The Sale Isn’t the End: How Service Businesses Can Drive Loyalty After the Work Is Done

Jeffro (00:01.703)
Getting the sale can feel like the finish line, but for many service businesses, it should be the starting point. Now in this episode, I’m joined by Ken Rapp, CEO of Blustream, and we’re going to explore how service-based companies can build long-term client relationships after the job is done. So whether you’re a consultant, agency, or local business, what happens post-sale can mean the difference between a forgettable one-off and a five-year referral machine. So we’re going to talk about using personalization without being creepy
how to deliver value beyond the invoice and why zero party data might be the missing link between you and your next great client. So welcome to the show Ken.

Ken Rapp (00:39.448)
Thank you, pleasure to be here.

Jeffro (00:41.712)
Yeah, and I’m excited to chat with you because I mean, you are the expert in this area, right? And one thing I’ve seen is it’s pretty common for a service business to be laser focused on getting the client, but they kind of ghost them afterwards or they’re slow to respond or something like that. Why do you think that post sale drop off happens so often?

Ken Rapp (01:01.9)
think that we’re all accustomed to driving and investing for new customers. And then we go and do a quality job and expect that the customer will just continue on with us. But it doesn’t happen that way. Customers want a personal touch, and they want more communication and feel like they’re connected to a company. And then they stay with you. But if they’re not, then it’s more of a transaction. And so I think that’s what causes the churn, we call it, to churn your customer.

Jeffro (01:32.902)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, and I think also a lot of owners think that, the work should speak for itself. But I mean, that’s not really enough, especially in our digital economy. There’s so many options. Things are moving fast. People just forget, right?

Ken Rapp (01:48.11)
Yeah. And I’ll give you an example of kind of how we started, is interesting. It has to do with, I’m a big guitar guy. I love playing guitar and play out in bands. And I bought a new guitar and that guitar actually cracked in a cold Boston, cold and dry winter. And I have a lot of guitars, don’t tell my wife, but I’ve got plenty of guitars, but I had never had this kind of guitar and so it was kind of interesting that there was no connection between me and this brand on how to take care of it and how to service it and how to, you know, should I, what should I be doing about it? And so it cracked. And that really was the concept of, boy, what if there was a way to automate the connection between me and that company where I bought the guitar so that they were providing me with just some tips and some education and reminders of when to come back and went to maybe have a tune up and they would have got me not only with the neck service interval for the guitar, it certainly if they knew a little bit about how often I play, there’s also cross sell upsell opportunities to provide me with accessories and things that are associated with playing a guitar.

Jeffro (03:04.347)
So, I I like that example and it sounds nice, right? Because that’s kind of the perfect world. Like they’re supporting you along the way, giving you helpful info. But there’s also the fact that we’re overwhelmed with our inboxes overflowing, with everybody sending us newsletters and tips and things. And I think our default, at least for me, is kind of just like, no, don’t add me to your list when I buy something. I just wanted the thing, right? Because I get too much. So how do you walk that line between being helpful and staying connected? when people are just like, I don’t need more.

Ken Rapp (03:37.625)
So it’s a great point. It’s a great point. I’ll give you another example that kind of was all part of the forming of the post-sale product experience address, a platform that we do. It was, you know, I get a coupon from my Jeep dealer to change my oil and I just delete it. There’s just too many emails coming at me. But when my car actually has a light on that says I need to change the oil, I find a dealer or find a way to get that oil changed. So the thinking has really shifted to look at the product or the delivery, the service provided in the center of the circle and ask yourself if you put your customer in the next circle around the product, what are the kinds of things that that customer would like to know about, about your service or product? and that’s where it’s a shift in the paradigm or the thinking that if you provide a service or you provide a product, what are the important valuable things about the product that someone’s buying from you that they would want to know? And we have a rule of thumb here, you know, with our product experience platform that you never send a cross sell a promotion or an upsell message until you’ve sent at least five value added educational tips or links that would provide real value to your customer. so the other, the corollary to this is, you know, if I’m going to, when I go and change the oil in my car and then I go back to work, I actually do wait to hear from the dealer that’s actually going to tell me your car is ready or we found something else. And so there’s a huge difference in your point that When it’s just noise and it’s not relevant, we just delete it. I mean, there’s too much white noise. But if it’s about a product or service and the message is actually helpful, we look forward to those messages. And I can share with you and your listeners, we have over 90 % of the consumers who start on our journeys. Over 90 % are still on our journeys, quarters, years.

