As a business leader, your north star objective is to make your brand a household name. To achieve that, you spend a lot of time and effort on messaging and branding, digital marketing, customer service, and how best to drive retention-based growth.
That is good. These things are truly important.
However, several businesses emphasize their customers at the cost of their other key stakeholders – their employees. They dedicate considerable resources and time to educating people about their products/services that they often forget to do the same with their “internal public.”
In other words, internal communications (IC) processes. Believe it or not, it fits well into your brand’s customer success strategies as much as external communication.
On to the blog post.
Internal communication (or IC) is all about sharing brand or product or service-related information between employees at all corporate ranks and ensuring everybody is aligned with organizations’ customer success objectives.
Internal communication goes past more meetings and text messages – although these surely play a role. It lets your team members collaborate with each other via CRMs, google sheets, or weekly meetings & reports and, seamlessly manage critical documents and stay updated on customer information and interactions – irrespective of their location and device.
What is more, your support agents can collaborate with other teams in real-time without leaving the current platform.
For instance, let’s say your agents are striving to resolve a customer’s query about a product/service. They team up with the development team to get a clearer picture and help the customer out more accurately.
Earlier, when any such situation arose, they had to send emails back and forth and wait for everybody to respond. Thanks to internal communication processes, your agents can simply start a chat or jump on a video call, and teams can be at the same time to make decisions. This not only saves effort and time but also improves customer experience.
In a nutshell, internal communication processes aim to eliminate micromanagement and channelize more energy into collaboration, feedback, and transparency.
Having employees who are unaware of what is happening within the customer success team poses a significant danger. After all, if they do not know a brand’s future strategy or goals it wants to achieve, how can they work towards these effectively?
Unfortunately, 6 out of 10 companies do not have a long-term internal communications strategy. This number echoes some vital reasons why team especially customer success teams need to change their attitudes towards internal communications processes:
When your customer success agents get different messages from multiple departments or sources, they slip into uncertainty and confusion. Moreover, team members having conflicting message interpretations and priorities results in duplicate or wrong responses.
Internal communication processes enable customer success teams to consistently share data and updates with each other in short bits of digestible messages. Moreover, team members can collaborate with other departments, including marketing, sales, or product. As such, they have up-to-the-minute info about marketing campaigns, sales strategies, and product/service features.
A leader who is poor at communicating can do more harm than good.
Inept communication between team members results in duplication of replies, inaccurate decision-making, and missed critical details. As such, the quality of customer service takes a hit, leaving customers frustrated.
Research by Grammarly suggests miscommunication costs US businesses up to US$ 1.2 Tn year, or US$ 12,506 per employee.
Effective internal communications processes drive smooth, two-way dialogue between brands (leadership, departments, teams, and agents) and customers. They open up clearly defined channels for coworking and ideation, either via emails, meetings, or any other customer service tools driving internal communications, thus connecting the right information with the right people.
As such, your customer service agents stay informed every time.
When your business has recently taken off, you can afford to bank on unsystematic, informal socialization to keep your employees informed. But as you expand, you need to devote time to share any query-related data and updates among your customer success team members.
Internal communications are powered by tech-led tools that scale as you grow. These tools have enough network bandwidth, robust messaging platforms, and reliable email systems capable of handling a growing number of users without compromising employee productivity.
Besides, internal communications processes foster scalable training and onboarding for new hires. With holistic documentation, training resources, and knowledge-sharing platforms, internal communication strategies let newbies quickly onboard and get up to speed.
For your customer success agents to work at their best, they must have the necessary information and resources readily available to them.
For example, say your customer service intern does not know who they should escalate an inbound customer inquiry to. Or, imagine your support agent lacks the essential account details to proceed forward with customer onboarding.
In both cases, your employee will spend a significant chunk of their workday hunting down the necessary information, drifting from core tasks. A report reveals that employees spend 60% of their time on “work about work” – searching for files, communicating tasks, and shifting priorities.
Internal communications processes connect employees with relevant customer data, resources and points of contact, making their job faster and eliminating roadblocks in their workflows.
Plus, when your team members know exactly their responsibilities and goals and get constant feedback on their tasks, they feel valued and work harder to hit their targets.
If you want a simple way to experience these benefits, better consider a centralized communication tool that easily gels with your existing solutions. For instance, consider the Helpwise-Slack integration. The combo lets you manage customer service tasks on Helpwise from your Slack channel. That includes monitoring activities in real-time and reading messages about various updates while internally collaborating with team members.
So, how do you kick-start an internal communications process in your customer success team?
Here is a five-step framework to launching a successful internal communications strategy:
In today’s digital economy, no single communication channel serves all use cases. To stay afloat, you will need a combo of traditional phone calls, instant messaging, emails, social media, and self-service portals. Plus, check how suitable they are for various types of support interactions. Compare the pros and cons of each communication channel in terms of responsiveness, customer engagement, and satisfaction.
