A lot of companies love to say they are “customer-centric” or “customer-first” and many likely have at least one core value that is tied to the customer. In theory, this is great! The philosophy behind putting the customer at the center of a business is very sound.
The problem is the disconnect between saying you’re customer-centric and the actions to support behaviors, programs, and processes that actually put the customer in the center.
Most companies are actually sales-centric with what I call a “customer-first veneer.”
How is this a comms issue? Well, a strong Customer Communications function (different from Customer Marketing) can move a company to be actually customer-centric with the mutual benefits of stronger market positioning and messaging, improved retention, reference and referral programs, testimonials, CSM sanity, relationship strengthening, etc. The list is long.
The elements of a strong customer communications program include:
- Feedback: Dialogue, Observational, and Solicited
Feedback programs can get scattered throughout an organization, usually with solicited feedback (surveys like CSAT, NPS, etc.). A customer communications program will take into account all of the surveys going out and be able to pull together the bigger picture of feedback by customer segments into a unified story. A comms program will also build out observational feedback processes (because people lie on surveys – both to a company and to themselves) and support dialogue feedback programs like Customer Advisory Boards/Councils, Executive peer groups, customer community channels, etc.
Generally, a holistic and strategic feedback program will be called “Voice of the Customer” and will be jointly owned by Communications and a Post-Sales leader like a COO or head of Customer Success, but the point is that it should be a strategically organized and well-communicated program, and not some random NPS surveys sent out with a hope and prayer.
- Post-Sales Relationship (frequently referred to as CX)
This part of a program includes all of the “business necessary” touchpoints of a customer relationship, assessing everything that happens from contract to renewal or churn and how it’s designed to benefit the customer. Think about billing, incident response, technical support and education, price increases, license/user changes, CSM/AM changes, etc.
A communications program will make sure these interactions are planned and executed well, with clear messaging and appropriate visibility and tracking. It will also ensure balance with any other messages or “asks” of the customer that come from Marketing, Sales, Product or other teams.
Example: It’s common to have a customer newsletter or some other demand-type activity that showcases new features or promotes the next tier of a product subscription. It’s likely these types of campaigns have some automation functionality. But what if a company has a major security breach and in the middle of that, one of these sales-oriented messages goes out? It’s a bad look and can make a crisis situation much worse, damaging customer relationships. Customer Communications programs will be aware of any always-on campaigns and will know to turn them off in the event of an incident or crisis.
- Customer-Facing Team Comms
Often overlooked, but extremely important is supporting your customer-facing team members with clear and complete communications and messaging. Anyone in your company that speaks with customers on a regular basis or is a point of contact for questions/support should know what’s going on with Product and Marketing so that they are not caught off guard by a customer.
Example: Product feature releases usually include a marketing and sales process to promote the new feature, but did Technical Support get a chance to see it? Do they have an FAQ doc to help them answer questions? Are they prepared for a new influx of customer questions around the launch? Comms handles this with the respective team leaders.
Also, a good communications program will build information gathering and feedback mechanisms for these teams to provide insights to Product/Engineering and the GTM functions on things like top support issues, frequent feature requests, things customers don’t use / don’t care about, escalation points, etc.
Want to utilize comms for customer centricity but don’t know where to start? Book a free 30-min consult with our founder, Kate.
