Optimize Your Customer Success Pipeline Stages for Communications & Media

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let your team be creative strive for your team to be agile 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 hello my customer success friends erie ezips here for csm practice the customer success consulting firm before we begin i'd like to remind everyone to subscribe to our youtube channel and turn on your notifications today i have with me abby hammer for churn zero hello abby hi thank you so much for having me i'm excited to chat today well the reason i wanted to have you on board is to you know after covet 19 most of the customer success uh teams that i speak with are hammering down and optimizing the way they communicate with customers so so key for us to continuously you know have the right cadence with them ask the right questions and talk about value that we can bring that's relevant so i'm super excited to have you in because you actually work with so many customer success teams and with your application for customer success turn zero you can see what customer success teams are doing with regards to scaling those communications as well so in today's session i really wanted to double down on that topic yeah yeah you know it's something my team thinks about a lot in terms of how we work with our customers but we also think about it a lot in terms of how we advise our customers to work with their customers we've seen some things develop out of this unique moment in our history that i think will become sort of table stakes just applicable for how we do modern customer success going forward so certainly a topic near and dear to my heart i agree so let's go for the first question that i have for you like i said you work with a lot of companies to improve their customer success strategy and scaling using churn zero do you see any impact on how often customer success teams communicate with their customers since kovic 19. and um do you see a change in cadence at the very least and if so what are you seeing some of the changes since the pandemic yeah you know i had a little sort of lovely geek out moment with my own product as i was looking at what our customers did um you know because it tells a really interesting story over the last couple of months and i think also illuminates what will be sort of pathways going forward you know so when things really first took hold in the u.s we saw the the sort of classic responding to a crisis you know there was a big uptick in people doing these massive blasts to their customers you know i've made the joke that during that two-week period i heard from every business i've ever interacted with how they were handling covet-19 um you know and everybody had the impulse to do the same thing so we did see this one really huge spike particularly in email communications right around that time i think just sort of as an initial conversation with customers but what's fascinating to me and what we've been trying to encourage and practice ourselves is that now going forward it's about being even more smart about when and how you communicate with customers so uh you know blasts were never a great way to do customer success even before this um but the degree to which we're seeing our customers really try to be extremely specific about who they talk to when and why it's just getting to an even deeper level than what people were striving for before because now there's this extra pressure of well is this the right time to talk to them like am i actually going to be getting in their way with other things that are going on because we're dealing with a pandemic we're just being a lot more thoughtful about whether the content that we're putting into the world is worth putting into the world is worth taking you know one to three minutes of our customers time to to tell them and so you know while we saw these sort of initial post up around emails in a much longer sense and something i expect to continue we're starting to see our customers engage more in more non-traditional ways of communicating with their customers in-app being a big way to do that find your customers when they're in your app when friction is lowest um but we're also seeing a huge tick up in the amount of automation that our customers are running and that's saying something because our customers were already running a fair amount of automation on their customers but the uptick to me signals a deeper degree of segmentation an additional level to be even more specific about when and why you talk to someone we're seeing more frequent communications as well so moving away from sort of longer form content and into like bite size you know get value by doing this one thing have a nice day style of of communicating which if you're going to do that at scale really does require you know thoughtful um fairly robust automation which you know we we can support so i think we'll continue to see that and i think this whole concept of really checking yourself around is this content worth putting into the world how is it specifically going to help my customer what specifically do i want them to do and what benefit do i want them to receive out of every little nugget of information i give them i think that's just going to be how we do cs from this point forward you know it's just it's going to become a natural part of what we do so what i'm hearing you say is that the timing of the emails the agility of the communication message the maybe even the segmentation of the attributes that we collect per customer are going to be key in order for us to effectively communicate with customers this almost sounds like account based marketing yeah people have drawn that analogy i think it's a good analogy to draw to a certain degree because why account based marketing took off and why it's so attractive and so effective is because it is all about trying to communicate like you are talking to each individual customer like you know them and you know in this day and age in 2020 and certainly if you have a cs tool the ability to really in depth know your customer is there um you know from how they use your product to how they engage with you or or don't um and you can use those those you know sort of initial data points but you can also make some leaps from those data points about the type of information that they need and best next steps and i think that's actually where i draw a particular line people used to act on their data and now i'm seeing people act on their data but also start to make some some leaps off of that data if this i'm going to assume these couple other things and therefore try to get a little bit ahead of you in that regard um so it's exciting stuff what what kind of usage metrics do you see them uh collect and i assume that there's more than just usage metrics but if you just look at uh you know you mentioned okay if they did this in the application i should send them that because the timing is correct they're in my right now trying to do something let me send out a timely message about this particular feature that's what i'm hearing you say yeah that'd be correct so i mean there's so many features in an application how do you pick the right one to and create sequence emails or just emails yeah it's a fair question you know um metric in your app in the right way is is a is a big challenge and you know we often think of the phrase you know my product side is throwing