One of the things that excites me most these days is thinking about Customer Experience departments as holistic endeavors to provide users with an amazing experience and thus, retain them.
Too often businesses fund a specific effort to try to shove customers in or pry them back from the brink. But the businesses that seem to succeed with ease are the ones who have put funds, sweat, and tears into the entirety of the user journey. Instead of selling harder or giving more discounts when customers try to cancel, they create a powerful experience at every point in a customer’s journey, increasing the value you’re providing them and getting them to stick around longer (and spread the word).
Here’s how I think about approaching the whole customer experience.
Core Elements
These are the core tools a Customer Experience team has to drive retention.
Foundational
You can’t build on a weak foundation. These crucial underlying elements might not drive immediate retention effects, but must be included – and cared for – in order for the rest of the org to thrive.
Customer Support
Customer support isn’t sexy. But it’s also something that many customers will have to seek out, usually when they’re already feeling stressed out. If you can’t deliver a high-quality support experience, it doesn’t matter what sort of fancy events you host or quarterly business reviews you conduct.
Key metrics to consider:
First reply time
Customer satisfaction
Customer effort score
Customer Feedback
You can’t serve your customers without understanding what they need. Customer feedback helps inform your initiatives, prioritize your work, and – when done well – show your customers that you are listening.
Key metrics to consider:
Customer segment representation
Customer satisfaction
Targeted
These are tools you can deploy at specific points to actively change outcomes. They’re your scalpels – and must be used with care.
Onboarding
Ensuring your customer knows how to use your product is crucial, and onboarding is your best opportunity to do this. However, onboarding is a double-edged sword; if you get in your customers’ way or overwhelm them, you may create the opposite effect you had hoped for.
Key metrics to consider:
Completion rate
Ratings
Correct quiz answers
Customer Success
Customer success teams, in my opinion, are your SEAL Team 6. These are the people you deploy at the highest-leverage moments – when a customer is just starting with the product, or when you’re seeing warning signs – to provide expert, hands-on support and advice. The best Customer Success teams rely heavily on data and on conversations with customers, and are able to use the two to provide powerful intervention.
Key metrics to consider:
Customer health score
Churn rate
Offboarding
Offboarding might seem like the end of the relationship, but a former customer is still someone who will provide word of mouth about your product. Make it hard to cancel and they’ll complain. Offer discounts you don’t offer your happy customers and they’ll gossip. Instead, this should be seen as an opportunity to a) get feedback so you can make your product and services better and b) leave them feeling great about your company (even if the product is no longer right for them).
Key metrics to consider:
Resurrection rate
LTV of resurrected users (if they are resurrected and then churn a month later, it was pointless)
Qualitative feedback
Value-Add
These tools create additional value for your customers, hopefully improving their appreciation of and commitment to your company. They shouldn’t be attempted without a strong foundation and some key targeted tools…but when combined with the above, they can really take a company over the top.
Education
Not to be confused with onboarding or help centers, education helps your customers advance in using your product and/or in their craft. This is the difference between someone using your product at 10% vs 90%, or the difference between retaining a manager as your point of contact vs having your point of contact promoted to Director. A word of warning, though: education can be an endless project, and you must make sure you’re creating the most valuable content and driving people to it at the right moment.
Metrics to consider:
Education promotion clickthrough rate
Completion rate
Ratings
Community
Obviously one of my favorite subjects. Beyond your actual product, there’s only so much domain expertise your company can have and credibly deliver. Connecting customers (and/or prospects) to each other can unlock a wealth of information and value for your customers.
Metrics to consider:
Community retention
Percentage posts answered
Customer satisfaction
Partner Touchpoints
As Brian Oblinger has rightly pointed out, a Customer Experience team working in a silo will not succeed. Customers’ experiences are affected by every touchpoint they have with a company, and it doesn’t make sense to fold all those touchpoints into the Customer Experience team proper.
Here are some of the crucial partnerships & touchpoints the Customer Experience team must influence.
Marketing & Expectations
Marketing teams want to get people in the door, but if they do so by setting too-high expectations, it can be for naught. A great Experience and Marketing partnership finds the balance between getting customers excited and ensuring accuracy. And, ideally, Experience can also provide a pipeline of potential references and satisfied customer quotes to market!
Sales & Fit
Sales teams are often rewarded for closing – and left unscathed if a customer is a bad fit or finds that your offering doesn’t live up to what they were told. A great partnership between a Customer Experience team and a Sales team ensures customers are great fits – and shares that success.
