In the past years, industry-leading customer service teams like Automattic, Wistia, and Geckoboard have grown to love conversation reviews that increase the quality of their interactions. Now, systematic internal feedback is gaining ground in other customer-facing teams, too.
More and more Customer Success teams are rolling out internal quality programs to make sure they make the most out of their customer interactions. Analyzing the conversations your team has had with your customers helps find your success reps’ areas of improvement so that they can become better at what they do.
Conversation reviews help you capitalize on all of the customer success team’s most important activities:
- helping customers,
- identifying growth opportunities,
- reducing churn. Here’s how.
Providing product knowledge
One of the most crucial responsibilities of all Customer Success teams is making sure that customers know how to use the product they’ve purchased. So, having perfect knowledge about what your company offers is a must for all CSMs.
In most businesses, Customer Success helps users in two ways:
- Onboarding new customers by getting to know the users’ needs and introducing all relevant features and functionalities to them;
- Helping existing customers with their questions and issues.
How do you know that your customer success team provides correct and sufficient information at all times? Unless you take a look at their interactions, you don’t.
Product knowledge is a quality criterion that the majority of customer service teams are already addressing in conversation reviews. And, it’s an extremely relevant aspect for success teams to analyze, as well.
Reviewing samples of your customer success team’s conversations helps you understand the quality of the information you’re offering to your users. It’s the quickest way to find gaps in your team’s knowledge and to iron out inconsistencies in customer success managers’ responses.
Identifying growth opportunities
The second most important function of a Customer Success team is increasing customer retention through product engagement. Telling users about new (or premium) features that they’d benefit from and, by that, driving further product adoption helps keep customers around.
There are two specific routines that customer-facing teams can use to seize opportunities for growth:
- The “Yes, and…” technique is an efficient way of introducing additional features and functionalities to your existing customers. Every interaction is an opportunity to tell your users about the (premium) parts of the product they are not yet using.
- Proactive conversations are a great way to provide valuable information without waiting for the customers to approach you first. For example, automated emails and in-product notifications are some of the most popular ways of starting a conversation with users.
How do you know that your customer success team is driving product engagement and creating customer loyalty? By evaluating their customer conversations from this specific perspective.
For example, companies like Geckoboard have included a dedicated rating category in their conversation reviews for the purpose. Moreover, highlighting missed opportunities for offering proactive help was one of the main reasons why Geckoboard established a peer feedback system in their team.
By the way, conversation reviews come in many forms. You can choose between manager reviews, QA specialist reviews, self-reviews, and peer reviews (like Geckoboard did). The latter has proven to be one of the most efficient ways of identifying growth opportunities, as fellow success reps are often the best people to notice these aspects thanks to their first-hand experience.
Reducing churn risks
The third reason why businesses need customer success teams is that they can reduce churn. By helping your users with their issues and increasing product engagement, you’re lowering the risks that customers stop buying from you or cancel their subscriptions.
Here’s how systematic conversation reviews help you cope with churn:
- Review all the conversations you’ve had with churned customers to understand what went wrong. These interactions are great resources that you can learn from to avoid making the same mistakes over and over again.
- Review a sample of all customer conversations to evaluate how well you’re identifying and acting on opportunities to reduce churn. With consistent feedback, customer success representatives will learn to use the techniques that create customer loyalty in all their interactions.
Systematic conversation reviews are the only way customer success teams can learn to get the most out of all interactions with their users. With constant feedback, CS reps will become better at using the techniques that will decrease churn in your business.
Moreover, just like conversation reviews have become an integral part of all successful support teams’ onboarding programs, internal feedback is essential for new customer success representatives, too.
Before letting new success team members talk to customers on their own, most teams want to check how well they adhere to your internal quality standards, how well they’ve mastered the product, and whether they are using different techniques to increase customer retention.
Conversation review tool for Customer Success teams
Reviewing your Customer Success team’s conversations and giving feedback to all reps can sound like a fulltime job (or more). But it doesn’t have to be like that.
If your success team uses a help desk solution to talk to your customers, you can use a conversation review tool like Klaus that will help you:
- Easily analyze your customer success team’s interactions. Klaus integrates with Zendesk, Intercom, Freshdesk, and other customer service platforms, and pulls all conversations in for review. It’ll also help you find the right tickets for review, allow you to create a review scorecard based on your needs, and notify your team about the feedback they’ve received.
With the right tool, conversation reviews will become a natural part of your customer success team’s everyday life.
Implementing systematic conversation reviews in all customer-facing teams is a growing trend among the most successful businesses. Knowing that there’s a clear connection between having good customer relations and growing profits, more and more companies are shifting their focus to the opportunities hiding in their Customer Success departments.
If you’d like to start doing conversation reviews in your Customer Success team, check out Klaus. It’s the easiest way you can set up the procedure and start reaping the benefits of internal feedback.
