Messaging to your customer can be a tricky challenge for Customer Success professionals who need to balance the requirement to extend proactive solution guidance while nodding at ensuring that the guidance is relevant and timely for the customer. People don’t respond well, if at all, to messages that don’t make sense for them and for where they are in their journey with your solution. Just look at your own behavior with consumer applications you use in your life. I mean, just because you used a website to book a hotel for a vacation doesn’t mean that when you return from the trip that you should receive daily emails and a steady diet of ads in your social feeds telling you how wonderful that city is (that you just returned from) and oh wouldn’t it be great to book another trip there. Fail. As a CS pro, you don’t want to be part of those kinds of fails and you don’t have to be. What you do need are common sense and empathy for others.

Twilio recently released the above study that sheds some light on things that many of us who dabble in Voice of the Customer programs already intuitively understand but don’t talk a lot about. We should because customers are not happy with typical messaging strategies and tactics.

So what is meant by messaging to your customer? For the purpose of this argument, it is not about reactive communications. These are some examples of reactive communications:

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What are some examples of proactive communications?

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Take-aways?

  1. Communicate but do it with purpose and intention
  2. Be respectful of your customer’s intelligence, their time, their business environment, and their communication preferences (if you can confidently determine them)
  3. Coordinate your strategy with other teams that might also be communicating with that customer but don’t be too cautious on this front. If you’re doing the job of customer success the way it should be done, only you will be able to communicate what the customer expects from your service. Only you are properly positioned to be that voice to and for the customer.