Three simple words to follow as a customer success leader during a crisis

March 11, 2020, was a warm and sunny day with a beautiful blue sky. I had just enjoyed a relaxed lunch at a sushi restaurant just north of San Francisco with my client. As we devoured our sushi tacos, sashimi, and teriyaki, we discussed our fears about the canceled events and conferences, such as Austin's annual South by Southwest festival and Coachella. While we were concerned, we didn’t even consider that in just a few days we would be forbidden to dine at any restaurant like this one, and we would be confined to our homes for an indefinite period of time.

As I drove back to my hotel in San Francisco that day, I heard over the radio that the NBA put its season on hold due to a few Utah Jazz players testing positive for COVID-19. I was shocked. The other professional sports leagues quickly followed suit. My company had already mandated a work-from-home policy two days ago, so I knew that things were getting serious, but the extent of the crisis didn’t hit me as I was on the road visiting clients. I noticed the traffic back to San Francisco was much lighter than it’s ever been and there was an eerie emptiness on the streets. I cut my trip short and flew back to New Jersey the next day.

Picture of the cruise ship docked in the bay that had infected passengers on board. Source: New York Times.

They don't have a customer success leadership school for this

From that point on, we saw several changes, including the limitation of travel, the banning of large gatherings, and the only permitting of essential services to operate in most large cities in the US. We also saw the crisis directly impacting our clients. While Covid-19 wasn't anything like anything we’ve seen before in customer success, we leveraged a tried and tested methodology to cope with the situation:

1. Listen to your clients.

2. Execute

3. Measure the results.

It can be easy during these times to get wrapped up in elaborate plans. It’s best to keep things simple and move quickly. Your customers and your team are depending on you.

I. Listen

When faced with a situation like COVID-19, you are often unsure of the best course of action. Having had the luxury of just meeting a number of clients face to face, I anticipated that they would be anxious and may even need immediate help.

We started to do the following:

• The customer success team began reaching out to our clients with a simple message: “How can we help?” The goal was to understand how COVID-19 was impacting our clients’ businesses and identify the type of assistance we could offer. Because we work with a variety of industries, we observed a range of responses from some businesses, which had reduced staff, to others that were growing as they had never done before. I then had my team pass on their client concerns and feedback to me, and set up follow-up meetings in some cases to better understand these concerns. It was essential for our clients to know that we genuinely care about them and are committed to helping.

• We went beyond customer success and had other teams, such as sales, product, and finance, also reach out to customers. We also had the executive team connect with specific clients.

• We looked at the conversations (tickets) in our own customer service platform, Kustomer, and reviewed the CSAT scores and feedback.

• I listened to hours of recorded client calls using Gong so I could hear the tone of our clients and pick out the larger trends. I also cut snippets from these calls that I could send to others in the organization so they could hear exactly what our clients needed.

  
  

It was evident in many cases that our clients needed us to provide them with a lifeline, so to speak, and address contractual questions. Other clients needed a sherpa to guide them through how to manage their teams in this new work-from-home environment. As Kustomer is a customer service CRM platform, many of our clients have customer service agents who are now working from home for the first time. Some companies also needed to reduce the sizes of their teams, which means they would need to do more with less. It was time to execute so we could help our clients and get through this crisis together.

II. Execute

We had a saying at Kustomer: Don’t just talk about it, be about it. If you don’t execute, nothing happens. It sounds simple, but in crunch time, you can’t seize up. You need people to step up. Our company immediately sprang into action to help our clients. We worked in a coordinated effort on a number of initiatives.

Here are a few of them:

• We offered clients on a lower product tier access to some of the premium features for a limited time. This included a special type of user license that could save our clients money, as well as additional real-time reporting that would give our client champions more visibility into the teams that are working from home.

• Our product team accelerated the development of key features that enable our clients to optimize their resources. They then reviewed the most requested feature requests and surprised our clients by rolling out the feature with the most customer votes in a very short period of time. The product team also spent more time on client issues and feature requests to try and address items that were causing unnecessary pain or could improve efficiencies.

• Our CS team met and collected various strategies that we were using to help our clients during this crisis. This included creating custom reports to give clients a clearer picture as to where their teams were spending their time and how productive their teams were, ways that they can automate certain tasks so they could do more with less and how to take advantage of some of the new products we were launching which could also increase efficiency. We incorporated these discussions into our client calls. We also collaborated with the broader CX team and other departments to support one another where needed and to leverage each other’s expertise. It was all hands on deck.

• We started new initiatives like an online community. We provided an opportunity for our clients to support one another. We can no longer gather people face to face, and an online community provides a great medium for our clients to leverage their combined wisdom.

It’s essential to note that in many cases, we were listening and executing simultaneously. This isn’t a time to measure twice and cut once. You need to keep cutting as your clients need solutions when faced with something that the world has never seen before, and iterate as needed.

III. Measure

As the crisis unfolded, we collected client feedback across various channels and surfaced it to the relevant departments and the executive team. We established special client health monitoring for this crisis, focusing on the clients most severely impacted, which went beyond our standard client health process. We also reviewed client calls for feedback on our product enhancements and complementary product upgrades. We acted on the feedback to improve the overall customer experience. I remember our CEO, Brad, saying to me, "Chad, I know this isn't what you signed up for," in his supportive tone. I had just joined the company four months earlier.

Beyond the subjective feedback, we reviewed the other metrics such as NPS, client retention, and product adoption to determine the longer-lasting impact. In the short term, we focused on our most important task: ensuring that we connected with our clients and helped them in any way we could.

I still think back to my trip out to San Francisco. On that return flight home, I knew that the world would never be the same. My heart goes out to all that were directly impacted by Covid-19 and to those who may have lost loved ones. There are many things that we can’t control. In a crisis, focus on what you can do - it doesn’t need to be overly complex. Just listen, execute, and measure your results.