Spare Me Your Platitudes — Customers Are Tired of Insincere Support

Customer Success is the business methodology of ensuring customers achieve their desired outcomes while using a product or service. Customer Success is relationship-focused client management that aligns client and vendor goals for mutually beneficial outcomes.

Effective Customer Success strategy typically results in decreased customer churn and increased upsell opportunities.

Customer success is the function at a company responsible for managing the relationship between a vendor and its customers. The goal of customer success is to make the customer as successful as possible, which in turn, improves customer lifetime value for the company.

Customer Success is when the customers achieve their desired outcome through their Interactions with the company.

Every so often when people are trying to be helpful, all they can think to say is a platitude. People care but they don’t have the energy to dig into our souls and wrack their brains for the perfect retort.

“The customer is always right” seems to have become a dangerous platitude. Especially when there are limited resources, it’s impossible to take every piece of feedback from customers and incorporate into business. It is important to set boundaries as to what’s acceptable to incorporate.

It’s not that being friendly isn’t allowed, or that the sales representatives are needed to be impartial and imitate the personality of an automated call center.

It is important how you evaluate each customer as well as the situation being discussed to help you offer the right kind of response.

Customer success is directly related to customer satisfaction which can be attained when the following is taken care of:

By giving a personal touch:  Getting to know the customers and letting them know us

Being accessible: Making it extremely easy for customers to reach out to people to have one-on-one interactions.

Being Transparent: By accepting the mistakes if something goes wrong and giving a clear picture of the scenario helps the customers to understand the people they are dealing with better.

Being Relevant: Some companies have trouble adapting. The needs of the customers are not constant. They keep changing by time -- and if the customers’ success has to be given importance then staying relevant, and to be able to change with them is important. Staying close to customers is the best way to be clued into what they’re really looking for.

Some of the most common issues businesses struggle with when it comes to providing great customer service are:

A lot of times, customer support is an afterthought or checklist item, when in reality, it needs to be a critical part of the go-to-market strategy.

Customer support is often considered to be a cost-center. In actual fact, it should be considered to be a revenue-center that is focused on customer loyalty.

Platitudes Come With Expiration Dates

It’s not just vendors that have co-opted and over-used phrases and concepts in their messaging. Thought leaders of all kinds are guilty of using the same tropes to describe the world we market in.

For instance, an email just received from one of my favorite industry sites that has high quality commentary and even that post had the header: “Buying behavior and profiles have changed.”

What is the alternative? If things have changed but we’ve been saying that for more than five years, what does that mean for a marketer? Is this a moving target? Are we falling further behind? Was this one big event or an accumulation of them? Is it fast moving or a slow burn?

Intelligent engagement based on what we know about the person drives better marketing performance.

Just like the appropriate tone can have tremendous returns to forward facing communications the right tone is absolutely essential for support.

The main problem is that many companies often tend to blindly follow the best practices. In this particular case, it is assuming that super-friendly and chatty reps are what customers are looking for.

In this case, it is important to remember that a one size fits all approach does not work. As such, finding the right tone for the company begins with truly understanding what the customer base looks like.

Sincere empathy works far better in these situations. To be sure, we should stick with positive language and focus on the solution, but if someone just spent money using the services of the company and is not happy with the service received, the customer will be looking for results, and not personality.

Customers however, are most likely to be understanding and forgive a company for the issue as long as the resolution being offered is straightforward. If the rep says something like "I'm so sorry about what has happened, and I totally understand how frustrating this must be. Let me fox this for you right away." the customer will be pacified.

The success of the business is inherently intertwined with the customers’ success. If customers succeed using a product, they’ll continue using the product, and thus, the business will be successful. At the very core, that is what Customer Success (CS) is all about:

Ensuring the customers achieve their desired outcome while using the product. Nevertheless, getting this done requires data, people, as well as processes in place. After all, how can we help our customers succeed using the product if we don’t know when, why, and how they’re actually using it.