Clients Tell You What They Need: Are You Listening?
“I Feel Your Pain…”
What’s your first reaction to that sentence? My go-to is to cringe…and brace myself for a monologue full of B.S.. But now, “I feel your pain” is something I genuinely want to say to our clients, and I just can’t find a better way to phrase it. So I hope you’ll bear with me, and hold your cringes ‘til the end.
Were we glad to move Ad Zombies into a “real” office? Of course! But saying goodbye to the office where we’d started this company (in a spare bedroom in my house) was a little emotional.
Since the humble beginnings of Ad Zombies (in a spare bedroom of my home) I've always asked for feedback from our clients.
I wanted to know how we were doing, what areas we could improve in, and how we could make our services better. I still want to know all of those things.
Recently, we’ve been getting feedback from several clients that felt angry about how our subscriptions worked. I don’t like it when something I can control makes people angry. And I knew this was more than someone having a bad day, blowing off steam.
Clients were pissed off because their copywriting credits rolled off their account. They weren’t getting the value they needed from their relationship with us and they wound up canceling with us.
They felt like we were screwing them over.
And while we never set out to build a plan that screws people over (it’s just not good for business long-term), they weren’t wrong to feel that way.
We all agreed that there was a real problem to address. So, the team and I rolled up our sleeves and we dug in.
We spent a lot of time getting our hands smudged with dry erase marker, getting finger cramps from spreadsheeting too hard, and had too many restless nights (and next morning conversations that started like this “okay, I couldn’t sleep last night and was thinking about plans…”). It turns out trying to reengineer plans that allow us to stay in business while delivering the maximum value to our clients is a tall order.
Then, one night (morning?) at 2:30 am I sprung out of bed as if a scorpion was about to fall off the ceiling fan and onto my pillow. (The nightmare is real in Arizona, guys.) I was on a mission to solve this problem, so I emailed Brandon, my business partner. He (serendipitously enough) was awake, too. By 5:30 am, and my second cup of coffee, I heard a ding. Brandon, my partner in business - and insomnia - was texting me…with a solution.
He’d figured it out. And the math worked, too. He told me to get on a screen share ASAP (he knows that emailing me a spreadsheet is the best way to put me right back to sleep) and walked me through it.
There it was, (*cue angelic choir sound effect*) the solution was literally staring me in the face. After months of feedback and weeks struggling - engineering and reengineering plans - the team at Ad Zombies has finally been able to check every box on our clients’ wish list.
That means we’re now able to offer:
✅A super-affordable $99 a month plan
✅No minimum monthly commitment
✅All plans are month-to-month (cancel anytime)
But the biggest improvement is the one that every client, across the board, asked for: a better system for rollover credits. Drumroll, please! 🥁
✅Unused Ad credits NEVER EXPIRE!
I'm proud to say that we not only listened to you, our clients, but we felt your pain…and we responded to it.
Thank you for your invaluable feedback over the past years. Please continue to tell us what you want and need. I can’t promise we can always fix it fast, or that we can offer every service you’re looking for, but we will always strive to make it right.
My company is here to serve you. My team is here to serve you. We work for you.
PS - If you’re one of our current monthly clients, my dead-icated team of customer service zombies will be reaching out to see if you’re interested in staying on your current plan, or if you’d like to swap into a new, improved model.