How We Celebrate #CustomerLove Week

At Apptentive, we talk about love. A lot. Our logo is a heart, we created the hashtag #CustomerLove, and we go out of our way to spread the love every chance we get.

Valentine’s Day is a big deal for our team. It’s a special time of year where we show love to our customers, partners, and friends of the company.

At first, we only delivered Valentines to our local customers. But over the last three years, we started a new tradition: sending out Boxes of Love to the people who made our year special. We wanted our Boxes of Love to stand out, so we searched for a box that would make a statement. We found a sweet family business in California who makes red heart boxes. I’m pretty sure we’re their biggest customer :)

Every year, the contents of the box have a theme. This year, our theme was a “Taste of Seattle.” Since our customers are located all over the world, we wanted them to experience our Seattle.

Everyone at Apptentive participates in the making of the heart boxes. We assemble the boxes during Friday happy hours, and create an assembly line (resembling Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory) to stuff the boxes with hand-written notes, coffee, mugs, chocolate, taffy, stickers, and a few other surprises.

This year, we upped our game and delivered boxes of love to many of our largest Seattle customers in-person—with our very own cupid (aka Red Russak, our Senior Account Exec). We wanted to give our team a chance to meet with customers. The best part was seeing the smile on our customers’ faces—and we caught it all on camera.

Why do we go through all this effort?

First of all, we believe love is an action, not a static place. You have to invest time and energy into #CustomerLove. We also like to stand out. Everyone sends holiday cards and presents in December, but you probably aren’t getting many work-related Valentines.

You can call our efforts Account-Based Marketing (ABM), customer experience, or customer retention, but we think sending red heart boxes filled with our favorite things is, above all else, an important relationship builder.

What else do we have up our sleeves this week?

Well, it’s Customer Love Week at Apptentive, which means that in addition to Valentine’s Day deliveries, our engineering team kicked the week off with a bug bash and continued the tradition of holding a hack day specifically designated to solve problems for customers and improve their experience.

As a team, we use Customer Love Week to reflect on our customer interactions, to share insights and ideas we have, and to push one another to a new level of customer empathy and understanding. We ask ourselves hard questions about where we can improve and how we can take better care of our customers. Why? Because we’re all about that #CustomerLove.

Love, Team Apptentive