It may be bold but as a founder who is committed to sharing his business journey, I think it’s important that The Trademark Helpline share not just our wins, but our mistakes too, because let’s be honest, you learn more from the bumps in the road than the smooth journeys.
Today’s story is about one such bump: a WhatsApp mistake that, in hindsight, should have been obvious.
Why We Use WhatsApp
We have found WhatsApp to be a fantastic tool for client communication. Compared to email, where a good response rate is around 10%, WhatsApp typically gets us about 35% and the only thing that outperforms it is good old-fashioned post.
We use WhatsApp over SMS for a few reasons:
- You can send more information and add helpful links and videos.
- You can include action buttons (e.g., ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ replies) that make responding easy.
- Meta (the parent company of WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram) checks and approves every broadcast message. While that can feel like a bit of a pain, it’s actually great for quality control.
We also always include an opt-out link to ensure that people can choose if they want to keep receiving WhatsApp updates from us.
It’s an incredibly useful channel, especially when we need to contact clients about urgent matters like expiring trademarks, oppositions, or notices of cancellation.
The Mistake We Made
Recently, we needed to act quickly.
A competitor company had gone out of business, leaving a lot of UK and overseas trademark owners without a UK representative and at real risk of missing important updates about their trademarks.
For those we were aware of where we have a mobile number on file, we prepared a WhatsApp campaign offering to step in as their representative, helping them avoid missing critical deadlines and winning a new client in the process.
We had a legitimate reason to reach out to these trademark owners, the messages were approved, we clicked send… but … we dropped a bollock.
When matching the client contact data, a small error crept in. The trademarks we referenced in the messages didn’t match the trademarks for the people we were contacting.
Cue confusion, unnecessary worry, and a lot of apologising.
The Impact
The unfortunate thing is, that in trying to do a good deed, we actually made ourselves look incompetent. What was a simple mistake, resulted in hours of analysis and to rectify the issue and damaged some existing relationships.
The Lesson Learned
You can have the best tools in the world, but they’re only as good as the preparation and the data you feed into them. Even when the data was correct how we connected and presented that data mattered more.
The reality is mistakes happen. Especially when you are working under pressure. But what matters is owning up to them, learning from them, and improving your processes for next time.
If you are thinking about using WhatsApp for business (and we strongly recommend it), just remember to double-check everything, especially if you’re linking multiple sources of information together.
Hint & Tip for this Tale
If you’re not keeping your client data in good order… Well, let’s just say you’re playing with fire.
In my previous life I helped a number of successful financial adviser businesses to sell their assets. It was never a surprise that the companies with 2,000 customers and hundreds of thousands of pounds in assets under management could lay their hands on all the key management information in a matter of minutes, whereas the smaller firms who had failed to grow couldn’t even provide you with a reliable list of their existing clients.
Generally speaking, you can’t grow your business without having your data in order.
Today, you will be surprised how many ways there are to quite easily get your data organised, which makes it easier to engage with your clients, identify new business opportunities and reward your customers, improve your service and drive referrals.
Subscribe to our newsletter for more hints, tips ad tales, got something you want to here more about, let us know at enquires@thetrademarkhelpline.com.
