Software Soundbytes: Avoiding The "Just Checking In" Conversation With Your Customers
You can’t grow your software company without continuous feedback from your customers. Your sales, marketing, product, and customer success teams all need to spend quality time communicating with customers. But no customer wants to see an email or hear a voicemail that leads with “I was just checking in to see...” Jocelyn Brown, VP of Customer Success at marketing performance management software company Allocadia, uses real-time user data to ensure customer contacts are insightful and meaningful. In less than 90 seconds she explains how customer data helps Allocadia, a software company with an 852 percent revenue growth rate since 2013.
Transcription
I want anybody who talks to a customer to be able to have a high value and a contextual conversation with them. To do that, you need to know about the customer. We store their main objectives and why they bought and milestones and things like that in Salesforce as well as usage data, so that my CEO can be smart about a customer in five minutes.
I also like that the conversation with the CSM (customer success manager) from somebody outside group going to talk to a customer is going to be a bit deeper. They already know the basics, they know basically what they are using, they know what products they have, they know why they bought, so it’s never just an update call.
I feel the same way about CSMs talking to customers. I’m trying to get away from the “just checking in” concept on either side of the fence. Let’s start from a fact-based and a data anchored conversation, so that you can ask the next question. You never have to ask the first question.
I think there are lots of things that you should reconfirm over the life cycle. Or, maybe from a usage perspective you might say, “How are you using that,” or, “How is that working for you?” but you don’t have to start from, “Do you use that?”