6 ways to improve customer experience
One of the hallmarks of Customer Success is the relationships you get to build with your customers, and that’s the reason why the value of one-to-one communication is incomparable.
But, when your team’s dynamics keep changing and your customer base continues to grow, how do you keep up with everyone? How do you foster your customer relationships without spending hours a day on calls?
This is where one-to-many communication is key. You might have heard it being called lifecycle messaging, tech-touch, or automation, which is why some customer success teams feel wary about using it in place of one-to-one—it sounds more robotic than human.
But, the reality of it is that this less personal and yet more efficient and scalable means of communication can save you valuable time and still make your customers feel cared for.
How do you do that? You make one-to-many feel like it’s still one-to-one! Here are some strategies you can use to get a head-start.
1. Use a Variety of One-to-Many Communication Channels
Emails, webinars, social media, surveys, etc. are all one-to-many. You can appear more active and involved with your customers by using different (but appropriate) types of one-to-many communication in different situations, instead of just one or two kinds that your customers are used to.
Need to onboard a customer and already have an automated email? Think about adding a video from their customer success manager so customers aren’t just reading, but seeing that this email is from a real person.
People will respond better to different forms of communication because everyone has different preferences and learning styles. Some customers may like to learn more about your product and the problems it can solve by reading an article, while others may prefer to attend a webinar.
This repetition through different modes may feel inefficient but, in the long-run, it will help your customers a lot more and grow your Knowledge Base (KB) faster!
2. Personalize Your Messages
People love to see their names on things and feel addressed personally. In one-to-many, this can be especially hard for your CS team to convey.
Add personal touches to your one-to-many communications so they look like they’re from actual people and not machines.
For example, address automated emails to a specific person’s name (“Hi Sarah!” vs. “Hi there!”) and sign with e-signatures from a member of your team (“Jill, Onboarding Specialist” vs. “Onboarding Team”).
On social media, you can recognize your champion customers and engage with other followers (e.g. like, share, and reply to their posts) to make them feel like they’re talking to someone from the company and not reading generic messages.
This is also a great occasion for you to collaborate with your marketing team—they know the ins and outs of social media, while you know the ins and outs of your customers; by working together you can improve your brand’s social media presence and the customer experience.
3. Collaborate with Marketing
Your company’s marketing team isn’t only good for social media. They have access to and knowledge about different services that show them how your customers interacted with the company before becoming a customer.
They’ve been tracking which marketing collateral has the most downloads, what kind of emails in A/B testing were the most effective, how your customer profiles have changed over time, and much more. These insights can help you strategically develop your one-to-many communications.
You should also align your communication strategy with customer marketing so you don’t bombard current customers with one-to-many messages.
You can also collaborate on campaigns to maximize the reach of your communications. Alignment will also help you make the customer success processes more efficient because you’ll be able to use the same insights marketing taps into before communicating with customers.
Now you can be better educated about how and what to automate for your customers. In turn, this makes your communications and processes more scalable, giving you more time to spend on things like creating success plans for your customers.
4. Use the Right Tools
Perhaps the tools Marketing is using aren’t the right fit for your Customer Success team, but you still need that detailed information to help your communication strategy.
Tracking and updating customer data is one of the hardest things to do in customer success. To do this effectively and efficiently, CS teams need the right tools, and the right platforms to pool and analyze their customer actions.
Your tools need to be tracking actionable, accurate, and up-to-date data,
as Brooke Goodbary, a Customer Success Consultant, points out.
This is where a tool like Amity comes in handy, because our software allows you to track both one-to-one and one-to-many communications through unified data, health scores, and reports.
With this information, you can automate your communications right from Amity.
5. Be Proactive with Your One-to-Many Communications
To make your one-to-many communication with customers effective, you need to know what kind of messages they’re most likely to open.
By tracking how your customers engage with the product and your CS team, especially those one-to-one calls (such as during onboarding) you will collect valuable information.
By analyzing this data, you can learn a lot about your customers’ needs at different stages of their lifecycle and what they need to adopt your product well.
What you learn can help to improve onboarding, create engagement, and uncover opportunities,
says Kristen Hayer from The Success League.
These insights will give you ideas for product information that can be added to your support page, turned into webinars, and will ultimately be the content for your future one-to-many communications.
By automating processes at the right stages, you’ll make your customers feel like you’re listening to their problems.
This will also help you stay one step ahead of your customers, making them feel more satisfied with your proactive services.
To learn how else your CS team can be proactive, check out this blog post about the challenges to proactivity.
6. Improve Your Automated Processes
You have lots of automated processes in place, but are you paying attention to how customers are responding, or maybe not responding?
What types of emails, videos, and tutorials, are your customers opening and engaging with, and which ones are they ignoring?
Use this information to improve your current one-to-many communications. This is also a way to employ A/B testing for things like emails and surveys to increase your response rates.
By improving your processes, you’re showing your customers that a machine may be sending these messages but, a person is running the show and that person cares about their customers.
Moreover, just because you have automated processes in place, this doesn’t mean you aren’t still making time for those precious one-to-one moments.
Make these into a learning opportunity as well by documenting customer feedback about the product, your team, your communication—everything!
Talking to your customers will provide insights you can’t get anywhere else, and you can use that feedback to improve your current processes, whether they’re one-to-one or one-to-many. They may even give you constructive criticism for other teams in your organization!
Guest Author:
Elakkiya Sivakumaran is a Writer at Amity. She enjoys interdisciplinary writing (who said English, Classical Studies, and Psychology can’t mix?) and learned almost everything she knows about English grammar from high school Latin. She is currently writing about customer success best practices for Amity’s blog.
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