- When Issues and complaints arise, avoid maintaining frequent and consistent communication with clients.
It’s all fun and games until somebody loses an eye, right? Maintaining regular communications may have its challenges when the client relationship is in good standing, but let’s be honest, no one really wants to be doing clean-up or damage control when it isn’t. Yet it’s at this point where we most need to resist the urge to withdraw if we stand a chance at reversing negative sentiment and rescuing the relationship. Still some team members are better suited for navigating troubled waters than others. I’ve seen department heads head for the hills when the problem got too big, too complex, or too overwhelming and there was no immediately clear solution in sight. On other occasions they were entirely conflict averse, and simply opted to avoid getting within a stone’s throw of the conflict altogether. Bad idea. Management by Avoidance is generally – not management, and most often is a crisis in the making. Its always better to regularly brief the customer on the status and outcome of mitigation efforts.
Not all businesses have structured Customer Success, Account Management or Customer Service and CX teams in place. But regardless of the size of your operation, where you are in the resolution process, or how you handle personal conflict resolution limitations; be sure that there is a designated point of [human] contact (Bots won’t cut it in a melt-down.), who won’t shy away from proactively maintaining communication with a disgruntled customer. It’s been said that where communication gaps exist, people tend to create their own narratives. You don’t want your lack of responsiveness to signal indifference; leaving customers confused about what to expect. Worse yet, disengaging can ultimately become the basis of an abandonment, incompetence and customer churn narrative. As Sonny Dasgupta, Head of Product Marketing for Conversica points out, the number one reason for churn is lack of customer engagement, and 66% of B2B customers churn after a bad experience.
Proactively keeping the lines of communication open, creates opportunities to mitigate any damage to client confidence or trust in the midst of a challenging situation. I was encouraged once to err on the side of being overly communicative in the face of a Customer crisis. It’s sage advice.
2. Under-estimate the Importance of Speed
When it comes to customer retention, we can basically do one of two things: accelerate the rate of adoption and scale or accelerate churn. If we want to accelerate churn, we simply need to make decisions like not deliberately investing in learning our customer base. But in the age of hyper convergence, and with the world on the verge of expanded reopening, if the reverse is true and we’ve developed a healthy appetite for actionable customer intelligence and insights, consumption can’t happen at a snail’s pace. You know the drill. Customers expect us to understand their needs, respond to their issues, and solve problems – like yesterday.
If you have client intelligence aspirations but are challenged by bandwidth constraints and core competency concerns, perhaps it’s time to start looking at AI solutions that can augment your Customer Success workforce. Sounds like a no-brainer, but empowered teams are much more likely to help you quickly achieve Customer Success at scale. Platforms like Medallia Strikedeck, Gainsight, and Conversica have solutions ranging from just-in-time virtual assistants that support repetitive tasks like scheduling meetings, upsell notifications and renewal reminders to deep learning with at risk account interventions, customer journey workflows, and sentiment analysis.
Whether these types of solutions are in or out of range in terms of budget, be sure that at minimum, you’re putting a Customer Success framework in place that will help you learn customer habits, identify repetitive issues, anticipate needs, and compete in a post-Pandemic digital era.