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Thank you for visiting my essay on what it means to be a Calm Customer and how customer success departments can facilitate creating calm customers that add profit and retention to a company.
My name is Lawrence. I’m a Senior Customer Support Operations Manager, Salesforce Administrator, and a Customer Success Manager. I also run my own consultancy.
What is a Calm Customer? A calm customer is cool, collected, unflappable, self-assured, confident, and relaxed.
Churn. The dreaded word that strikes fear into the heart of accounting, marketing, and even development.
“Why are they leaving us?”
The head(s) of Customer Success must track — and then know — why customers leave.
Are there likely opportunities to recapture lost business? Yes.
Is there a chance to save an account by explaining the service better? By offering a discount? By understanding a customer’s pain point? Yes.
Should we be compiling churn data using great tools?
I have adult children in different cities. I travel between them. It is easier for me to travel to them, than for them to travel to me. I am not alone in having family in multiple places; concentrated cultures are great, but most of us have loved ones in places away from our employers.
The best knowledge work is done asynchronously. Modern tools make this not only possible, but preferable.
When writing support documentation, do not start sentences with “You can”.
For example, avoid “You can select your primary number from the dropdown menu”.
Make it action-oriented: “Select your primary number from the dropdown menu”. Make it a command. An imperative. Plain English is your friend.
Sometimes it is not as obvious as my example, but look for ways to dispose of the words “You can”.
Lots of reasons why, but the top two are this:
Everyone talks about Sales.
Few talk about Retention (although it’s equally important to Sales).
Almost no one talks about helping some customers leave.
When you first revamp a Customer Support department, a good question to ask management is “what customers are you willing to lose?”. You could also say, “You understand that this process of change will cost you some customers, right?”.
Be prepared for raised eyebrows.
Sure, they knew their Support department was in disarray.
You are a customer at a restaurant. You discovered this restaurant by some good reviews on Yelp, or perhaps a friend recommended it, or perhaps you had even been there before.
You went to the restaurant with a certain set of expectations: “I will eat an amazing mushroom pizza and no longer be hungry, while I enjoy a pleasant conversation with my friend, and enjoy the ambience of piped Italian music”.