Ken Rapp (05:55.969)
later. And so that tells me that we’re doing a pretty good job. That’s a metric we have that says we’re doing a good job of making sure that the messages and the questions, and we call them dialogues in a product journey or a service journey, are actually relevant to the consumer.

Jeffro (06:13.272)
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I still, my brain goes to like the practical side of this. Like, okay, do you break out the newsletter opt-in from the helpful tip opt-in and have like two separate lists for people so that they can feel like they’re still in control, but you’re able to be that helpful guide along the way? Or is it just, you know, what’s the best way to do that?

Ken Rapp (06:35.874)
Yeah, that’s another good point. So if I’m dealing with sales or I haven’t bought something yet, it’s a different campaign. And there’s excellent systems out there that allow us to do mail lists and put people on our drip campaigns. And then we have beautiful websites now that take care of educating about what we do. And then when we finally get that first order and that first time customer, we actually think that it shifts to another, ought to open a new relationship which is, all the history contextually is there, but now this is where product or the service being provided is the gold. It’s providing, so actually it’s a different channel than you have today. Today your channel is sales oriented or a helpline, somebody’s calling, they’re upset. Whatever it was didn’t work the way they expected. But now to build, an ongoing relationship around your service and provide some education about other service that you might provide, some other products that you might provide, that actually warrants its own channel. it’s a different, today we see a lot of text messaging, we see a lot of SMS, and so companies like ours would help a brand or a company, a service provider, with that whole process of setting up a new support line or a new product experience platform line.

Jeffro (08:05.869)
Yeah, so let’s talk about that first, the pre-sale, before someone’s bought anything. You’ve got all these options for how to connect with them, like you said, text messaging or mailing them stuff. I’d imagine some things are more effective than others. It kind of maybe depends on the person and the offer and everything. How do you decide how to approach what you’re sending and when you’re sending it?

Ken Rapp (08:27.555)
Yeah, so we typically are either just before or just after the delivery of the product or service. So I’ll give you a couple of examples. If I’m providing a product where there is some prep involved, then probably want to start right after the order but before the delivery of the service. For example, one of our customers is in the solar business. And so there’s some prerequisites. There’s some things that You want to make sure that the homeowner is ready for before you actually show up to do some of the service. So that’s when we call them the product experience journey will start just post the order being placed. Other kinds of products, there isn’t any prep work. It’s that it’s going to start the day that you start your grooming of your puppy or it’s the, you know, going to provide some… a service that is going to start and you’re going to meet the customer at that moment. So that would come post the actual delivery of the service and then the ongoing relationship. So I’m not sure if that answered your question, but it’s, if we look at everything from prerequisites or in the medical spa arena with a service for beautification or for medical spa types of treatments, You’re not supposed to drink alcohol for a few days before you get there. And so if you have, that provider loses the customer. You can’t put them in the chair and actually provide your service, which means it’s revenue being lost. But then post that service, you also have some questions about, is it red or are you having a headache or is there any kind of reaction? So you get to kind of nurture that relationship to assure they’ll come back again because they had an excellent five-star experience.

Jeffro (10:20.578)
Well, so that’s helpful. I guess more of my question was, which channel do you decide to use? Like, when do you decide to do? Text message might make sense for the day of appointment reminder, but when to mail something versus send an email, do you just go down and order like, okay, we like text first, but if they unsubscribe from our text, I guess we got to email them. Do you do all of the above? That sort of thing. Ken Rapp (10:44.716)
Yeah, we find that we like to leave it up to the consumer, the recipient of the service. And that’s one of the things that it’s kind of cool about the thinking here is start with texting because most people, we respond to like 90 % of our text messages. So that’s the place to start. if we have our engine or our cloud runs through SMS texting or WhatsApp or email or however you want to do it. We like to let the consumer pick what they want to do. And the business may pick what they want to do to start and what the channels they want to provide.

