How to Get Under Their Skin: Reengaging and Retaining Customers with Orum
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Toni Tiffany, VP of Customer Success @ Orum Join VP of Customer Success Toni Tiffany as she shares how a car salesman from Florida reshaped her thinking and approach to value-adding engagement with customers. Toni will break down how her team solicits and leverages customer emotion - excitement, surprise, and yes, even frustration - to kick start conversations and spur actions that lead to desired customer outcomes. You'll walk away with key tactics for crafting effective engagement emails and insights that elicit an emotional response and drive results – at all stages of the customer lifecycle.
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How to Get Under Their Skin: Reengaging and Retaining Customers with Orum
- 1. Get Under Their Skin Reengaging and Retaining Customers with Orum’s VP of Customer Success Toni Tiffany VP of Customer Success Orum
- 2. “My job is easy. I have only one problem in my company, my department, my team today. I know how to solve that problem and have the ability to dedicate all of my time implementing the solution until the problem is solved.” – No One Ever
- 3. 3 Average number of apps
- 4. 4 App engagement by business size
- 6. Frazzled Customer Syndrome "[A] debilitating condition is brought on by excessive workloads, 24/7 availability, information overload, lack of sleep, and job-related stress." - Jill Konrath, SNAP Selling
- 7. Every customer champion and key stakeholder we service suffers from frazzled customer syndrome.
- 8. 8 Improve your Connect Rate Hi John, I hope you’re doing well. I just wanted to check in to see how things are going. I noticed your team can improve the connection rate for your inbound callers. We can help you there! I have several ideas for how you can improve this. Let me know if you want to hop on a call to discuss. Thanks, Your CSM. John
- 9. Stock photo of a BMW dealership - preferably with palm trees or something indicating coastal city. 9
- 10. 10 Call customer before she purchases from (redacted) BMW Mike, Lost a Customer to the (Redacted) store. Below is the sequence of events that caused a customer who has bought multiple cars from you to start buying from (Redacted) instead. Call 1 - Calls for Dillard because she purchased from him in the past. Leaves a voicemail. Call 2 - Calls back for Dillard. He is not there. She says she will call back. Call 3 - She really needs Dillard on the phone. He is not available and doesn’t appear to have ever called her back. She leaves Dillard another message. Call 4 - Calls in desperate to talk to anyone in sales. Receptionist tells her no one is available. Customer responds saying “Okay, I will just go to BMW in Daytona”. This customer needs to be called back as soon as possible or you will lose her as a customer! Call #4 happened only 2 hours ago. There is still time to bring her business back to your store! Her phone number is: (786) 345-7654. Your CSM. Mike
- 11. 1) Elicit an emotional response 2) Lay up an easy and immediate win New Goal of Engagement Emails
- 13. Elicit an emotional response
- 14. Lay up an easy and immediate win Specific Urgent Actionable Aligned
- 15. Tighten the Delivery ● Bullet points over paragraphs ● Proper nouns over pronouns ● Images over text ● Leverage different colors, font, sizing, formatting
- 16. 1) Elicit Emotion to drive Prioritization 2) Provide a path to clear, easy Wins to prompt Action 3) Format intentionally to capture Attention Key Takeaways
- 17. THANK YOU
- 18. Appendix 18 Slides 4 - 5: Productive “The State of SaaS Sprawl” Slide 7: Jill Konrath “SNAP Selling”
Editor's Notes
- Good morning, my name is Toni Tiffany. I’m Vice President of Customer Success at Orum. I’m here today to confess to you all that I actively encourage CSMs to shock, awe, frustrate, and sometimes, even piss off our customers. (pause) I don’t know what the surprised faces here are about. What else did you expect to hear from a session titled “Get under their skin”? Alright, alright. Stick with me for a bit. Before I get to why CSMs should elicit emotional responses from your customers, I’m going to take a quick detour to set the stage. - How many of you can relate with this sentiment?
- “My job is easy. I have only one problem in my company, my department, my team today. I know how to solve that problem and have the ability to dedicate all of my time implementing the solution until the problem is solved.” Anyone? No? Good. I’ve got the right audience. Many leaders, like myself, have no issue identifying areas of improvement within their org. In many cases, we know what needs to be done. The challenge we face is we find ourselves pulled in too many directions, called on to solve too many problems, and left with too little time to really fix what we want to fix in the time we want to fix it. Can you relate?