Billing & Experience
Billing is often seen as an operational function unrelated to customer experience. But it is an experience. And, if it’s a bad one, it can sour the other experiences a customer have. A great Experience and Finance partnership ensures that bills are paid without customers feeling stressed out.
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Customer Experience is a holistic effort. A customer doesn’t exist at just one point in time. They exist before they start talking to the company, while they’re sold to, while they’re setting up and using the product, and – yes – even after they stop using the product. A proper customer experience strategy should utilize all the tools above to ensure the customer has more than just a smooth experience, but a successful and delightful one.
One of the most fundamental ways companies can build trust is to listen to their customers (and act on what they hear). But this can often be easier said than done. There’s SO much feedback out there, there can be a lot of aggressive negativity, sharing roadmaps feels like handing intel to your competitors, etc.
One of the best tools for building this trust while avoiding many of the concerns above is an advisory council: a private, limited group of customers who give you insight and feedback. A successful advisory council becomes the bridge between company and audience and drives true co-creation.
Advisory councils have been one of our most crucial tools for rebuilding trust at Reddit. And many of the harder decisions we’ve made have been informed by our Moderator Council. You can see that in action in the public notes we shared from our Council discussion on implementing a hate speech policy.
Today I want to outline the crucial ingredients for a successful advisory council.
A Clear Mission
If you’re not explicit about what your goals are, your audience may see the council as simply lip service – or use it in ways you didn’t expect. Craft your mission statement before you do outreach and be sure to feature it prominently both during that phase and within the council itself.
You’ll also want to explicitly define what the council is not. For us, we had to clarify a few months in that this was not a channel to escalate support issues. We didn’t want to give unfair advantage to our council members and these escalations tended to distract from the core topics. Make sure when identifying these non-topics that you carefully explain why (and what their alternative channels are) so the council doesn’t feel silenced.
Constructive Criticism
A successful council will give you the feedback you need to hear, but not feel antagonistic. If it’s too antagonistic your staff won’t want to attend, but if you just fill the council with yes-people you won’t actually get what you need.
The right people
Choosing the right people for your council is one of the most crucial steps. As with any community, your core members will define the culture and vibe of your council. We specifically looked for people who had criticized us before but tended to be civil and open to discussion. This was relatively easy for us because we do public feature announcements on our platform and get lots of feedback in the comments. If you don’t have that to pull from, you can do some introductory calls before extending a formal invite.
Sales staff, community staff, customer support staff, and your audience itself will also have great suggestions for additions. Just be careful that nobody is getting added as a way to help close a sale – you should have final say on whether you accept a nominated member.
Rules and norms
Like any community, you want to establish rules and norms within your council space. This may be fairly personal based on your company, the area your business is in, the stomach your staff have for conflict, etc. For us, a few things were important: council members needed to actually try to attend calls and get context if they were going to give criticism, to treat others like humans and avoid ad hominem attacks, and to ensure they’re not dominating the conversation.
Confidentiality
It’s very important that you’re clear with invitees up front what level of confidentiality you expect. Some members may not be comfortable keeping things private, and you don’t want to put them in a tough position. Nobody should have to guess what they can share – make it explicitly clear when something is early and confidential (i.e. don’t freak out the larger community with this half-baked idea) vs something you’d love for them to evangelize.
On the other hand, make it clear whether their participation in and/or contributions to the council will be publicly shared.
Enforcement
Rules don’t work without enforcement. It might feel especially painful to punish someone in such an intimate and important community, but if you don’t then nobody will take the rules seriously. Establish a plan for how many strikes someone gets and then apply consistently. We’ve been lucky to have to remove very few folks from the councils, but our warnings and occasional removals have been effective in showing that we’re not messing around.
Positive reinforcement
On the flip side, make sure that every time you see someone with a really great contribution you give them a shout-out. Be sure to emphasize why it’s great so others know how to emulate – call out if it was particularly insightful, or critical without being antagonistic, or whatever other norm you want to entrench.
Diverse Membership
The insights from your council will be ineffective unless it’s successfully representing a diverse group of people.
Diverse recruitment
This is an opportunity to hear from the folks who may not be the loudest voices in the room, but are still affected (sometimes, even more dramatically) by your decisions. Be sure to carefully curate people across a range of attributes, like:
Account size
Account age
Location
Race
Identity
Product usage
Obviously, be sure to follow all relevant laws and be transparent about any data collection or usage.