Jeffro (11:23.832)
That makes sense, because I know also with, I mean, texting, there’s some regulatory stuff if you want to be doing the A2P verification and make sure your text messages get through, like there’s some initial setup you have to do, right?

Ken Rapp (11:37.475)
Yeah, actually you raise a really interesting point. There are some types of products and services that cannot use text messaging and phone numbers. And so we have an internet-based, we call it Chat Stream from Blustream. And the internet-based messaging is bidirectional and has the dialogues or what we call product experience journeys going.

But it’s not use, it feels and looks like texting, but it’s actually writing on the internet, just like iMessage does as opposed to, you you get a text. And there’s a lot of, there’s a lot of reasons to use that channel as a business because it can provide a richer experience with videos and automatic, you know, photos and surveys built right into what you’re doing rather than with SMS. You have to have links to those kinds of

Jeffro (12:30.056)
Is that cheaper to use the web based as well?

Ken Rapp (12:33.678)
It is. is. Yep.

Jeffro (12:36.406)
Okay, very cool. Can you still register your numbers so they show up properly? Or is it just bypassing that altogether?

Ken Rapp (12:47.614)
Actually, it bypasses it all together and provides a branded experience. So it’s like if you had an app on your phone, but as a business, you never had to build the app. It’s just a few clicks of a button on our platform and you’ve got an icon ready to go. So every message that comes to your customer actually has your logo next to it anyway. and at the top, it’s kind of like a notification. If you’ve ever had a notification come to your phone, and it says this is from a particular brand or a particular company, then it’s the same exact technology riding on the internet.

Jeffro (13:23.754)
Yeah, so it’s like, it’s a push notification that happens to show up in your texting app.

Ken Rapp (13:28.684)
Yeah, it’s text, virtual texting. It’s not really writing on the phone numbers. Yeah, it’s kind of cool.

Jeffro (13:31.87)
Yeah, that is cool. All right, so let’s talk about something else. So zero party data, you know, that’s when somebody gives you their info voluntarily, whether that’s through a purchase or maybe they got a lead magnet or something. Obviously, you can use that data to personalize these messages and the timing of what goes out. Do you go about collecting additional information or do you just make sure it all has to be done in one fell swoop so that you have the best possible you know, outreach and timeline for things.

Ken Rapp (14:05.534)
really, really good question, Jeff. We’re actually starting the zero party data clock post purchase. think about, let’s talk about an example. So let’s think about my prerequisites for that solar panels being delivered to my house. And just as an example, and you say, okay, prior to getting it, we send a message that says, hey, is this your first time to experience solar panels? and if the customer comes back and says yes, the journey that they’re on will take them to, well, here’s a little background video right off the website. Most service providers already have all this content about everything from any tax breaks or all that stuff is up on their website. But the consumers, they’re overwhelmed with the materials that have come to them before they say yes. And now they say yes. So providing that first question and the first response is what we call a dialogue. And then you string together dialogues over a lifetime that are the journey, the product experience journeys. And when a consumer says, no, never had a solar panel on my roof before and I have lots of questions, that’s them giving you zero party data about that customer. So I’ll use the car analogy again. It’s almost like Carfax.

You’re building the car facts history by asking questions and providing information that’s actually valuable, very valuable at that exact moment to that particular customer. it’s a person, think of hyper personalization on these journeys and your consumers actually drive the cadence, the timing. It isn’t a campaign where it’s on Monday do this and next Thursday do that and then two weeks from Friday do that.

It’s asking, would you like some information about this? And they click it or not. If they don’t, they go to another step in the dialogue and along the journey. Whereas if they do, now you know that customer is very hungry for information right now. And so they’d accelerate their cadence to get more information. So when we say zero party data, it’s data that isn’t available today. It is not. let, I have a story for you. This is my favorite story is one of our customers provides dog.

