Driving renewals and growing the customer base are crucial for successful companies. Customers throw a major wrench in the mix they don’t buy or don’t renew because they think you don’t have the features they want- and you do! We’ve noticed our email automation and marketing automation customers are especially susceptible to this problem. Proper customer relationship management is something that many email service providers overlook and cause them to lose customers. If you don’t want to be one of those companies, updating product documentation and providing exceptional self-service will significantly benefit your customer relationship management and drive the renewals and new customers your company needs for growth.
Make it Effortless for Customers to Find What they Need
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When a customer looks for a particular feature in your email service platform and can’t find it right away, they’re more than likely to assume that you just don’t have that feature. Forcing your customers to dig through your service to find what they they need sure to disappoint and drive them to your competitors.
Head off customer frustration by providing in-product contextual help that allows them to access product documentation immediately by answering their questions before they need to ask you. Not only do your users quickly and painlessly find exactly what they’re looking for, but they become invested and knowledgeable about your product. Churn simply doesn’t happen because with good contextual help a casual search for a product simply yields the correct results- there is no confusion or frustration- no need for a user to turn to a competitor’s product because all features are right in front of him.
Contextual Help within Your CRM Service Will Make Your Customers Love You
Contextual help is extremely important in marketing and email automation because those activities are time sensitive. Customers want their email service platform to make the job of automation easier and faster; but if they can’t find what they need right away, it will set back their timetable and lead to dissatisfaction with you and your service. If you’ve failed in the customer’s mind, then it gives your competitors the opening they need to exploit the fear, uncertainty, and doubt that your customers now have regarding your service, and you’ll lose them quickly.
However, while providing in-product contextual help gives your customers the tools they need to figure out your service quickly, you can’t stop there. Make sure that your support team is giving sufficient weight to customer inquiries by answering their questions with direct links to the relevant product documentation, as well as providing tutorials and help videos. A quick and efficient way to do this is by giving your support team the ability to drag and drop relevant documentation and media straight into a support ticket. Also, if a submitted ticket doesn’t have accurate or complete documentation on a topic, support can instantly turn the solved ticket into documentation and send it to the documentation team for modification and publishing. Better support demonstrates to your customers that you care about their concerns.
The Best Way to Stop Attrition is to Focus on the Customer
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As you can see, no matter how great and feature-filled your email service platform is, it won’t keep your customers on-board if they can’t figure out how to use it. Depending on just the few employees that you trained at the client’s company is not the way to go, and it will only hurt you in the long run if those people leave. If you provide them with in-product contextual help, as well as product documentation that includes tutorials and easy-to-access support, you ensure that no matter who is using your product, they’ll still be able to find the answers they need whether you trained them personally or not.
Retaining your customers is only one aspect of customer relationship management in terms of using your product help as a marketing tool. You can also utilize your product help documentation in bringing more customers into the fold by leveraging similar practices to the ones mentioned here.