Term limits
A permanent advisory council is bad for a number of reasons:
You don’t get a diversity of voices
Over time, members may lose their outsider perspective
The larger audience may not feel represented by this “cabal”
You may discover someone isn’t a great fit but you don’t want to “fire” them
I highly recommend creating limited, pre-determined terms for your members. You can consider a one-time extension for especially fantastic members. (We also hired one of our best council members!) This gives you a nice rotating cast of people and an easy out if someone isn’t a great fit.
Internal Participation
The council will only work if you’re actually engaging with it regularly. This means that you have to drive internal participation.
Getting internal buy-in
This can be hard – internal folks may feel too busy, or may be scared of being yelled at. The best long-term solution for this is just to make sure that, per the above, council conversations are constructive. The short-term solution may be less elegant: call in favors, plop council meetings onto people’s calendars without asking, find a friendly (even if they’re not the team leader) to come present, get their bosses to pressure them, etc. Get the wheel turning and, if you’ve truly created a collaborative environment, folks will want to come back and will spread the good word.
Be sure to also be conscious about how you’re pitching the council. When pitching, this isn’t about “listening to our users” or “doing the right thing” – those aren’t the primary motivators for everyone (unfortunately). Instead, frame it in a way that aligns with the parties’ goals. For product managers it might be about making their launches more successful, for policy folks it might be about avoiding potential blowback, etc.
Hearing All Voices
If the point of a council is to hear viewpoints you might normally miss, that means being intentional about hearing those voices.
Limit call size
After about 10 council participants, a call tends to gets too messy to handle and people can’t speak up. Make sure to limit – you can always release notes from the call and have a larger asynchronous discussion after.
Wait before you try to solve
It can be easy to hear someone explain a problem or make a suggestion and immediately leap on it because you have thoughts or want to try to fix it. But that one person might not represent the group. Make time for other voices; ideally, a gap long enough it feels awkward and the most timid people can work up the courage. Actively ask “Is this how everyone feels? Are there any other perspectives?”
Raise people’s voices
If someone’s quiet that doesn’t mean they don’t have an opinion. Make sure to call on people you haven’t heard from.
Follow up after
Some people aren’t great live, and sometimes people think of new angles or better articulate their thoughts after a call. Create an asynchronous written space for his conversation.
Respect time limits
Hearing all voices does not mean going over time. Some people have hard stops and can’t attend past the end time – continuing is putting them in a tough spot and potentially excluding them. Plus, having more to talk about probably means you’ve just found some juicy topics, which is great! You can always schedule a more focused follow-up call (frankly, that may be more productive than trying to solve something in the last 10 minutes of a call) or, again, take it to an asynchronous conversation.
Theme your calls
There will always be topics that are more urgent, but not always more important (see the Eisenhower Matrix). For this reason, it’s good to have different themed calls to ensure that you touch on everything important at some point. For some constant topics you’ll want to have a recurring call; others can be ad hoc.
Act on feedback
Listening without taking action can sometimes be worse than asking in the first place. It gives the sense that a council is merely for show.
Bring things to your council early
The biggest issue we ran into is that teams would be so heads-down on work that they wouldn’t bring products to our council until they were nearly finished. This doesn’t work; even if you get some truly great and valid feedback, you don’t have time to implement it.
Set an internal goal for how early teams are to bring items to councils, measure it, and address problem teams. Be sure to remind them why this is in their best interest!
Either do it or say why not
Some feedback will be worth acting on, some won’t. Some will align with business interests, some won’t. But even if you don’t plan to act on feedback, you should acknowledge it. Explain why and set clear expectations as to whether you’ll revisit the decision. (Try to avoid platitudes like “thanks for the feedback, we’ll consider it” – people can see right through this.) Often, this is the difference between a community member feeling you’re ignoring them and them grudgingly accepting your decision.
Reply
Even if you don’t have anything actionable to say in response to feedback, you should appreciate that person for going out of their way to give you something valuable. Try to reply to or at least socially respond to (like, award, etc) every contribution.
Appreciation
Hopefully it goes without saying, but people like appreciation and you should appreciate your council. A few ways to do so:
Thank them every chance you get (publicly and in the private council space)
Point out where their work had an impact – the more specific you can be, the more they’ll feel it
Give them unique swag that emphasizes their unique effort
Give them access to high levels of the company
Give them digital badges or trophies to display
Loop them in early when something big is happening
On that last point, we specifically found that during crises (when we tended to be heads down) our council felt painfully ignored. When we started to loop them in – even with a “hey, we ARE working on this but we don’t have any details yet” – they were happier, gave us more constructive feedback, and tended to publicly support us more.
