CSM Quick Tips: What To Do With a Ghosted Customer?
How many times have you needed to re-engage your champion or main point of contact whose engagement has declined, or who has gone entirely unresponsive despite your multiple outreach efforts?
Most of us have been here at one point, and we understand the risks and red flags. You know that you need to re-engage your contact, ensure the relationship is a healthy one, ensure they are getting value from your product, and stay with you – but where and how do you start? And how did you get here?
First, do not take it personally. Customer ghosting happens for many reasons, but it’s important to take it seriously. Here are a few actions you can take to re-engage the customer, and what you can do to ensure you don’t find yourself in this situation again.
The first step is an important one: research if there is something going on at the company that may be a higher priority. Look into whether or not there has been a lot of turnover at the company, or if the company is going through change. This at least gives you some context. Once you have established that, go through these quick steps:
Establish that your contact is still with the company:
This may seem obvious but people leave abruptly for a number of reasons and you may not know. You should:
Check LinkedIn to see if they are still with the company. It can happen. Someone can leave suddenly, get a new job, or be dealing with a personal/family situation. In these situations, they might not have had time to contact every vendor and transition. Are you getting out-of-office messages? "This user no longer works here”?
Ask shared connections. It is a best practice to have more than 1 contact with a customer. However, it can happen that you have just the 1, especially if your product is one of many vendors or if you provide a low touch/tech touch approach. If your main contact is not answering, try reaching out to another user. Make sure that you are asking out of concern (and not like a jilted ex).
Check product-level metrics to ensure your customer is still using your product.
A true tell to see where you stand with a customer is to check their usage. Has usage dropped dramatically? Did it never get off the ground? You have an uphill battle here, but it can still be done. Reach out to users to let them know about new features. Invite them to office hours to ask questions. Remind them why they chose your product in the first place.
Re-enage
Executive alignment: align an executive with your company with an executive at their company - align titles if possible - and have that person reach out directly → this is the step that we find nearly always works.
Sales alignment: who sold the deal to whom? Re-engage your Sales rep and ask them to reach out to the buyer → this step is typically a close second!
Ask Sales to get back in touch with the contract owner. If your contact was the contract owner, perhaps you or Sales can reach out to someone in Finance or Legal that you worked with when the deal was being negotiated.
Is there something you can reach out with that provides them with real value? A new product feature?
Do you have in-app messages in your product that you can personally tailor to your contact or others on their team?
Can you send them swag or something personal that would encourage a “thank you” outreach?
Be proactive and reach out consistently and regularly via channels you know your customer engages on.
Prevent this from happening again.
Once you have successfully re-engaged the customer, look at what got you there in the first place and how you can prevent that from happening again.
You have to have a Joint Success Plan in place at kickoff. This will dramatically assist with getting the customer onboard with mutual goals that they will work towards.
Revisit how you have been communicating with the customer. Did you agree to an engagement strategy at kickoff? If you did, you should revisit it with the customer. Can you set up a (more) regular cadence call? Can you set up quarterly calls between executives? Product roadmap updates?
Establish multiple contacts. Can’t stress enough how important it is to have more than one contact (Sales should also help with this before the deal is closed). Look at product usage to identify regular users of your product and engage. Map roles between your company and the customer.
Ensure you have access to data that would indicate account health, such as product usage data, NPS, support tickets, so you can possibly flag at risk indicators early and not rely solely on your customer interactions.
Look at internal processes within your company that could have caused this customer to back off. Are other customers also going dark around the same time in their customer journey? Is there an internal process that is broken?
Most importantly: always be proactive.