Importance of Customer Communication for Customer Success

The utilization of customer communication by customer success teams has never been easy. The Coronavirus pandemic has affected many economies around the globe, and different businesses need to map the way forward as soon as possible. Businesses are taking quick action and coping mechanisms as they struggle to meet the well-being of their employees and their customers. As such, your customer success communication strategy needs to be implemented in a concise, relevant, and clear manner.

In this Chat and Learn series, we featured Abby Hammer, Chief Customer Officer and Head of Products at ChurnZero, as she shared her phenomenal experience with the importance of effective customer communication, certainly a topic near and dear to her heart. During the interview, she emphasized that the pandemic shouldn’t be a reason for her customer success team to stop; but it’s a reason for them to experiment and try out new things.

“Our work is most exciting and our success is often strongest when we’re not afraid to experiment and we’re not afraid to be flexible and adaptable to the situations.” (Abby Hammer, 2020)

For Abby, it’s also crucial for us to continuously have the right cadence with the customers, ask the right questions, and discuss values that we could bring that are relevant and helpful to them. However, when communicating with the customer, we also need to be wary of the different drawbacks it could bring.

Drawbacks of Using Traditional Modes of Communication

According to Abby, many customer success teams dwell on the usage of traditional methods of communication such as phone calls and emails. But there is a natural friction point in using those means of communication. Let’s say for example, if you call a customer, you’re going to hope that they are at their desk, and they are not disregarding their calls. What if no one’s still in their office because of the pandemic and, unfortunately, we only have their office number? Email has some of the same problems as well. How sure are you that they are reading your emails? There are also times that you violate the “Is it worth my time enough?” which for some customers will be once and you’re less likely to get read in the future. These are the reasons why Abby and her team took some time to explore other methods of communication, such as Slack and other online communities.

Now, it’s more interesting to discuss what are the possible ways to effectively communicate with your customers.

Ways to Communicate With Customers

Most of the customer communication processes take place in the online space. The pandemic has totally affected the way the world operates and, as a result of the outbreak, communication has become more relevant. These challenging times are about being smarter about what mode of communication you should use and when and how you communicate with your customers. As part of the customer success team, consider whether the content of your message is meaningful to your customers.

If you are starting email campaigns, as the sender, you should be more customer-centric by thinking if your message is bombarding for your customers. Having a good relationship with your customers doesn’t mean you can send them multiple emails or text messages.

Ask yourselves questions like:

• Is this content worth putting into the world? 
• How is it specifically going to help my customer? 
• What do I encourage them to do? 
• What benefit do I want them to receive?

That’s how we’re going to do customer success from this point forward. To effectively communicate with customers, Abby shared the three key factors to consider, which are the following:

• the timing of the emails or any other communication activities
• the agility of the communication message
• the segmentation of the attributes that we collect per customer

How can CSM Practice Help?

At CSM Practice, we vanguard the effectiveness of customer communication which leads to customer success by providing professional consultations and remarkable training. To ensure that your customer communication is deemed effective, CSM Practice offers CSM Analytics that enables your customer success team to be proactive and scale through actionable analytics.

CSM Practice specializes in the technology and services industry and offers a portfolio of enterprise solutions, that wish to achieve successful and scalable results. CSM Practice offers a particular customer-centered approach that helps you to develop a winning plan for the success of your client.

Take it to the next level!  Ask CSM Practice about the services we provide and learn how we can help you transform your organization into success.