Customer Success Tactics: How to “Check In” with Customers

*These short Customer Success posts are meant illustrate things we’ve learned at Proven, so they may not translate perfectly to your company / industry. For context, the majority of our Saas customers are low LTV “pro-sumers” who are generally SMBs*

Ever emailed a customer something along the lines of “hey, just checking in”?

I know we definitely have. In fact a lot of CS teams use this strategy to make sure they’re keeping track of your accounts statuses. The idea behind it makes sense, you want to talk to your customers and make sure everything is running smoothly.

However, put yourself in the customer’s shoes. If you’re busy running around handling 5 different tasks, do you want to pick up the phone only to hear “how’s everything going with our product?”.

Hell no, you have important things to do, plus you probably use a lot of different products. That means that one company is just a small fraction of your tools.

We had scheduled “check-ins” throughout our customers journey, but we were noticing that people almost seemed irritated when we gave them a call (or were just awkward). We then got a great piece of advice:

Only reach out to customers with a value add.

This could be fixing a problem, providing guidance, alerting them of a new feature, etc. Make sure that when you contact them, you are delivering a benefit to them

We instantly found it was a lot easier to talk to people when we could tell them exactly WHY we were calling, and what the benefit to them was.

This type of check-in is best if it is driven by customer actions, not a pre-determined schedule. This leads us to a whole different topic, which is creating a contextual alert system (great white paper from Totango) to drive your customer communications.