Why Silent Customers Are Risky

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Today we're going to be talking about the silence segment. Those customers who've ghosted and what to do about it. And once again, welcome back to the Digital Customer Experience Podcast with me, Alex Turkovich. So glad you could join me here today and every week as we explore how digital CS and AI can help enhance the customer and employee experience. My goal is to share the insights that my guests and I have learned over the years so that you get what you need to evolve your own digital program. If you'd like more resources, head over to digitalcustomer success.com. There you'll find access to a chatbot that's trained on this content and get information about the Digital CX masterclass where I teach you how to execute and thrive in Digital CX. For now, let's get started. Hello, welcome back to the Digital CX Podcast. My name is Alex Turkovich. It's awesome to have you back. And today I wanted to tackle a little bit of a topic that has come up quite a bit recently in various questions that I've had from folks either online or LinkedIn or folks that I've talked to at a couple of different conferences. And that is the concept of kind of the silent cohort, the silent customer segment that has ghosted, that has disappeared, that isn't being measured in any kind of meaningful way in terms of like usage in the platform, isn't communicating, whether it be support tickets, whether it be emails, whatever that might be. We all know who those customers are. You all have them. I have them. And to be honest with you, and I've said this before, the customers who have gone silent are the ones that kind of scare me the most because it usually means that there is some indication happening of, you know, either them wanting to move on or them not getting value out of the platform and whatnot. Sure, the opposite can be true. And for a lot of those customers, it is true. They're silently using the platform. Uh, they're just not communicating either via email or support tickets or whatnot. In my experience, that is probably the minority of those silent customers. And so we're going to talk about that a little bit today. Plus, I think a lot of folks are a little bit confused about what to do about those customers, how to measure them, and what kind of playbooks to engage those customers with. So we'll talk about that a little bit too.

Fixing Green Health Score Surprises

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But first off, let's talk about scorecards a little bit because we all have some semblance of a scorecard, whether it's in a CSP or it's manual in a spreadsheet or whatever that may be. You have some semblance of a customer health score. And a lot of times when customers go dormant, your health scores actually still show them as green. That is something that I hear a lot, a lot, a lot, where you encounter customer churn on a green health scorecard. And that is, well, it's kind of embarrassing when that happens to me, right? I think it's ideally you would want a health scorecard that anticipates those churn events so that you know it's going to happen or the indicators are there that it's going to happen and you can intervene. And while I don't think there is necessarily a perfect scorecard, there are a couple of tests that you can build into them that leverage some of the data that you probably already have. Now, to test for this kind of dormancy, there are two things that I really like to look at. The first is the last login date. I think that may be, you know, a pretty obvious one. Literally the last time the customer or any contact of the customer logged into the platform should tell you if they're using the thing on even at the most basic level. Obviously, you can get fancier with login and usage data, but if all you have is logins, that should do for this little experiment, right? The second is when was the last inbound contact from the customer? Now, I don't just mean email. I mean email, sure, but also support tickets or community posts or webinar attendance or phone call. This is where it gets a little bit trickier because you're now tracking this sort of thing across multiple platforms. You know, you're you're you're tracking this across your phone system and your community and your maybe even your LMS. When's the last time you had a signal of contact from a customer? Ideally, this is all data that you should be able to collect in one place, whether it be a CSP or another platform, or you know, with a cloud dashboard or something like that. But you would want to be able to measure when the last time the customer had some sort of inbound communication with you, whether it be active via email or phone call or passive via like a community post or an LMS login.

The Four Outcomes Of Silence

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Now, what you'd want to do next is basically compare the two and and and build a set of I'll call it four outcomes of these comparisons. The first one is they're using your product, they're talking to you. Awesome, great. Nothing, nothing to do here, nothing to see here. The second is they're using your product, but they've gone silent. Now they're using your product. I think that's incredibly positive. They are likely the type of customer that is just what I call embedded. They're using the platform, they don't engage with support much, they don't engage via email, you know, but you see healthy usage. For the most part, I think you can leave those customers alone, although those are the kinds of customers that are really well served with education and value add communication, right? So don't ignore them entirely, but we're not going to focus on them for the sake of this particular exercise. Now, the next two is where you're going to want to get a little bit more involved. The next category is they're not using your product, but they are talking to you. So usage has really dropped off dramatically, but there are inbound tickets, or they're talking to a CSM, or some kind of communication is happening. This is the sweet spot for intervention. If this scenario is playing out, this is where you need to engage, and this is where you're likely to have a really high save rate. And so it's really worth it to invest time and energy into this category. The last one is they're not using it, they're silent. This customer, you could kind of assume that they're going to churn. They're in an active shopping state. Now, if this customer is still showing green on your scorecard, then you you do have a problem with your scorecard for sure. But in general, this is the kind of customer where, you know, you may decide just not to engage at all. You may decide that you put a very strategic kind of motion around this customer. And so a little bit of it, a little bit of your action depends on, you know, your organization's structure, the importance of really cap, you know, holding on to every single bit of revenue, those kinds of things. But if this customer is a small customer, they've gone dormant, they're not responding to emails, they're not using the platform, your energies might be better spent on some of the other segments of customers, just saying. But that doesn't really sit well with a lot of people. So uh definitely understand if that's if you're not in that camp. Now, I do want to point out like a third type of silence that I see