Amplifying to the Larger Audience
Simply running a council doesn’t mean all your users feel connected to what you’re doing. An advisory council shouldn’t exist in a vacuum – it should be combined with other methods of gathering feedback, conversing with your audience, and building trust.
It’s important to amplify the work you’re doing with your council. This can look like:
Noting in launch announcements that the council weighed in on a feature
Calling out improvements that were specifically identified by the council
Creating ways for the broader community to apply to join or nominate others
Evolve
Our first councils were vertically focused (sports, gaming, beauty, etc). We then combined them into one mega council because we didn’t have the bandwidth to run so many individual calls. We’re now looking at some potential ideas around splitting them out again. That’s ok: plans, situations, and capabilities change.
Every council is going to be different, and it’s going to evolve with your capacity, company goals, etc. Don’t lock yourself into one format. But, crucially: be sure to get feedback from your council before you change said council!
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Advisory councils are not a small amount of work, but they can be one of the biggest bangs for your buck in building customer insight and trust. If you choose to create an advisory council, be sure to sufficiently invest in it. And lastly – have fun! Getting to connect intimately with your audience can be incredibly rewarding.
Slack just released some fascinating research on remote work in the age of COVID-19. There are some important takeaways every company should think deeply on.
People lean towards a hybrid workplace
Despite all the claims of “remote is the future”, the majority of Americans surveyed said that, post-COVID, they’d like to spend some time in the office and some time at home. Very few want to spend 5 days a week in the office, and they appreciate saving time and money working from home.
I suspect many more would have been excited about fully remote, save for one major pain point cited in the research: human connection. People are feeling less connected to their coworkers, and this seems to be one of the main things driving them to think about a hybrid workplace.
The office is not necessary – opportunities to connect as humans are
It’s clear from these results that the office as a workplace is unnecessary, but the office is an easy (if not cheap) way to drive some human connection. That said, it’s uneven, biased towards those who naturally connect with others, and frustrating for truly remote workers.
The future is much more likely about creating structured opportunities for people to connect, both online and in-person. With the focus on connection, these interactions can intentionally drive inclusivity and, frankly, spend more money on peak experiences rather than office perks that become less novel over time. (Hell, even just from a COVID-19 standpoint, safety at one big in-person event is much more doable than safety in an office open to dozens, hundreds, or thousands of people every day.)
People Ops teams need to start carving out roles that focus on creating connections and belonging
In other words, they need to hire community professionals. Connection and belonging has become a big focus for People Ops teams in recent years, but it will need to be a top priority for hybrid and remote-first companies. Employee engagement is heavily affected by connection, so someone needs to be dedicated to not just building that into the day-to-day, but building intentional spaces for people to connect. This might look like:
Programs that connect employees over coffee
Career development buddies
Interest/hobby groups
Identity groups
Team offsites/onsites
Big internal summits
Onboarding processes geared towards building connection
Etc
This will certainly involve events, but won’t work if it’s simply an event planner hire. Experienced community professionals know that the logistics of the event are secondary to driving the desired human connection.
It also requires thinking through how you foster conversation and connection around touchy, emotional issues, something many tech companies are struggling with. These are community-building and moderation issues. Luckily there are a bunch of us who are very experienced at tackling these challenges and opportunities. Rather than learn these skills from scratch, People Ops should look towards the experts.
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This stuff is work. My team’s engagement score has actually improved during the pandemic, but that’s due to hours and hours of work and experimentation on the part of me and my lieutenants. If we leave these things to chance, we’re going to see this get worse.
So yes, I also felt a need to write about that Away article. The thing is, I have two sets of issues with what I read.
1) From an operations standpoint, a lot if this pain was avoidable
2) From a management standpoint, managing like this is cruel and unsustainable
I hope that the following tips can turn an unfortunate story and experience for these employees into something practical for those of you who have a good heart and want to avoid these situations.
Operations
I’ve run Operations teams in some form for over ten years now. It’s a little bit art, but it’s a lot science. And with a physical product, operations are incredibly important to get right. If you are selling a physical product that is likely to be a common Christmas gift, good planning is essential. I worked at the (partially) eCommerce site ZOZI for several years and successfully shepherded us through the holidays despite the massive influx in orders.