Ken Rapp (16:30.553)
probiotics to help with digestion of dogs. And when she was small, she knew every customer’s name, and she knew every dog’s name. So she knew the pet parent and the pet. And so she would know that little Daisy, who’s a Springer spaniel, is getting a 10 minute walk every day after work, and then going to the park for an hour each day on the weekends, Saturday and Sunday. And she could tell the pet parent how to use her probiotic in a way that was specific and personalized for Daisy and her parent. Then you might have another customer who has a different breed and different exercise programs, et cetera. But as she got bigger, it was much harder to personalize a relationship around her product in that customer’s hands. And so we’ve helped them scale the personalization so that each of her customers who buys your product gets asked the questions she wanted to ask in the first place to help them have a five-star product experience. So when you think of zero-party data and our product experience platform, it’s all about as if you were just amplifying yourself on those first few customers who helped you really understand what they needed to all of your customers. And what we’re all about is trying to help you get more best customers. So we see Revenue drive, we drive revenue up because this, with every customer we work with, it’s a 30 % reduction in churned customers. So if you have a customer that’s $1,000 a year to your business and you got 100 of them, you’re losing 40 or 50 % of them a year after you work so hard to get them, we take that and cut it by 30%, which drives revenue right into your pocket. We also see,

Jeffro (18:22.589)
Yeah.

Ken Rapp (18:23.577)
great reviews and referrals, because your customer base starts to really believe, and you do, that you want them to be successful with your product or your service. We really appreciated that our lawn care service provider came by and they actually had a tip about us, because it’s rained a lot in the last…
So that would actually cause you to maybe send a tip or an education about what to do if your customers were thinking about that. So you build this incredible trust and loyalty, but it’s all automated. And as a business owner, you’ll see the data on a dashboard up in our cloud and you have access to your data and you’ll see who’s responding to what. And maybe last but not least is you can even see where your customers are asking questions, the zero party data and turn that into reducing the inbound calls because you can provide education as preventative knowledge to your customers about a topic that maybe they’re all having. And so you get that data, you can provide a link to your website where you already have the quick guide or the quick start about a subject and you’ll reduce the number of inbound calls to your business.

Jeffro (19:36.976)
Yeah, that was a great example and overview. I think for a lot of people when we think of collecting data from customers and personalizing, we think of, OK, we got billing info and then contact info, name, email, phone. So now I can send my template and say, dear Ken, but everybody’s getting the same thing. This obviously allows you to go way beyond that, because if you start thinking of data as everything, their background, experience, their interests, like interested in this, yes. Interested in that, no. Have they done this before? Yes. Like, OK. And so now you can build this whole decision tree or different paths for different people depending on where they’re at. So it’s personalized and unique to them. Even if someone down the road might go on a similar path through your decision tree, it still fits them where they’re at at that time rather than forcing something on someone who doesn’t fit in with that. So thanks for walking through that. And it does bring me to my next question though.

We have decision trees, right? Where you manually create all these paths and decide who goes where. But then now with AI, I’m curious to hear how you guys are using that to kind of help create and morph these into even better experiences.

Ken Rapp (20:51.267)
Yeah, great, great question. If you visit our website, is blustream, B-L-U, stream, there’s actually what we call our product experience journey builder up there. And you can put in your company name and put in your service or your product name. And what we do is we go out and we look for information about that service type.

So we comb the internet, we go to your website. And so using AI, as you described, with the guardrails up, because we don’t really trust it without the guardrails up, we control AI under the hood to look at all of our current customers, tens of thousands of consumers who are sitting there responding to messages and clicking on educational links, and when people are responding or clicking versus when they’re not and answering questions. And we combine the data from our current data lake, it’s called, with all of our customers, all genericized so it doesn’t matter what the product is. We take the content and the service or the product provided. We combine those two and actually build you a journey for your business. The journey is a template, just like you said. It’s got some branching. And the workflow is up there online. You guys are welcome to try it. But what happens is that one journey is a series of dialogues. Maybe it’s your new customer, 90 day template. And each one of your customers starts from the same starting point, but then they will change based on their answers and how they respond. Our software will change the cadence and content that they get as they go, which makes it super personalized from a standardized template and then the other part of it is kind of cool that you can add to it. So if you start with the first 90 day program and then you have a second year or a third year. So I’ll give you another example. We’re very, very big in the kids, school, band, and orchestra rentals. Being a guitar guy, the service provided of renting.