- Technology is a truly amazing thing. The right tech, when implemented and used well, can help solve a lot of the problems we face. I don’t think anyone here will debate this, right? Productiv conducted a study last year which showed that the average company uses 254 applications, with most departments each leveraging 40-60 different tools. Each of these tools were designated and purchased to help solve a specific problem.
- Here’s the catch - That same study from Productiv showed that less than half of licensed employees are regularly using the apps available to them. What does this mean? Very few of the applications purchased to solve a problem are actually being leveraged to their full potential and, therefore, the problems they were designed to solve still exist. Dig into your customer base, my bet is that you too have customers who aren’t leveraging your services to their full potential. This creates a problem for customer retention. If your end users aren’t actively using your product or aren’t using enough of it to solve the problem they turned to you to solve, they will inevitably cancel.
- Today, I’m going to share with you how my Customer Success team and I were able to break through the noise and improve our reengagement rate by more than 40% without making drastic changes to product. To do this, I’ll walk you through the early customer interaction which served as our aha moment and the basis from which our Engagement Email Playbook was created. In 2014, I was managing the customer success team at a call tracking and analytics company in Dallas, Texas which largely catered to Automotive dealerships. We had just finished reading sales strategist and author, Jill Konrath’s, book, SNAP Selling, where she writes about a condition known as frazzled customer syndrome.
- “Frazzled customer syndrome” describes the debilitating condition brought on by excessive workloads, 24/7 availability, information overload, lack of sleep, and job-related stress. This was one of those moments where you go “duh!” because what Jill described felt so obvious, but it was something we hadn’t fully appreciated.
- We looked around and it was clear: Every GM, Sales Manager, IT professional, and Marketing Director we served suffered from frazzled customer syndrome. No wonder so many of these key users had become disengaged with our product. It’s not that they had given up on wanting to solve their problems, they simply had too many problems to address and prioritize at once and, unfortunately, we had failed to position ourselves and the problems we helped solve as the priority. We took a step back and evaluated how our CSMs were attempting to engage with these frazzled customers. Here’s an example of what I saw: (slide of email example) —------------------------------- ALTERNATIVE VERSION: We looked around and it was clear: Every GM, Sales Manager, IT professional, and Marketing Director we served suffered from frazzled customer syndrome. For me and my team, we knew we had a service that could bring tremendous value, but struggled to break through the noise and capture our champion’s attention and energy long enough to help them make an impact on the problem they initially brought us on to help solve. In light of this realization, I took a step back and evaluated how my CSMs were attempting to reengage disengaged customers from the lens of someone suffering from Frazzled Customer Syndrome. Here’s an example of what I saw: (slide of email example)
- No wonder we weren’t having much success breaking through the noise to reengage dormant customers. 4 things quickly stuck out. The emails were boring and failed to capture attention. Most emails started with the phrase ”just checking in…”. I loathe this phrase and have since banned it from all communication on my team. Emails pointed out obvious and large problems - often the exact problems our software was purchased to address - with no real, immediate value. They basically screamed “we aren’t making an impact on the problem you brought us on to solve in the first place” There was a very weak, uncompelling CTA. You may think your CSMs are doing better than this. Perhaps they are, but I can tell you from the CSM emails I receive, not many people are doing much better than this. In 2014, I set out to change our approach.
- Our breakthrough moment came from a simple email sent by then-CSM, Kerry Bodner, to the sales management team at a non-responsive BMW dealership down in Florida. This dealership was the flagship store at a fairly large regional automotive group. Kerry knew that failure to gain buy-in and engagement from this dealership could lead to a full cancellation from the entire dealer group. A risk we simply couldn’t take. Kerry leaned into the challenge. He spent roughly 15 minutes culling through this dealership’s recent call recordings looking for an insight that would capture their attention. He found it in the recording of an inbound call that had happened only 2 hours prior. The call was from a previous buyer who was looking to purchase a new BMW from her prior sales rep. The problem was, she had been calling in for over a week and couldn’t get in touch with someone to help her. She was fed up and had enough. In this latest call, she informed the receptionist that they had lost her business. She was going to their biggest competitor that afternoon to purchase a new vehicle.
