The Relationship Between Better Communications and Lower Churn
- Eliezer J Sherman
- Jan 25, 2021
- 2 min read
Updated: Jun 30, 2021
Acquiring customers is hard and expensive but holding onto existing customers or adding value to the status quo demands resources too.
One way companies efficiently learn about their customers' preferences is through gathering usage data and gleaning insights from user-behavior. They track the decisions customers make while interacting with their products. Many customers, faced with the current pandemic, have adopted a more relaxed attitude about having their data collected.
While efficient, the data-collecting relationship is passive, with an observer, the company, and an observed party, the customer. Sometimes, the company may reach out to the customer if a certain kind of behavior is noticed, or the customer may reach out to the company for customer service or technical-related questions.
Why's customer service awkward?
The company, here, is driven to communicate by the need to retain and increase the value of customers, if possible (or, occasionally, dump problematic ones). The customer, on the other hand, is often driven to communicate by the need to capture the most value from the product. No wonder customer service can be an awkward experience: the companies are interested in the customer while the customer is generally interested in the product.
Read more from Elie Sherman:
One way for the company to resolve the issue is to speak the language of product, to make the product as important to the company as it is to the customer -- from marketing, to sales and sales enablement, to technical support. From a high level this is true anyway. If they both speak the language of product, then their points of interaction involve communicating about the same problems and resolutions.
Certainly this poses a challenge for companies which prefer their customers' happiness to functioning products.
Introducing the language of product
Some ways the company can be proactive about introducing to the customer the language of product include:
Establishing a way for customers to express when positive product outcomes have been achieved; giving solutions a vocabulary
Making sure customers and customer service agents are fluent in discussing products and features; identifying solutions for various problems
Introducing new products and solutions based on your customers' needs now
These are three helpful stepping stones for speaking the language of product with customers early and often. I didn't devise a Greek mnemonic device for this strategy.
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