Ken Rapp (23:04.085)
instruments which also has lessons and accessories and all these other things. So if I use that as an example, what we find is we start with that first semester, you know, a third or fourth grader gets their violin or their cello or their trumpet and they don’t really know much about it. So you start to educate around the violin. Did you know that the neck is made out of this and the body is made out of that and here’s a way to clean it and here’s some things to take care of it and how to stand it up. And then as we go forward in that first onboarding 90 days, it’s, you know that you, if you’re feeling a little neck pain by playing the violin, here’s some tips on how to get a different chin rest or use a towel or things like that. Well, as that goes on, our cloud is watching the responses and our customers are able to see that. And you can see where they’re clicking and they’re getting so much value. And as I said earlier, in that space, we have over 90 % of the consumers of the kids who are playing and renting instruments are still on and so now you get to cross sell a little bit like, okay, this, how often are you playing that violin? Well, your child might be playing it 10 minutes a day, whereas if it was me, I’m playing an hour a day because I love playing my guitar, right? So you have different usage of the product and understanding of the product driving cross sell recommendations. And we see tremendous

Jeffro (24:20.912)
Mm-hmm

Ken Rapp (24:33.705)
conversion rates on the recommendations because it’s real. I use those sneakers to jog 10 miles a week and maybe you are training for a half marathon. the usage is actually driving their dialogues that can get added to that journey that came out of our journey builder that just continues engaging that customer and driving revenue for your business.

Jeffro (24:59.95)
Yeah, I love all these examples that you’re giving because I think hopefully it gets the wheels spinning for people to think of ways they can do this in their own business. What questions they can be asking in their post sale questionnaire or anything like that. They’re onboarding meeting, even if they’re not doing all the automation yet. So I think this is really helpful. I’ve got one last question for you, Ken, before we wrap up because we’re getting close to our time here. So what is a simple strategy that a service business could implement this week, you know, to increase repeat business or re-engagement. They haven’t done any of this automation yet. What can they do to start moving in that direction?

Ken Rapp (25:38.703)
So think about yourself as a customer, as your own customer, and a brand new customer, a beginner, who’s never dealt with you before. What are the 10 questions that they would have about your service and you? And so, and I’ll go back to the journey builder for a moment and anybody, any of your audience who would like to talk with me, take 10 minutes, I can walk them through it if it’s a little confusing, because sometimes I find, you know, things a little confusing out there. But we’ve tried to make it straightforward where if you put in your company name and you put in your service or your product you’re providing, we have two things that the journey builder provides to you that directly answer your question. The first one is, will give you 10 to 15 touch points. These are places where you could engage your customer after the sale, after you finally get that sale you worked so hard to get or the referral you wanted. So there’s a list there that we are providing to the world just because we believe in this space like you’re asking. And then the second thing is if you want to try it, it’s super easy to take the workflow there and onboard. But to answer your question directly, without having to do any technology,

Just go run your product on the Journey Builder that’s up online and you’ll get some tips on, just free, just get some tips on how to engage your customers after the sale.

Jeffro (27:06.007)
Awesome. Well, thank you for that, Ken. I’m going to go check it out for my own business and see what it tells me and how I can compare how I’m doing and where I can improve. But I appreciate you being on the show, Ken. It’s a great reminder too that, you know, finishing the project or the job doesn’t mean the relationship is over. fact, it’s probably just getting started, especially if you want it to keep going on, have them renew or refer you to their friends and stuff, because that’s how you’re going to build up that connection with the customer. So if you guys want to learn more about Ken and his team, how they’re helping businesses create, these client journeys, go check out the links in the show notes. We’ll put the journey builder link in there as well. And if this episode gave you something to think about, do me a quick favor, leave a review and share it with someone who needs to improve their post-sale process. That’s the best thing you can do to help this podcast grow. And obviously it’s going to help the people who listen to it because this is practical stuff that they can apply to their business and earn more money. So that’s it for today. Thanks again, Ken. Thanks to all of you for listening and we’ll see you next time.

Ken Rapp (28:04.141)
Thank you. Thank your audience.