What I read in this article is a complete ineptitude in holiday planning for a physical brand…which is probably tied into the second part, because if you don’t care about your employees then you’re less likely to spend time planning for them.
The tips here are simple:
Plan
Understand your sales projections, estimated support volume per sale, support capability per staff member, etc.
If you’re retail, plan for a holiday influx. You will have one.
Staff should be allowed to have vacations, so you should plan how to handle vacation schedules early.
You should offer in advance, not at the last minute, vacation trade-offs for folks who truly are okay working during the holidays.
You should do your best to balance out people’s days off so you can have continuous coverage.
Invest
Not delivering Christmas gifts on time can be a death sentence for your brand, so you should over-invest during this period.
If your projections suggest you won’t have enough people, hire more early (full time or temp).
If you’re in a pinch, get all hands on deck to help with support.
Prep
You should address any quality issues with your product well in advance of the holiday and implement a code freeze (or in this case product freeze) far before so you don’t introduce any potential issues.
You should decimate any backlogs well before the holiday influx.
You should set expectations with your customers about holiday responsiveness.
Management
That said, the more important issue here is a complete lack of understanding of what makes a good manager. Managers are there to help their employees do their best work…and employees do their best work when they feel it is rewarding, challenging, and appreciated. Nobody does their best work when being yelled at, or if they do then it results in much quicker burnout. Every tactic on display in these Slack threads shows a fundamental misunderstanding, but here are a few tips that might help.
Your staff are both valuable asset and PEOPLE. Don’t treat them like gears in a machine.
Your on-the-ground managers are going to best know how to implement and deliver your directives. This “all communication should be public” thing is naive. Talk to your lieutenants to figure out the right approach, and let them deliver.
Don’t ever couch a punishment as professional development. It’s insulting and undermines any trust in you to actually help them develop.
Yelling at people in public only makes them feel worse. These people clearly felt dedication to the company, so any performance conversation would have been motivating to them. Doing it in public just shamed them and showed a lack of appreciation of their hard work.
If you’re going to get hands-on, ask how you can help, don’t threaten to take away the project. Get your hands dirty doing the same work as your team. People appreciate leaders that get in and help, but not when they do it as an exasperated, demeaning punishment.
When you are shitty to employees you lose them, have a harder time getting new ones, suffer from abrupt and rough departures, and maybe even get an article like this written about you.
I don’t like dunking on other teams, but I found the situations highlighted in this article pretty offensive…and sadly, I’ve seen versions of this in the real world. Life is too short to be a jerk. Build work memories you’re proud of.
I actually thought last Monday was Community Manager Appreciation Day, because the CMAD website hadn’t been updated since 2017. Back then they were doing all-day streams, giving out awards, and trending on Twitter.
I highlight this not to shame anyone, but to point out that this is exactly what community manager burnout looks like: going from something huge and engaging and impressive to nothing. You bust your ass, you do about 5 jobs at once, you make amazing things happen…and then you hit a wall. You don’t have the resources you need, you’re exhausted, your value gets questioned, and you stop.
That sucks, and I feel bad for the CMAD organizers because they really did so much cool stuff for several years.
So here’s my challenge to you this CMAD: take care of yourself. Don’t worry about hanging out checking out the CMAD hashtag all day or sending supportive messages to your peers. Take care of YOU.
A few ideas:
Schedule a legit vacation right now. Line up backup so you can be truly offline. Know that it won’t be the same as you doing it, but it’ll be ok.
Rejigger your schedule to make uninterrupted time for deep work.
Find some time for exercise, even a tiny bit. (I’m about to walk the 20m from Transbay Terminal to work instead of take a bus. It’s something.)
Set up your phone to limit your time on apps you don’t need, or to go to grayscale after 6p, or to pop an alarm warning you to take a break.
Give more responsibility to your community members. Know that it’ll be hard to let go but that they’ll do things you never expected.
Stop working on something. Cut your losses on your least successful project, let someone who foisted a task on you know that you’re too swamped, take a break from your Friday wrap-up post. (I did this once and the community stepped up and did it for me!)
Ask for help. Make sure your boss really understands how much you’re working. Ask a fellow community manager for advice, or another set of eyes. Find a coworker who believes in your mission and see if they’ll help with a big project.
Build time into your day – even literally 5 minutes – for mindfulness. Take a class or download an app and learn how just taking a moment to be present can make a huge difference.
Know that you can’t do everything, that you’re doing a great job, and that you’re not an imposter. And burnout will not help you succeed.
