Evaluating Customer Communication Effectiveness

Mastering Customer Communications: Why Cross-Functional Governance is Key to Driving Change Every company wants to keep customers informed—but without the right governance, communications become disjointed, overwhelming, and ineffective. Too many emails. Too many teams sending messages. Too little coordination. Customers don’t care if an email comes from Marketing, CS, or Product. They just want clear, valuable info at the right time that's relevant to them. Affectionately, at Freshworks we call it 'air traffic control' because it requires herding cats to solve for a bigger cross-functional problem. Most companies lack a unified strategy for customer communications. Instead, different teams send messages based on their own priorities: ❌ Marketing wants to drive engagement → Sends webinar invites and thought leadership. ❌ CS wants to drive adoption → Sends onboarding guides and feature tips. ❌ Product wants to drive usage → Sends release notes and announcements. ❌ Sales wants to drive expansion → Sends upsell and cross-sell messages. The result? Customers get bombarded with messages that feel disconnected. How to Build a Strong Governance Model for Customer Communications ✅ Centralize Oversight with a Cross-Functional Team 🔹 Form a Customer Comms Council with teams from Marketing, CS, Product, Sales, RevOps, etc. to prioritize the most meaningful comms at any given moment. 🔹 Set up the basics like a shared calendar to track all customer-facing messages and prevent overload. ✅ Define Communication Tiers & Priorities 🔹 Not every update needs an email. Map messages to the best channels (email, in-product, community, knowledgebase, blog, etc.). 🔹 Set rules for who owns which type of communication (e.g., CS leads onboarding emails, Marketing owns advocacy outreach). 🔹 Set rules for the types of comms for each system from Marketo (promotional), Gainsight (operational), Medallia / Qualtrics (feedback), etc. ✅ Move from Ad-Hoc to Intentional Messaging 🔹 Align customer messages with major milestones in the customer journey. 🔹 Ensure every communication drives action—whether it's a webinar signup, feature adoption, or a renewal decision. ✅ Measure & Optimize 🔹 Track open rates, engagement, and retention impact. 🔹 Identify overlaps & gaps—are customers getting redundant messages? Are critical updates being missed? Governance Enables a State Change in Customer Communications. It shouldn’t be a free-for-all. Governance brings clarity, coordination, and impact. When cross-functional teams work together, customers receive the right messages, at the right time, from the right source. 💡 How does your team align on customer communications today? What’s working (or not)? #CustomerCommunications #CustomerEngagement #RetentionMarketing #B2BMarketing #CustomerSuccess #CustomerMarketing #Governance

Marketing, sales and CS teams, take note! In looking for a team management tool for my pole vault club, I had an experience that is worth noting with customer prioritization. ABC Glofox and TeamUp set a crazy standard in customer engagement with me this week, and here's why: Fast and Purposeful Response: Within two minutes of filling out their forms, both companies called me. This response replaced a discovery call and showed not only efficiency but a genuine interest in understanding my specific needs. Strategic Discovery Process: Rather than wasting our initial interaction on a lengthy discovery phase, both companies utilized that time to schedule demos around my use case for the next day. I left the calls feeling respected and understood. Effective Questioning: During their brief calls, both companies asked four targeted discovery questions. These weren't generic inquiries; they were aimed at uncovering the specific format of my pole vault club's management needs. They both have solutions for a unique use case I have and will be showing me tomorrow. Thorough Note-Taking: Taking customer-centricity to the next level, both businesses took notes during our talks. Their follow-ups included these details of our conversation so I know I won't have to repeat them tomorrow. Anticipating Wow Moments: Both companies will cover the features I need in the demo but also mentioned a feature they'll show that could be helpful and act as a "wow moment." It's a proactive approach, ensuring that our interactions are not just informative but memorable. In a world where customer experience is setting companies apart, they are showing that prioritizing the customer's journey from the first interaction pays off. This level of service builds trust, sets the stage for meaningful partnerships, and ultimately makes the customer's journey one filled with moments of delight. Turning every interaction into an opportunity to exceed expectations is worth noting and should make us all pause and consider how things currently run in our organization and whether we are providing this level of service.

The key to achieving a five-star customer experience is ensuring they leave happy - something we can control. Most customers come in hot, which is out of our control, but we can focus on making sure they leave satisfied. Figuring out how to effectively measure this and identify areas for improvement seems to be what many customers are focusing on operationally. So, two key processes need to be in place: 1️⃣ A process to measure sentiment flips in each conversation 2️⃣ A strategy to cover as many customers as possible To measure sentiment flips in each conversation: 👉 It is important to evaluate both the key sentiment throughout the conversation and the end sentiment, indicating how the customer felt at the interaction’s conclusion. 👉 Managing a custom field like ‘ending sentiment’ is effective. While agents can manually tag this, AI for automatic tagging is more efficient. 👉 For chats and calls, each conversation can be measured separately. Emails can be managed by tagging inquiries and measuring the end sentiment when completed. Measuring sentiment flip helps gauge customer experience improvement and expands coverage to include customers who didn’t respond to the survey. What should be done if the customer doesn’t respond to the consultation service provided? The final piece of the puzzle is how to determine the end sentiment for customers who haven’t responded to the agent’s response. This is how we have been handling it: 🗂 After classifying customers through segmentation, apply the average sentiment flip value to personas in the same category. 📤 To improve response rates operationally, customers with strong negative sentiments are grouped and managed separately. When they make the next inquiry, they are directly asked for feedback at the end of the conversation. We are testing different approaches. What is your team doing to increase response rates for such customers?