- Kerry leveraged this customer’s experience to craft an email that would break through the frazzled customer syndrome and garner a response from the customer. Here is what Kerry sent. (Pause) It worked. It caught the sales manager’s attention, the sales manager responded - exactly what we hoped for. This one email earned Kerry the right to schedule a call with them, to engage with them, to make recommendations, and to initiate change. This dealership became the poster-child of an engaged customer and stayed with us through the duration of my 8 years at the company. What stuck with me though, was the emotional response that Kerry’s email elicited from the dealership’s sales manager. He was pissed. Pissed is truly the best way to describe his emotion after receiving Kerry’s email. He was pissed at what Kerry’s email represented. He was pissed at the failure of his team. He was pissed at how close they came to losing an easy deal. He was pissed that a simple solution was already available to them to have saved those deals, but it wasn’t being used. In short, he was pissed enough that he stopped what he was doing to prioritize the problem Kerry highlighted.
- We latched on to the idea of generating an emotional response and immediately started experimenting with it. From this point, our entire reengagement strategy focused on driving two basic goals: Elicit an emotional response Lay up an easy and immediate win That’s it. By focusing our efforts on these two things, everything else started falling into place. An engagement playbook quickly evolved and overnight, we started getting responses from previously disengaged customers, we started seeing more upsells, we started seeing longer customer tenure. There were no major product changes, no new technology investments.
- Advertisers, particularly in the B2C realm, have been leveraging emotion to sell for a long, long time. Company A and B leverage happiness Nike and Company C aim to inspire and motivate. What I’ve found though, is the intentional use of emotion is surprisingly underutilized in the B2B customer success space. It’s as true now as it was 8 years ago. My teams and I have been experimenting with driving different emotions through our Customer Success outreach and the results have been both compelling and surprising.
- We confirmed that driving an emotional response is effective, but in a different way than B2C advertisers typically see. The emotions we found most successful in reengaging a disengaged customer were Anger/Disgust and Fear/Surprise. Happiness wasn’t as effective for disengaged customers, but was effective in helping keep or further increase the engagement of an already engaged customer. By and large, Frustration was the most effective emotion to stir an unresponsive customer to respond. This is very similar to the Dealership story I shared a moment ago. Surprise / Shock-and-Awe was effective in prompting urgency and further action on an agreed upon plan. Joy was exceptionally effective in strengthening relationships with engaged customers and drove customer loyalty and referrals.
- Honed in on the low hanging fruit - easy wins we could provide. Most closely tied to the key goals and metrics of the specific customer persona - the closer tie to revenue, the more effective the win was. We identified a list of 8-12 specific insights or wins we could provide via email This favored things they could do in <5 minutes to receive real value Tying the win to a specific person or activity was best Ex: Tee up a customer to call to salvage a deal; provide a call recording that could be used as a coaching tool during the next team meeting ; highlight a specific rep and 1 piece of coaching feedback for them. 1) It’s aligned with the Champion’s specific goal. In this case, it was selling vehicles. He knew his audience was an automotive sales manager. Their key metrics is number of units sold. Their compensation is tied directly to this number. Kerry decided to lean into sales opportunities - knew they wouldn’t care about anything else. 2) It’s specific. Kerry avoided making broad statements like “sell more vehicles” and instead logged into their live account and spent 30 minutes listening to recent inbound sales calls. This was where things got interesting. It wasn’t long before Kerry came across a call from a frustrated customer. She was a return customer who was ready to purchase a new BMW. She had been trying for several days to get in touch with her previous sales rep, but none of her messages had been returned yet. A quick record search pulled up 4 recent calls from the customer. 3 & 4) The insight provided is both urgent and actionable. The urgency in that the customer was going to their competitor that afternoon. Actionable in that a 2 min call could turn it around.
- The final piece of the puzzle was the delivery. The key point can be quickly identified without reading word for word. Prioritize bullet points over paragraphs. Proper nouns over pronouns. Images over text. Leverage color, font, size, formatting.