Moving on, assess the nature of customer-facing interactions when determining the appropriate internal communication channel. For in-depth discussions or complex technical issues, emails or phone calls are more effective. Routine queries or urgent matters require real-time communication channels such as Helpwise, JustCall, Slack, or Teams.
Do not forget the working hours, time zones, and availability of both customers and your customer success team. Pinpoint mutually convenient times for real-time communication. Adjust your team’s schedules or offer flexible availability to cater to multiple time zones if necessary.
Analyze your agents’ areas of expertise and specialization, including service-specific expertise, technical knowledge, industry-related knowledge, or language proficiency.
Then, look into their daily workload and capacity. Consider their current responsibilities, ongoing tasks, and existing workload. Distribute customer queries among customer service agents to ensure a balanced workload and avoid overwhelming any agent.
Further, assign specific roles within the customer success team based on agents’ strengths and the requirements of the queries. Case in point, some agents might excel in technical troubleshooting, while others are incredibly skilled in customer onboarding or relationship management.
How often should your customer success agents interact with customers? The communication frequency varies according to the kind of query/request and its urgency.
The general rule of thumb is to contact customers immediately after issue resolution via phone calls, emails, or any other preferred communication channel. This helps you provide closure, gather feedback and ensure customer satisfaction.
Additionally, you need to follow up frequent for complex problems or those requiring constant monitoring. For instance, if your agents fixed a technical issue that require further testing, regular updates are crucial to inform the customer about the progress.
How fast does your customer success team respond to incoming queries? As fast as they should? Are those response time expectations realistic?
Nobody likes to wait for a reply, especially an upset customer. Hence, set the guidelines for what kind of response times you expect for each communication platform.
For instance, when it comes to answering emails, set the standard response time to within 24 hours or one business day. Likewise, urgent requests via instant messaging apps require a response within a few minutes or immediately.
Consider the nature and urgency of the communication while setting these response time expectations.
Consider the language and tone that reflects your brand’s unique identity while communicating with the customers. Do your customers prefer a formal, professional style or a more casual, friendly one?
Be polite and kind throughout customer-facing interactions. Keep your cool and hear out your customers’ queries. Reflect upon their concerns and paraphrase to ensure you have understood correctly.
While communicating with customers, focus on clarity, simplicity, and inclusivity. Avoid jargon or technical terms. Instead, Nurture a language style that is easily understandable by customers, no matter their background. Break down complex concepts into easily digestible explanations.
Building a healthy internal communication stream in your organization is no rocket science. Following are some best practices to get your customer success team engaged, connected, and motivated:
While defining the internal communications process, identify who you need to involve in the strategy. Is it C-suite execs? Or every employee? Or different department teams?
Map out your key stakeholders as part of your strategy. Mostly, you will have to address various stakeholder groups with multiple needs and create personalized messages for each of them. Case in point, your customer support team need to know a different set of data than all the other stakeholders would know.
More importantly, ensure your agents receive the right insights at the right time in the right way.
Besides, build a culture of two-way communication that encourages open and honest feedback and opinions, whether they are regarding customer support, potential future services, or the brand as a whole.
What value does an idea or thought hold if it is never expressed?
Deploy a service tool like Helpwise for your customer success team where they can share updates, collaborate with colleagues, and discuss customer service-related matters internally only.
Document the ideal internal communication flow and some best practices. At the bare minimum, explain your communication philosophy and core values to your customer success team, including directness, conciseness, and mutual respect.
Moving on, underline important steps in your internal communication process, such as planning, channel selection, message development, data sharing, and analysis.
Create content guidelines on language style, voice tone, visual elements, and formatting to ensure consistency in branding and messaging. Moreover, build templates and examples for various types of internal communication resources, including newsletters, email announcements, presentation slides, or conferencing agendas.
Draft a document based on these steps, combined with your previous experience with org-wide communication. Then store the document in a centralized location so that it is easily accessible and referable by your customer success team when needed.
After implementing your plan, determine what worked and what did not. Then, document those learnings for future reference.
Revisit and course-correct your internal communication process if you do not want it to flatline over the next three months.
What worked a few weeks or months back may have become redundant. Do not hesitate to adapt and evolve constantly.
Conduct regular feedback surveys to understand your employees’ sentiments toward your internal communication processes. Ask questions about the efficacy of communication channels, clarity of messages, and overall satisfaction. Use these inputs to find areas for improvement and align your internal communication process with their evolving needs and expectations.
Moreover, set crucial metrics and key performance indicators (KPI) to measure your internal communication process. These include net promoter scores, communication channel effectiveness, and cost per resolution.
Customer success teams want to know their organization is as invested in their professional development as they are.
Start by examining the training needs of team members and identify knowledge gaps. You can gather the data via interviews, surveys, or performance analyses.
Based on the assessment, devise training modules that outline the objectives, concepts to be covered, and methods to be used. Ensure these training plans cater to the specific needs of customer success teams.
For instance, one employee might need help with their clarity in messaging, while another needs to learn to adapt communication styles to various audiences.
After training sessions, let your customer success agents exchange thoughts through group discussions, peer mentoring, or brainstorming.
