One Angry Customer Email Rewrote Our Entire Homepage

The email arrived on a Sunday night with the subject line "This is not what your website said." It came from the owner of a physical therapy clinic in Columbus, Ohio, who had signed up for our scheduling tool, spent two hours setting it up, and discovered it could not handle the way her therapists split their days between two locations.

She was angry, and she was specific. She quoted our homepage back to us, line by line, and explained why each promise had misled her. It was the most useful piece of marketing research I received all year, and it was free.

What our homepage actually said

At the time our headline read "Scheduling that works the way you do." Underneath it we had three icons with the words "Flexible," "Powerful," and "Simple." I had written most of it myself, and I was proud of how clean it looked.

Her point was brutal and correct. "Works the way you do" means nothing until you know how someone works. "Flexible" told her nothing about multi-location staff. She had made a reasonable assumption based on vague words, and we had let her waste a Sunday afternoon.

The rewrite

I replied, apologized, and asked if she would get on a call. To my surprise she agreed. We talked for forty minutes. I asked her to describe, in her own words, what she had been looking for when she found us. I wrote down every phrase she used.

Then I did the same thing with nine more customers over the next three weeks, some happy and some not. Patterns appeared quickly. People did not talk about flexibility. They talked about specific situations:

• "One of my therapists works Tuesdays across town."
• "Patients keep booking the 8 a.m. slot that doesn't exist on Fridays."
• "I need the front desk to see everything but the therapists to only see their own day."

We rebuilt the homepage around those situations. The new headline was plain: "Scheduling for clinics with more than one location or more than one kind of appointment." It is long and a little clunky. It also tells the right person, instantly, that we are for them, and tells the wrong person to keep looking.

What happened to the numbers

Our visitor-to-trial rate went from 3.1 percent to 4.4 percent over the following two months. That is good, but the more important change was further down. Trials that converted to paid accounts went from 18 percent to 29 percent, because fewer people were signing up under false assumptions. Support tickets in the first week of a trial dropped by about a third.

Some traffic went away, and that was fine. We had been attracting yoga studios and hair salons who were never going to be a good fit.

The habit I kept

Every quarter now I pick the three angriest emails from new customers and read them aloud to the marketing team. It is uncomfortable. Someone always gets defensive. But each time we find at least one sentence on our site that promises something we cannot deliver.

The clinic owner in Columbus eventually became a paying customer once we shipped multi-location support six months later. She sent one more email when it launched. The subject line was "Okay, now it's what your website said."