How to better communicate with your customers
Hi, I’m Markus, and welcome to a 🔒 subscriber-only edition 🔒 of my newsletter. I help you to deliver, grow, and monetize customer value to improve your performance, accelerate your career, and build a profitable SaaS business.
As a CSM, you own the lion's share of customer communication. At least, that’s how it’s supposed to be.
If your customers are mostly interacting with the support team there’s likely something wrong with your product.
Effective communication is an important pillar of your success because:
the better you communicate the better relationships you will build
the better relationships you build the more insights you will get
the more insights you get the more value you can create for your customers
the more value you create for your customers the better for your company and career
And just like that, everybody wins.
But there’s a catch as always with everything valuable.
It does not come without effort in the form of thought, practice, feedback, and continuous improvement.
Here are the 4 principles I’ve isolated that turn customer communication into a powerful asset for your success:
1. Customer-centricity
Your goal as a CSM is to help customers achieve their desired outcomes. Consequently, your communication efforts need to support it.
Whether you are running a kick-off meeting, a follow-up, a QBR, or sending an Email/message - it’s all about the customer.
They don’t care about the metrics that are important to you. They don’t care about your company news. They don’t want to receive check-in E-mails.
Make it worth your customers' time. Worth reading and responding (if required) or listening and talking.
A key mistake I see over and over is CSMs talking all the time and just don’t shut up.
If you try to impress your customers with everything you know and your ideas it will backfire. What you need to do is active listening.
Where you ask open questions but otherwise let your customers do the talking. I consider the ability to active listening as the most important skill for a CSM.
Because if you understand your customers' needs you can provide them with exactly what they need.
A great tip from Peter Neels, Senior Director of CX at Zendesk:
“Listening goes a long way, and repeating what you heard to clarify that you are on the same page is key. Acknowledge what the customer is saying and listen for key phrases they repeat.”
Your customers are not patient and will not tolerate trial & error.
If you send your customers 5 irrelevant articles, invite them to irrelevant webinars or training, etc. they will start ignoring you.
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