We’re all busy people. In an ideal world, we would like to be able to respond to every email, instant message and every notification that comes our way, but sometimes there are just not enough hours in the day for us to do so. The same is true for the clients that we are tasked with keeping happy in the world of Customer Success. For CS professionals, cutting through the noise in customers’ inboxes is an important task for managing our customer relationships. But an important question here is figuring out how to do this in a way that is friendly, professional and adds value to the client relationship.
There are different ways in which you can go about engaging and re-engaging customers who you may not hear from as much. Regardless of how you go about it, this is important given that unengaged customers are more likely to churn. If you find yourself in a situation where a customer is switching providers from your platform to a competitor, it is possible that this was preventable. They clearly still have a need for the features and functionality that you offer, but it’s likely that someone else helped them realize value and their desired outcomes with their platform rather than yours by getting in front of them at the right time, with the right message.
I’d like to provide some tips for engaging customers on some successful experiences I had in a previous role. I was responsible for sending deliverables and reports produced by internal teams over to my clients on a monthly cadence. While it would have been easy to simply forward the reports over to my contacts and ask them to let me know if they had any questions, I used this touch point as an opportunity to engage my customers, especially the ones I did not hear from frequently. This allowed me to deliver on what the customers had contracted us for (delivery of their monthly reports) while providing value-adds in the same exchange.
Keep it simple.
Figuring out how to engage and re-engage customers through a deliverable they already expect is an area where creativity and trying out new approaches will certainly go a long way. I recommend trying different email templates to see what resonates best. You can also track which piece of collateral yields the most engagement. It can be tempting to go overboard with these touch-points, but try not to. This isn’t the time to try to do a quarterly business review over email or to understand why they are not logging into the platform more frequently. At this point, you’re just trying to show them that you care about them and their business and are forwarding along with some information that may be helpful to them.
In an ideal world, we would like to be able to respond to every email, instant message and every notification that comes our way, but sometimes there are just not enough hours in the day for us to do so. The same is true for the clients that we are tasked with keeping happy in the world of Customer Success.
Make it relevant.
I made a point to research customer accounts to better understand which modules a particular customer was or was not used to further customize my outreach to them. This is something that can be informed by customer activity tracking tools, such as Kissmetrics. Some updates I would send with my outreach were: new product features, case-studies of how other customers were using our platform to drive success in the organization or tips of lesser-known product features that would enhance their workflows (along with an offer to set up a training session for their team).
While I wouldn’t always hear back from every interaction, I did get some customers to respond to me to ask clarification on an update or take me up on the offer of a training to learn about a new feature. Having at least 1 account engage with me following this outreach and helping them find more value with my product was a win. Every touch-point to an account can help reduce churn risk while enhancing customers’ usage of the platform.
As always, striving to find ways to make your customers look and perform better at their jobs is something that will always stand out. If you research your customer, understand their needs and priorities and align that they will really value, you will then become a rockstar and valuable partner to them instead of just another vendor to contact.
Sergio Castaneda is currently an Associate Solutions Engineer with Sprout Social.
Chicago Customer Success 