Creating Effective Customer Success, in Slack

At TechCo, you are a customer success rep, and your job is to keep the customer happy, well adopted, and sell more when the opportunity arises. Your team has closed a big deal with BigCo a few months back. The customer has gone through implementation, and users are adopting the product. Your data show that now is a good time to reach back out and cross-sell another product of yours, before the renewal of the original purchase. You do a quick scan of the Salesforce Account record to spot any gotchas that might blindside you (open support cases, negative email interaction, Salesforce Chatter about a bad phone call, anything). From the looks of it, nothing stands out at a glance. Great! “Maybe I’ll make my number this quarter with this one renewal”, you think to yourself. You call up your contact at BigCo. She doesn’t sound happy. Apparently a support call went really badly a month ago. The Case took forever to solve, the rep’s attitude was terrible, and the customer said “Does your team even talk to each other?”. Youch. Now’s not the time to bring up that cross-sell. This went from a green account to a red account in about 30 seconds, and now you need to spend time apologizing and escalating to make sure this never happens again. There goes making the quarter..

Managing escalations rather than a renewal — Bummer!

What happened here? How’d this go so sideways so quickly?

• Teams aren’t talking to each other. Sure, there’s department level Slack channels, but there’s a lot of throwing over the wall. Too many silos.
• Salesforce wasn’t up to date. People groan about trying to keep Salesforce up to date with what they consider tedious data entry. However, like all good systems, the people keeping it alive is what counts. In this case, that data would have been really valuable to know about before calling the customer.
• Critical data is locked up in people’s email. Some support reps may have known this was bad call, but didn’t get surfaced up. They’re just trying to solve cases, not inform the world of a customer’s perceived health.
• The company bought multiple tools to help solve this, but getting a team onboarded to another tool is difficult. They have too many tools in the toolbelt already…

What are some ways to solve these problems? Shameless plug, we built Centro to help.

• Create customer specific channels where the whole team can be brought in. I wrote about our philosophy on this: channel proliferation versus combining all customers into a #customer_success channel in Slack. There can be way too much non-relevant discussions in generic channels, and channels are cheap in Slack. You can organize by sections now, Centro will be providing more ways to manage customer specific channels in the future. The big gain here is giving context to the people in that room. Often the name of the room can instantly set people in the right frame of mind. “Ohhh, BigCo, right I heard we had some support problems” the moment people see the notificaiton of the channel name, for example.
• Create user groups in Slack. I recommend setting up a group of Subject Matter Experts that commonly know a product, for example. See our story of Slack Groups. That way, you can quickly “@mention” the right SMEs quickly into a channel. If the customer is having a problem with Product Z, for example, “@productz_techteam” to bring on that surgically pricise team to focus on the issue at hand.
• Use Centro activity logging throughout your entire sales process. That means from when they were first a lead, and now a paying customer. All of that interaction can easily be logged using Centro, some automatically! Emails, for example, can be automatically linked to Salesforce. If you want to summarize a call, you can quickly do that using Centro’s Log A Call button that’s tied to the appropriate records in Salesforce. This make the tedious nature of updating Salesforce super simple and where the team is spending most of their day anyways.

Log a Call in Salesforce with Centro

• If using Centrol email and SMS, all of these activities will not only be track in Salesforce, but also posted to the customer channel. This also lets the team collaborate on the language of the email before sending out. Drafting a technical response, for example, then “@mention_techteam” to validate, isn’t a bad idea and is a huge time saver if you can do it in Slack.
• The greatest part about all of this? We didn’t have to train the company on another tool. Everyone is using Slack. They know how to use it. Centro is simply providing the tools to make this work more effective saving time on the tactical means of surrounding the customer, and money on not buying and training on another tools outside of Slack and Salesforce.

Let’s tie this back together and replay the story knowing what we know now!

TechCo has been using Slack and Centro to break down departmental silos. They use customer Centric channels to discuss customer challenges, issues, and successes. Since BigCo was a lead, all of the relevant people have been collaborating together, and updating Salesforce along the way. No one is blindsided, and it’s very quick to see what’s going on with BigCo.

Quickly getting the latest info related to the Account

You see that there was a case recently with BigCo, it looked like it was a troublesome case. You were planning on perhaps selling Product X to BigCo on top of Product Y, but you’re going to course correct. Instead of being caught off guard with Rachel at BigCo, you now write a SMS to her, explaining how you heard of the issue they were having, and note what steps the company is going to take in the future.

Example of sending a SMS Text message to a contact using Centro

You avoided an internal escalation, and your proactive motion to Rachel gives her confidence she picked the right vendor. You saved a ton of time, and now the next time you touch base with Rachel, you’ll be in a much better position. You can spend the rest of your day on another customer, instead of internally escalating this problem! High five!

Bringing in your whole team to create success for the customer

Oh, bonus: the Sales Ops team loves that everyone just stayed on the platforms they already bought and invested training in: Slack and Salesforce. No need to buy yet another SaaS sales tool.

Credit: Nancy Nardin’s Sales Technology Landscape https://smartsellingtools.com/vendor-landscape/

Note the they had to create a magnifying glass feature 🙄. I’ve seen this myself, the number of tools can get unwieldly very quickly. Why not streamline on what you and your team already know?

Ryan Hitchler is CEO & Co-Founder of Centro

He can be reached at ryan@centro.rocks