Getting ghosted on a remote product discovery call is the worst!
By: Erin Fonzi Denton
Tags: Product Design, User Research, Remote Working, Product Discovery, Resources

Getting ghosted on a remote product discovery call is the worst!

My note taker and I getting ghosted on a remote discovery call.

Let’s talk about getting ghosted. 👻

If you conduct discovery interviews or video chats with users you know what I mean. Taking time out of your already busy schedule to sit in an empty call, waiting. It probably stings thinking about it again — all that effort and logistics to setting up an interview, only to be ghosted.

To make things more challenging, it was not our current users we had problems with showing to interviews, it was our “leads” or prospective users.

I see you — big companies with crazy discovery budgets — lifting your product-tinis, pinkies out, “You mean you don’t use [insert expensive user procurement product]? How pedestrian!”

Unfortunately, no. We’re a small company with start up vibes and we need to be scrappy. Many of these services are far too expensive for our team.

We have to make it work with the resources we have.

Research & Experimenting

So, I did what any good product designer would do… I conducted some research. I found some articles online about how some folks have overcome the no show issue with existing users, but nothing that applied to prospective users. I asked around my peers and at meetups — sadly finding out for many a 50/50 show rate was just accepted as “how it is”.

To make the problem more dimensional, our prospective users that would show up — weren't always our persona type, or didn’t fully match what we we’re doing discovery on. But when you are ghosted so frequently you are just desperate to talk to anyone with interest so we endured.

We had tried to make improvements to this process. We clarified the language on the sign up form we were using, and even tried double booking. We moved where we intercepted prospective users on our website attempting to get higher volume. Alas, no good results.

Tools

We we’re already using a few tools I could leverage:

HubSpot (Customer Management System, Sales & Email Marketing Platform)

HelpScout (Customer Support Email Client)

Google Workspace (Formerly GSuite, Docs, Sheets, Calendar)

Calendly (Calendar appointment sign up)

Zoom (Video Call Client)

Solution

So, I iterated in a different direction. Back of the napkin math said our current process was getting an abysmal < 30% show rate for prospective customers. I wanted to see if adding in a few things I learned from my internet research, trial and error, and talking to peers, might yield less ghosting.

The first thing I wanted to try was a funnel approach. Filtering and sending the most engaged and closest matched prospective leads to the interview offer.

I had the assumption that if we could get prospective users to not only submit a form with their email, but also reply to an genuine email exchange with a real human — they we’re more likely to show up to the video call.

The human element is key.

Making the prospective users feel as if they were talking to a real person with plain text emails, and not a copy paste email or “marketing email” was essential in engaging them. I also found that it was easier to justify the cost of compensating users when we knew more about who was coming and that they we’re a match to our personas or any special criteria. Thus would yield potentially helpful discovery data.

Funnel Process

Prospective users engage a form by submitting their email.

Prospective user fills out a “first to know” form generated using HubSpot (so it would collect the data in the CRM) on our sales page showing interest about the product we were doing discovery on.

2. Filter by criteria collected via HubSpot cookies / trackers.

Prospective user is added to a HubSpot list, that we use to filters them based on the criteria we are using to conduct our discovery. (Things like: not already a customer, engaged in sales emails recently, geographic location, if they used our free product or not.)

3. Filter using the human element!

Prospective users on the filtered list are emailed via a plain text HubSpot email (so they can choose to opt out) sent from our Director of Product (so its legit, ya know?). She asks if they would be interested in participating in discovery for a financial incentive, along with 2 specially written questions that will help us decide on if this person is a persona fit or a fit for the particular discovery we are doing.

4. Respond and Engage with those who hit reply.

Those that reply are routed to our HelpScout Customer Email Client. We track responses to the 2 questions in a google doc and any other information we can glean about them via all our touch points.

5. Initiate Interview Sign up.

Matches are send an email outlining more detailed expectations for the call, and with a link via Calendly to sign up for the interview. Calendly handles time slots we deem as available, makes zoom call / links, and sends the user reminders.

6. We attend an interview with confidence!

Yeah we’re pretty excited at this point, we feel like we know who we are talking to before we even get there!

Results

The biggest take away for us was engaging with our prospective users. The back of the napkin math on this revised process was > 80% show rate for our implementation. That’s about a 2x improvement with the added bonus of higher quality interviews. Once the system was in place the amount of time we spent funneling prospective users was negligible compared to sitting on calls doing NOTHING while both mine and my note takers / stakeholder’s valuable time is wasted. GOOD BYE GHOSTING. 👻

One of the things I love about UX & Product Design is the art of constant iteration! We’ve since iterated on this process to meet our ever changing needs and I encourage you to iterate as well. 🤓