sure showing through a little bit by saying you know metricking the app a product team or dev team is going to do that in one way you know and they want to see every click every movement you know they're really trying to look at the app in a much more detailed capacity for cs i usually tell my customers you know what it what are the most exciting parts about your app like if you had a 30 second elevator ride to tell someone what your app did what are the features that you would call out uh you know what are the ones that your customers rave about that really bring them value if you could get your your customer using you know two features because that would those would be the stickiest ones that's where we really want to focus not only our understanding of how they use the app but also how we talk to them about how to use the app as well got it well if you're if we're starting doing um email campaigns or email messages that are more agile and the communication is much shorter are we at risk of bombarding them with too many messages and how do you mitigate for that risk yeah uh very much so you know i think um increasingly the inbox needs to be used with a lot of discretion discretion that you know we've all we've always sort of assumed like you know i have a relationship with this customer therefore i can send them things and i think we need to be careful about that attitude which is why in particular i am a big fan of other non-traditional ways of communicating with customers because quite frankly our traditional methods email and phone they naturally have a lot of friction involved with them emails and phones are very traditional you mentioned other alternative ways to communicate with clients can you share some of the things that your customers share with you or how you're communicating with clients that you would recommend others to adopt yeah absolutely you know phone and email are always going to be part of how we communicate with customers there's just you know there won't be an end to that um but you know there is there is sort of a natural friction point in using those those means of communication you know if you call a customer you got to hope that they're at their desk and you know they're they're not screening their calls i mean heck sometimes we often even only have uh office numbers and right now no one's in their office so you know those phone numbers are not are not as useful for us email has has some of the same problems as well you know the threshold on whether someone scans an email and gets that immediate like worth my time not worth my time it's it happens so quickly you know and the more you're in someone's inbox um you know the the more likely you are to not pass that sniff test quite frankly violate the is it worth my time you know enough which for some users will be once uh you know you're less likely to get read in the future but again you know we all have very busy inboxes so there's a lot of trying to clear through inboxes and move past and you know get down to inbox zero or however people are moving through their day uh so for me i'm really interested for our product for our customers for the you know sort of evolution of customer success i'm really interested in how communicating with customers in the app becomes the way that we primarily talk to our customers because to me what i love about that is friction is extremely low right there someone's in your product which means their mindset is on the product they're prepared to accept information about what they should be doing and how they should be doing it now does not mean that you won't that you won't get a lot of negative feedback if you're just constantly popping up stuff in the app to them it still needs to be very relevant and targeted specific to things that you know that they might need but i think you just naturally have a little bit of a better opening in that in that communication channel if you needed to would you be able to create sort of like a table of what are the topics that you would recommend to nurture through emails what are the topics you would actually recommend to call or text about what are the topics that you would prefer seeing customer success teams communicate via email yeah i think so you know just start draw a very harsh line on it off the top of my head anything that's around use of the system adoption getting value out of the system which quite frankly should be the vast majority of what we're talking to customers about odds are that you want at least some sort of in-app component to how you're sharing that information you know so that you're guiding them in a very natural organic way some of the more business matters uh you know your renewals coming up uh i i wanna i wanna ask if you'll be a reference for another upcoming customer things that are more relationship based sometimes feel a little bit better in email you know because they don't have anything necessarily to specifically do with the product and so it's better to reach people when they're not actively trying to accomplish something but i also think there's these very cool moments where you can cross over into both as well and say like hey maybe i hit you initially in an email and then i follow up in app or vice versa you know making sure that i'm i'm presenting sort of a coordinated front yeah to me it seems like uh in emails and phones it would be things that related to the account management whereas in the product i would manage the end user experience and success yeah very different i could have an account with a thousand end users there's no way i can really email everyone and it's not even effective like you said the timeliness of it it's much better to do it in-app whereas if i have things related to the account success overall um that might be better managed through emails and phones other untraditional communication channels these days are slack channels that we keep hearing about right uh any online communities so those could be another route to even scale the communications with customers further especially if it's like a one message for everyone and like you said we keep being bombarded by emails so it's just one more thing that we can do to augment the way we offer the same messaging to a wide range of customers absolutely what i like about um slack and community in particular is that it also takes what might have started as a one-on-one conversation and potentially allows it to benefit others you know i the number of times i've had what ultimately felt like a really meaningful conversation with a customer about strategy or you know an execution of a certain idea and i'm like gosh darn i wish i had that recorded and i could give it to you know six other customers who would really benefit from that same topic um so i think those two in particular are really nice way to you know get more bang for your buck when you do put you know thoughts out into the world and make sure that it's benefiting a larger audience well this was great a lot of great insights which i know you were gonna bring abby given your experience with both products and uh customer success it's absolutely phenomenal your wealth of knowledge and your willingness to share it with everyone in our community i want to thank you for your time thank you so much for having me give us a like if you learned something from this discussion share it with others on social media and i look forward to seeing you in the next video