Follow ups and booking

In almost every small organisation there is a set of people who asked about something, were sent a price, and were never contacted again. Not because anybody decided not to. Because the week got busy, and by the time someone thought about it the moment had gone. Consonas sends those follow ups on a schedule and stops the moment the person answers.

The money involved is larger than most owners expect, and the reason is that a meaningful proportion of those people did not go elsewhere on price. They went elsewhere because someone else rang them and you did not. Following up is consistently the highest return activity available to a small business and it is consistently the thing that does not happen.

So automation is obviously part of the answer. The difficulty is that most automated follow up is bad in ways that cost more than the follow up gains, and everyone reading this has been on the receiving end of it.

The four ways it goes wrong

It does not stop. You reply on Tuesday and on Thursday you receive a message wondering whether you saw the last one. That single failure tells the recipient precisely how much attention is being paid, and it is worse than not having followed up at all.

It arrives at the wrong time. Three in the morning, or Sunday afternoon, because the schedule counts elapsed hours instead of working ones.

It ignores what someone has agreed to. The list was built three weeks ago and the person withdrew last Tuesday, and the system checked the list rather than the person.

It runs away. Two rules trigger each other, or a sequence has eleven steps because a tool made eleven easy, and a customer receives something absurd. The organisation finds out from the customer.

Every one of those is a design decision rather than an accident, and each is avoidable.

No cold outbound

No contact database. No email address finding. No automated prospecting across channels. No way to import a purchased list and begin sending to it.

That is a position rather than a gap. The tooling that makes cold outbound easy at volume is the tooling that makes it easy to do badly at volume, and we would rather not build it. The rules on unsolicited electronic marketing in the United Kingdom sit in the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations, and they are worth reading before anyone buys a list. If that is how you grow, this is the wrong product.

No open rates or click tracking

Partly because those numbers have become substantially less reliable as mail clients began fetching images on the recipient's behalf, which makes an open a measurement of someone's mail provider rather than of a person. A metric that is quietly wrong is worse than no metric, because decisions get made with it.

What you can see is who replied, which is the outcome that matters and the one that cannot be faked by a proxy server.

No sophisticated scheduling

The booking page is a link, a calendar and an appointment. Round robin, buffers, routing and payment do not exist. That is the right level for most small organisations and clearly not enough for a business whose operations are scheduling.

Start with the follow up you already fail to do

Not a nurture programme. The specific thing that already happens in your business and already gets missed: the quote that was sent and never chased, the enquiry that went quiet in week two, the customer who said try me after the summer.

Automating something you already do badly is a much smaller step than inventing a programme, and it produces a measurable result in a fortnight rather than an argument about tone.

Use it for the boring things too

Most organisations think of sequences as sales tooling. The higher return use is frequently operational: chasing a document, reminding someone about a renewal, confirming an appointment. Those are the follow ups that get forgotten and they are the ones customers are actively pleased to receive.

Three steps, not eleven

A first follow up a few days after, a second a week or so later, and a last one that says plainly that you will stop unless they say otherwise. That third message is the one people leave out and it is the one that gets the most replies, because it gives someone a reason to answer now.

Write them as though you had written them individually

Short, specific to what was actually discussed, and signed by a person. The test is whether the recipient could tell it was automated. If they could, it is doing your reputation more harm than the follow up is doing good.

This is why long sequences fail. No one can write eleven messages that each sound individual, so by the fourth they are generic, and generic is the thing people unsubscribe from.

Count the gaps in working days

A sequence that fires on a Sunday afternoon is announcing itself. The same clock the rest of the product uses applies here, and the effect is that follow ups land when a person would have sent them.

Then look at what stopped

After a month, the useful number is not how many were sent. It is how many stopped early because somebody replied. That is the count of conversations that would not otherwise have happened, and it is the entire return on the exercise.

The sequence itself holds almost nothing

A sequence has a name, a description if someone bothered to write one, an owner, a purpose, and a flag saying whether it is running. That is very nearly all of it. The plan is deliberately thin, because the interesting state belongs to the people on it rather than to the thing they are on.

The purpose is the field people read past and it is the one that governs the whole thing. It is the word consent is checked against. A sequence whose purpose is sales asks whether this particular person agreed to hear from you about sales, not whether they agreed to hear from you at all. Two sequences with two different purposes will therefore reach two different sets of people out of the same hundred contacts, and that is the intended behaviour rather than a quirk of it.

Steps are an ordered list, and there are two kinds of them

Each step carries its position in the order, a delay in days, and a kind. The delay is held as a number of days rather than as a date, because a sequence is written once and then run against people who join it on different mornings. What the delay resolves to is stored on the enrolment, which is the only place it can honestly live.

One kind of step sends an email built from a template. The other raises a task. The task step is the half most people ignore and it is frequently the more valuable of the two: making the third step of a chase sequence a task titled "Ring them" puts a piece of work on someone's list on the right morning, and a telephone call on day eight is worth a great deal more than a third email on day eight.

A step that sends an email must name a template that exists and that the person writing the sequence is allowed to read, and both are checked when the sequence is saved rather than when it runs. A step pointing at a template that is not there would otherwise fail three weeks later, against one person, quietly, and that is the worst of all the available moments to find out.

