer stories, ask the questions that will elicit the kind of responses you’re
looking for.
Customer stories are quite possibly the easiest and most powerful type of
story to use. If you have customers, you have stories. You just have to find them.
Instead of building them from scratch yourself, your job is simply to curate and
tell them.
If a Customer Story Falls in the Woods but Nobody Tells
It . . .
Of course, stories aren’t worth much if they aren’t told. Think of your job here
as that of chief curator. You’ve collected the exhibits for your customer story
museum, but they won’t work for you if you don’t put them on display.
The question of course is where? Where are these stories?
For the answer to that, I think back to my childhood mornings before school.
Wake up. Go to the kitchen. Get a box of cereal. Pour some cereal into a
bowl with some milk. Then eat the cereal while staring at the back of the cereal
box. Did you ever do that? Oh, man, the number of hours I spent reading the
exact same cereal box. I read the random facts and tried to solve the puzzles
while shoveling sugary puffs of something into my mouth (yes, I grew up in the
eighties and we ate sugary puffed things back then).
Although my kids don’t eat cereal now, the memory of those mornings got
me thinking. What if the cereal company had printed a story on that box? They
would have had at least twenty-five minutes of my undivided attention—
undivided because what else was I gonna look at while I ate breakfast?
Now, I’m not saying print your customer stories on cereal boxes (although
you could), but, instead, think about those empty spaces in your customers’
lives. Spaces that you know they fill with something. Now that you know they
prefer story, why not put a story there? From websites and newsletters to video
and keynote speeches. Trade show booths to bids and proposals. Sales calls to
team meetings. The walls of a subway car.
For Native, their customer story museum is their website. For a hotel in
Canada where I stayed once, there was a journal in the room for guests to write
the story of their experience: why they were there, what they did, what they
loved about their stay. This was their customer story space. Social media is
another obvious place to display customer stories. Essentially, any place your
customers go and have room in their minds, tell a story there.
The Customer Story: A Components Breakdown
Did you notice something while reading this chapter? You’re starting to speak
fluent storytelling? It’s true. We’ve been talking in terms of identifiable
characters, authentic emotions, moments, and specific details throughout the
customer story discussion because, let’s face it, a story can’t be separated from
the sum of its component parts.
But, by default, you have less control of this story (because it’s not yours,
it’s theirs), so a deep understanding of the components is key to helping a
customer story achieve its full potential. Here’s the full scoop on how to use the
four components to maximize your customers’ stories.
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