Using a Process Story to create customer confidence about your site care services

Several years ago, I paid to take a class at the local coffee shop. I wanted to learn how to do a pour over. 

My friend Scott was one of the teachers. I learned to measure the grams of coffee and water. I learned how you should grind your beans. They had all the good equipment that I don’t have at home.

Then I learned how to pour the water slowly, starting at the top and descending towards the center in a circular motion. Pouring the water this way allows you to extract more of the coffee oils from the bean.

The result of this method is a great cup of coffee, fuller, livelier and you can taste the hints of flavor from the roast. There is nothing like it. 

I thought it might be fun to learn how to make a drink I ordered regularly from the coffee shop. Learning how to do a pour over didn’t keep me from buying more pour overs, but I can occasionally do them for myself at home. And, get this, if I make one for someone else, they think I am pretty cool. 

It’s a win-win, right?

My appreciation for the pour over and its value was cemented and even grew.

Explaining the process of how something works is very persuasive. 

Veteran copywriter David Garfinkel calls it “Stories that Explain,” in his book “The Persuasion Story Code: The Magic of Conversational Storytelling.“

I like to call it a “Process Story.” 

We could all spend a little more time using stories to explain what we do to help persuade and verify the value of Site Care Consulting. Stories help bridge the gap between abstract (complex and hard to understand) to the concrete (easily understood). See Kindra Hall, Stories that Stick.

Stories that explain, or your process story, have persuasion factors. As Garfinkel says in his book

“… they educate your prospect about the reasons to buy (benefits) and the desired outcomes (results). And, they give your prospect an advance look at the experience of using your product and service.” 

(Garfinkel, Book, p.104)

Today, I’m going to visit three tips to help you create a process story you can use to help you prospect see their desired results and reasons to buy.

Show your work

The first thing to do is to show you work. This will help you build credibility as an expert. First, write down every single step of your process. Get them on paper so you can survey. 

Next, condense the steps into something more easily consumed. I am a fan of a group of 3, but a group of 5 or 7 may work as well. The goal is to make them easier to remember. Give each step names that are easier to remember.

Read Enhancing Your Memory Retention with the 3-5-7 Technique.

Next, write the steps in a narrative form as if your customers are with you, looking over your shoulder, and you are telling the story of the journey of your process.

Create a diagram that gives a visual representation of your process. Use this to accompany your process. You might give your process a branded name. It doesn’t have to be fancy, but it does need to be identified and defined. Use it throughout your marketing messaging. 

The branded name helps cement in your prospect’s mind that you have a process and that it helps you show your work.

Highlight the process

There are three significant areas in your business where you can highlight your process and include a process story. In this section, we will take a look at those.

1. On your blog

Go ahead, write a blog post about your process. Create that narrative as well. 

Tell a story of how you used your process to help a customer. In this situation, you are not writing a blog post that should be ranked on the first page. The purpose of this piece of content is to help nurture and persuade your prospect. 

2. In your onboarding emails.

Onboarding emails are a great place to tell this story to your prospect. One of the goals of an onboarding email is to tell your new customer how you work, when you work, how to communicate, and how to keep up with the project. Here, you can share with them a process story that helps reinforce why they are working with you in the first place.

3. On your Service page.

I believe including your process on your service page is a fundamental part of the information a prospect needs to know. Include your diagram and a short story on how the process plays out.

Putting it together for Site Care Consultants

Here is an example of how a Process Story might look:

Here is how it works when we do site care for your website. We call it Site Therapy and it includes five steps.

First, we backup your website. This is vital because if anything goes wrong, we can use any backup to restore your website to how it was before the problem. To do this, we use an application called UpdraftPlus and upload it to our Google cloud storage folder. We will update your site at least three times a week. All backups are initiated automatically by UpdraftPlus. We check your backups weekly to make sure they are working.

Next, we update your website software. We do this three times per month using an application called MainWP. It helps us keep tabs on what needs to be updated. We update your WordPress software, theme software and each plugin to ensure any vulnerabilities are patched. 

Third, we run security scans every day. We do this automatically using a scanner provided by Sucuri via MainWP. This keeps us up to date on any potential issues.

Fourth, we scan your website’s performance to make sure it is operating optimally. We will “take out the trash” clearing your cache and any overage in your database. We use a special application to accomplish this on a weekly basis. 

Finally, we create a report. The report goes to you once a month detailing most of these tasks we perform. We will let you know if there are any problems. The reports go out on the 30th of the month. 

This is how your Site Therapy looks. Each member of our team is dedicated to keeping your site running smoothly and securely. 

Thank you for trusting us with your website care!

Wrapping it up

A version of your Process Story can be used in multiple places to give your customer insight into how it looks to use your service. Explaining your process can help your customers feel confident in your expertise and reinforce the benefits of your service. 

A process story can also be helpful in selling your service to interested prospects. 

Have you used some version of a Process Story for your business? Let us know in the MainWP Users Facebook Group or the Effective Writing Discord Channel.