How to get your customers to actually do what you need them to do — without the tears!

I must admit I get a little scared when I hear all of the excitement around “digital touch” customer success strategies. Because if poorly done, these tactics are useless at best and downright annoying at worst. To do it well, customer success leaders need to become experts in digital marketing. That’s an entirely different skill set!

But let me tell you a big secret for how to up your digital marketing game. It involves actually knowing your customer, and that’s something us customer success folks are all really good at. Here’s a story that will help.

I worked for a company that had to move thousands of customers onto a new UI. This mostly had to do with paying off some tech debt by updating the underlying architecture to be more flexible going forward. Moving to this new UI required administrators of the system to take certain technical steps in the background, which varied depending on the nuances of their particular setup. There were some customer benefits to making the move but nothing compelling enough to offset the work required. News flash: none of the customers were excited to take on this extra homework.

The organization put a ton of effort and resources around this migration. There was a large cross-functional team that met regularly for many months. There were half a dozen webinars, there were training materials, there were emails. We were all working towards a drop-dead date by which customers had to transition or we would have to force it. We knew that forcing it would cause a ton of disruption so we were attempting to avoid that with a full court press of content and reminders. A similar transition had happened years before with much less effort to educate customers and it had been a disaster. NPS plummeted, customers were pissed, and it took Support months to dig themselves out of a giant volume of questions from confused administrators.

I got involved when the process had been well underway for months. And I asked a very simple question: how many of the customers had actually made the switch? The answer was: almost none of them. How could this be? We had given them SO MUCH information!

And that, of course, was the problem. We just firehosed information at them, with the expectation that they would sit through an hour long webinar or read through a bunch of documentation and try to figure out what particular migration steps they needed to take based on their system setup. These folks had whole other jobs outside of administering our software. We were asking way too much of them, and it wasn’t working.

So we radically changed our approach. We recognized that is was OUR job to help the customers make this switch. It wasn’t their job to figure it out. So we did two things:

— Segmented the customers into a half a dozen different cohorts based on their system set-up and the specific steps they needed to take to make the switch to the new UI.

— Let the customers know we had analyzed their specific instance and had come up with a personalized transition journey for them. We laid out how the transition period was going to unfold over a period of several months, letting them know we would be walking them through the process step-by-step with in-product guidance. We then delivered a series of extremely targeted messages, asking customers to take no more than a single step with each message. We delivered these in-product, when the admins logged in.

Then, after each message, we pulled the data to see if customers had actually taken the desired action. And we saw a dramatic increase in the number of customers taking each step. If they missed a step, we followed up again to gently nudge them along.

Of course we continued all of the other activities, including running a weekly pre-recorded webinar staffed with live support folks answering questions via chat so that customers always had a way to tap into the training when they were ready for it. If they wanted to make the switch faster than our prescribed journey, they could always do so by accessing of the great information we had put together.

By the time the “big day” arrived and we needed to flip the switch for all customers, we only had a few stragglers left who hadn’t finished the work. There was barely a blip in support calls.

Now this had to do with some fairly boring system maintenance stuff, but we took the lessons we learned from this and applied them to other things where we were trying to influence user behavior, like getting customers to try out new features. The lessons we learned were:

— Get as personalized and targeted as possible with every communication. Don’t make customers figure out what pertains to them or not. Understand your cohorts and what they care about. A cohort could be broad like all customers who are at a particular point in their lifecycle, or very targeted like a specific end user who has never tried a certain feature.

— Recognize that customers are not going to give your communications the time or attention that you think or hope they will. If you want them to take action, like trying out a new feature, keep it simple. Ask them to do one thing, ideally pay off that effort with some tangible benefit, and then go from there. You can do your webinars and issue your press releases but you also need to supplement this with targeted, in-context guidance that speaks specifically to each customer and their needs and makes it dead simple to take action.

— Measure the results of everything you try, and use your successes and failures to get better!

Good luck out there, success peeps!