A sequence may hold at most twenty steps, and any one delay may be at most 365 days. Neither ceiling will trouble anyone writing the three steps we suggest. They exist so that a figure typed with an extra nought on the end is refused in front of the person who typed it.

The enrolment is one person, part way through

An enrolment names the sequence and the person, and then carries the state that actually moves: whether it is active, stopped or finished, which step the person has reached, when the next step falls due, why it stopped if it stopped, when it started and when it ended. That is the row a colleague is really looking at when they ask what this customer has been sent.

The reason for stopping is written down as words rather than as a code, and it appears on the record. In practice it reads as one of five things: they replied, there is no consent for this purpose, they are restricted from processing, there is no address to write to, or somebody stopped it by hand and said why. A sequence that went quiet without saying which of those happened would be useless to the person holding the telephone.

The enrolment also carries the owner and the sensitivity of the contact it is about, copied across at the moment it is created. Correspondence with a sensitive relationship is itself sensitive, and without that copy the list of who is currently being chased would name somebody a reader is refused everywhere else in the product.

One person may hold exactly one enrolment on any one sequence. That is a unique index in the database instead of a check in the code, because chasing the same person twice down the same sequence is the failure a sequence is most often blamed for, and it should not be possible to arrange it by accident from two different directions.

And the booking page, field by field

A booking page holds the last part of its own address, a name, a description, an owner, the length of the meeting in minutes, the least notice someone may give, how far ahead the page will look, a location if the meeting has one, a time zone written as a proper zone name from the IANA time zone database, and whether the page is open. Thirty minutes, a day of notice and a month of horizon are what you get without typing anything.

Availability underneath it is a set of windows, and a window is a weekday and two times expressed as minutes past local midnight. The default is nine to five, Monday to Friday. Times are stored that way, against a named zone, rather than as instants, because nine in the morning is a standing intention rather than a moment: the instant it falls on in March is not the instant it falls on in July, and a booking page that confuses the two is wrong for half of every year.

They reply from an address you have never seen

A reply is matched to a person by the address it came from. Someone who enquired from their work address and answers from their telephone using a personal one is not recognised as the same person, so their conversation arrives unattached and their sequence keeps running. This is the honest limit of the mechanism and it is worth knowing before it happens rather than afterwards.

What fixes it is adding the second address to the contact, which is worth doing the first time you see it. What does not fix it is a cleverer guess: a system that decided two addresses were the same person because the names looked alike would eventually attach one customer's correspondence to another customer's record, and that is a far worse failure than a missed match.

They withdraw consent on the Tuesday, and a step falls due on the Friday

The Friday check governs. Consent is asked again for that individual immediately before every message, and the enrolment stops rather than sends. The same is true if they were restricted from processing in the meantime, and true again if the address was removed from their record: rather than failing, the enrolment stops and says which of the three it was.

The message could not be delivered

The step is still counted as taken. That is the uncomfortable choice of the two available, and it is made deliberately: repeating a step because a send failed would chase somebody twice, and being chased twice is worse for the relationship than missing one message. A failed send is a fact about the sequence instead of an instruction to try harder.

You want to put the same person through the same sequence again next year

You cannot. One enrolment per person per sequence, and a finished one counts. The reasoning is that the common cause of somebody being enrolled a second time is not a considered decision twelve months later, it is two colleagues doing the same thing in the same week, or an automation quietly repeating itself. Refusing all of them is cruder than distinguishing between them, and it fails in the direction that does not embarrass anyone.

The same reasoning applies to editing. A sequence's steps are written once. If the wording turns out to be wrong, you write another sequence and enrol people on that, which also leaves the old enrolments telling the truth about what was actually sent to the people who received it.

The morning the clocks go forward

There is an hour that does not happen. A booking page whose windows run to two in the morning would, on that one day, offer half past one, and the instant behind half past one that morning is really half past two. A slot whose local time is not the local time intended did not exist, so it is left out of the list rather than offered and then argued about.

The same arithmetic problem is why availability is walked by calendar date rather than by adding twenty four hours at a time. Adding a day to an instant is not adding a day to a date, and doing it the easy way loses a whole working day from the listing once a year, depending only on what time the range happened to start.

Two people choose the same slot within the same second

One of them gets it, and the other is told that the time has just been taken and asked to choose again. The time is recomputed at the moment of booking rather than trusted from what the browser sent back, because a time someone's browser returns is not the same thing as a time you offered. The organisation's own database handles one request at a time, which is what makes that check dependable rather than merely likely.

A time that was never offered at all is refused on the same path, whether it was outside working hours, inside somebody's existing meeting, too soon, or simply typed into the request by someone curious.

The person booking is a sensitive relationship

The appointment is marked sensitive too, and stays off the calendar of anyone barred from that record. The title of a meeting carries the customer's name, so without that the marking could be read straight off the calendar by the very people it exists to keep it from.

They ask to be erased

The enrolments go with them, along with their consent records, their timeline and their attendance at meetings, because none of it has a life of its own once the person is gone. Appointments and conversations are the organisation's own records, so those stay and stop naming anyone.