When Your Company Is The Silent One

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out there. And I won't call this silence from the standpoint of the customer, but silence from the standpoint of the company, because there are customers who routinely have conversations with your support folks or your CSMs or whoever might be on the front line talking with the customer on a day-to-day basis. The customer voices their, you know, discontent or complaints or gives off like really strong churn signals or something like that. But those things don't always bubble up to the surface and to the leadership level and to the strategic level. Those things tend to just kind of sit in tickets or sit in call transcripts or sit in notes somewhere that you know aren't really being bubbled up at all and over time can actually, you know, build up to be a pretty significant risk if they aren't addressed, let's call it proactively. You know, when when these kinds of signals surface on the front lines, it's not realistic that you're gonna go after every single one of them, but you're gonna want to be strategic about that. Now, this is where artificial intelligence really comes into play, because of course you can do account-specific analysis on accounts in your CSP and whatnot. But I think one of the ways that artificial intelligence can really help us is by listening to those signals en masse across all of your accounts. An example that I'll use is if you have your customer success platform, your um your CRM, your phone, you know, meeting call recorder, whatever that may be, your support tool, if they're all connected to a central point, let's say it's Claude, for example, you can set up a regular cadence of these listening activities or an agent to go quote unquote listen for those kinds of signals, those that kind of sentiment that's being communicated from your customer, but not necessarily acted upon, so that you can get some reporting on that. You can get an insight week by week on what's happening. I like to do this on a weekly basis because it allows me to react very quickly when those kinds of things happen. And so then you can make decisions strategically whether you know you want to, you know, pay attention to signals that are happening, especially among those higher ARR accounts, whether you want to build some digital motions that come out of those sentiment analysis and can be kicked off. There's any number of ways about going and solving for that. But the problem is a lot of us don't even know that that is happening in the first place. And so, you know, that third type of silence, that silence coming from you when those signals are being handed to your company on a silver platter are the things that, you know, make all the difference in terms of intervening early and getting ahead of problems before it gets to that renewal time.

Outreach That Leads With Value

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Now, when it comes to actually responding to those things, obviously you're going to want to identify them, but you're going to want to spend some time and really understand the journey of each one of those customers. And, you know, if you have three or four that have sent you signals like that, that's a relatively easy thing to do. If you have 20 or 30 or 40, depending on your size, that may be more difficult to do. You know, but going in, if you're if you are going to proactively contact those accounts, going in with a plan, going in with, you know, some level of value on the outset is incredibly important so that you're not just connecting them because, hey, I'm checking in, or hey, I heard you said XYZ on a support call the other day. You're actually going in with maybe a somewhat of a different thing that then leads to the core objection because ultimately what you're doing in these kinds of engagements is you are uh there to be a consultant. You're there to uncover, you know, what the core objections are, really almost like a sales cycle, and ask those follow-up questions to really understand what the core of the issue may be. So I wanted to just address that because I do get this question all the time as to, you know, what do I do in those instances? And, you know, just to summarize a little bit, you're going to want to measure the stuff. You kind of want a reliable way of measuring those things. And I have found that kind of looking at usage versus communication is a really good way to categorize your dormant accounts and what to do about them. Then after that, you're going to want to build those playbooks that then act upon those signals in a very meaningful way. I do think that one of the things that comes as a byproduct of getting more mature in your measurement of that is that you can actually, you know, help fix your scorecards a little bit. Because again, if you're showing dormant accounts as green, that means your your scorecard just isn't really working. And that's not to say that that's the only indicator of a red account, obviously. There's many things that go into

Regression Testing Your Scorecard

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that. But what I would highly encourage you to do on a regular basis is do some regression testing of your current score scorecard. Go back and look at the last 10 churned accounts, run some regression testing against them and understand what the score was showing at the 90-day mark prior to that churn event happening. Any accounts that are on that list that were showing green, showing yellow, but mostly green, you need to understand what the signals were that were being missed. And if there weren't any signals being missed, you know, then there's probably some additional data that you need to go after. And I think, you know, exit interviews and those kinds of things are really great with customers to really understand where all of that came from. So listen, I hope this has helped you a little bit in thinking about your own playbooks and your own metrics methodology when it comes to dormant accounts. This can be an incredibly easy thing for us to just not pay attention to because it's convenient not to pay attention to. And for some orgs, that's fine. If you don't have a churn problem and you want to keep going like that, that is absolutely fine. However, if you do have a churn problem or if you want to get ahead of having a churn problem at some point, I would highly recommend that you spend some time, spend some cycles really looking at this subset of accounts and putting in place both the metrics packages and the playbooks to be able to engage those accounts before they become an issue. So that's it for this episode this week. Short and sweet, but I wanted to hit on this topic because it has been top of mind for me and a lot of people.

Masterclass Invite And Closing

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This is just part of some of the frameworks and the models that we talk about in the digital CX masterclass on a regular basis. I do have a cohort coming up, and registration for that is closing in a little while. So go check that out at DigitalCustomer Success forward slash masterclass. And with that, I will leave you to having a good rest of the day. I appreciate you spending time with me. We'll see you on the next one. Thank you for joining me for this episode of the Digital CX Podcast. If you like what we're doing, consider leaving us a review on your podcast platform of choice. It really helps. Don't forget, digitalcustomer success.com is where you can find extra resources, a chat bot trained on this show's content, and the Digital CX masterclass that helps you master digital and AI in CX. My name is Alex Turkovich. Thanks again for joining, and we'll see you next time.