When you have the tools required to enable and inform customer success agents, internal communication can become more than a megaphone for announcements. Simply put, it transforms organizational culture, drives at-scale collaboration, and enhances agents’ efficiency – all essential to offering a remarkable customer experience in 2023.
Here are 3 effective tools designed to step up internal communications processes – and what to do with them.
Project management tools help you build and manage customer success strategies. You can outline project goals and action steps for each customer.
These internal communication tools enable you to assign tasks to team members, alongside deadlines and priority levels – all without micromanaging. Moreover, your colleagues can monitor task progress according to particular deliverables, update their status, and communicate any delays or issues.
Further, project management tools keep every customer success agent on the same page. They offer a centralized platform where team members can discuss customer-related matters, share updates, and exchange insights on specific customer success projects.
Communication tools allow the smooth exchange of knowledge among customer success team members anytime, anywhere. This information exchange happens via:
With dozens of employees and thousands of customers, it is easy for data to slip through the cracks. Plus, with hybrid work rates surging, those cracks are only widening.
Knowledge management tools manage and distribute information related to customer success plans among team members in an instant. As such, they can reach from where they are to where they want to be in no time.
This information is not limited to product/service breakdowns and training materials. It also includes:
Knowledge management tools particularly come in handy when your customer success agents seek specific answers to specific questions without involving another stakeholder.
Sadly, you cannot wave a magic wand and optimize internal communications processes in your customer success team. You are always seeing obstacles down the lane playing spoilsport in your hard work and dedication to continuous improvement.
Read on to know some prevalent challenges brands face while honing their internal communications:
Implementing an internal communication process means bidding goodbye to various traditional methods. Emails or video conferences replace phone calls. Moreover, employees may even turn to collaboration platforms such as Teams or Slack to communicate with their colleagues.
Most C-level execs do not want to be on board with that. Instead, they stick with the convention far longer than they should due to budget limitations or fear of negative returns on investments (ROI).
For instance, a communication tool that goes well with a team of 15 (in-office) might fall flat when that team scales to 150 people scattered across geographies.
Caught in this mess are your customer success team and your brand.
Solution: Ask your staff in regular surveys whether they want to see changes in certain internal communication elements. Keep pace with how your company’s internal communication is evolving – change and update as necessary.
A healthy internal communication process involves all levels of the corporate hierarchy.
When the C-suite does not actively participate in the processes and tools an organization uses for internal communication, it results in a fundamental disconnect. This narrow approach triggers a wave of employee doubt, cynicism, and negativity, relegating internal communication processes to a slow and painful demise.
If management does not care about active internal communication and associated challenges, why should employees?
Solution: Communicate the purpose and objectives of internal communication to team members. Paint a compelling vision of how effective communication drives customer success and the larger organization. Highlight the benefits of better productivity, stronger teamwork, and improved decision-making that stem from pre-defined internal communication.
Offering employees a voice in the company is another excellent way to foster buy-in. Actively seek team members’ feedback and opinions on any company decisions. Enable them to share their ideas during brainstorming sessions.
You have a solid internal communications process in place and the right tools to implement it. However, if your customer success team is clueless about those tools and processes – and how they affect their everyday work – both will go awry.
Case in point, suppose you are introducing a new internal communication tool to help your employees schedule meetings without constant back-and-forth emails. If you do not familiarize your customer success team with the new process and how to use the new tool, most will default to sending emails when deciding to conduct a cross-departmental meeting.
Eventually, you will fizzle out before hitting your customer service-led growth goals.
Solution: Organize an all-hands meeting to walk your customer success team through your internal communication process, the goals you strive to accomplish, and how your organization’s internal communication will be changing.
Have managers explain to their teams the impact of the new process on every employee’s workflow. If, for instance, you are deploying new software, conduct training sessions to ensure everybody understands the tool’s features and how to use it to boost customer support.
Internal communication is the lifeblood of any customer-led growth business.
Imagine you are running point on a significant change to your customer success plan, and convey the same via emails. To your disbelief, you get messages from disgruntled colleagues, all flashing the exact words:
“No one told me…”
Hence, it is time to invest the exact level of attention and planning in internal communication as much as in your external communication – with your customers. By encouraging information sharing, collaboration, and alignment across multiple departments and teams, a waterproof internal communications process equips everyone with data and resources essential to improve customer experience in 2023.
Plus, keeping your customer service agents in the loop boosts efficiency, profitability, and decreased turnover – everything required to push your business forward as you navigate hybrid work.
Your employees – the often-overlooked audience – are your first and foremost customers. If you communicate well with your support agents, you can communicate well with your audience.
Need to tighten up internal communications within your customer success team? Try Helpwise out for free for 14 days today.
Businesses focused on customer service-led growth can enjoy the benefits of introducing an internal communications process in customer success teams:
Here are crucial steps to define an internal communications process in customer success teams:
These challenges hinder companies’ path toward achieving impeccable customer support in 2023 with internal communications strategies:
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