Ryan Shank explains why lead-generation businesses need documented QA processes. A Zapier integration failure left 20 leads uncontacted for nine days; a form bug prevented resubmissions with the same email. He recommends daily testing checklists and thinking like a customer to catch problems before they cost revenue.
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What up guys, it's Ryan from PhoneWagon. Today we have Blue Bottle Coffee again, starting the week off strong. It is day 21 of our morning updates and today what I want to talk about is the importance of QAing or testing your processes just to make sure that things don't break. So let me tell you a quick story and then I'm going to kind of dive into some tactical, actionable items that you can do and apply to your business. So, couple things recently, two, there's a couple, that's why I went two, have happened at PhoneWagon that made me start to really think about, hey, we need to have QA processes in place and we need to document that QA process so that we go through, we test everything, we make sure things are foolproof and we need to do it regularly so that anything breaks, that we are able to catch it. So first thing that I noticed today, so I'm doing some Facebook ads right now, and I had notifications getting sent to my email when someone submits a lead on Facebook, okay? So the flow would be they see the ad in their newsfeed or whatever it is, they click learn more, it submits their information. So they're not clicking off to our site, it's actually submitting the information through Facebook, and then once they do that I was using a service called Zapier to then send me an email notification that I got the lead and then also send a lead to the person that, or the customer that submitted the lead, to the lead, send an email to them kind of welcoming them to PhoneWagon and trying to set up that first call, okay? So what happened was, I guess for some reason, and Facebook actually offered the notifications through Zapier, and I guess I was on a free trial or something where it ended, so I stopped receiving notifications about 9 days ago, and I wasn't receiving any notification, so I didn't know I was getting the leads. And it's been over 9 days, I've got probably 20-some leads and haven't reached out to a single one. So it's kind of, it's kind of frustrating. And so that was the first— that was actually the second thing that happened to me. The first thing was I realized that on the PhoneWagon website, there was just a couple I wouldn't call them errors, sometimes there was errors. So for instance, we had, you submit your email on the initial homepage, then you go to another landing page and then you submit your information. However, I think I talked about this before, if you try to submit on the second page and you use the same email as the first page, which you should, then it wasn't firing and there would be an error. So, couple different things that have broke recently at PhoneWagon that have really got me thinking, hey, one, we need to document, you know, what we need to test, and we need to fully document it and have a process test, like hey, you need to go through, you know, A, B, and C, every, not every single day, but probably every single day, especially right now when, you know, every single lead is so incredibly important, it's critical that, you know, nothing breaks, and we also, you know, one, you want to make sure that it doesn't break, and then two, you want to make sure that the flow makes sense to the actual customer, so I like to take, kind of take off my owner hat here and then put myself in the shoes of a customer, and I feel like I use a lot of products anyway, so I, have a pretty good sense of what a decent customer experience feels like. And if there's redundancies, if there's things that, you know, there's too many clicks to get to where you are, if the padding is wrong on the page and the design is messed up, I feel like I can, I'll have that knowledge to be able to make a change. But it's really important though to, especially if you're gonna outsource this or pass this off to an employee, that you say, "Hey, you need to do every single one of these things on the checklist at this frequency and in this order," and then kind of go around and see if you can even get things to break. And it would actually be good if you could, because then, you know, at least you're catching it before someone else is catching it. So very, very, very important to document the processes and to actually go through with the processes of making sure that, you know, nothing in your system is broken, or else one, you're going to be leaving money on the table, which is horrible, and then you're not going to be servicing the customers, so it's going to be a poor experience for both sides. So very important that you are testing out things on a daily basis and you're getting those things into the daily processes. Okay guys, it is Monday, it's freezing here, wish it wasn't, and I hope everyone has an amazing week. We'll see you tomorrow for day 22, today is day 21 at PhoneWagon.
