A CSM like no other...

Colin Smith

I am now one month into my CSM journey. It is eveidently clear that my role is not a traditional CSM role.

I am a CS team of one at a Travel Tech Startup. My only real partners are the COO who has 3 other projects more important than my verticle, and a software engineer who has functioned as CS/Support/Tech for a few years. We have one sales person who only half sells our product as an add-on service. I have some minimal reporting available to me. 

I am having some success in engaging recently signed up users from an onboarding prerspective. I am seeing site usage immedately following these reach outs and zoom calls. We have a good product so my hope is to be able to keep these new users engaged and returning.  

But now my focus is shifting to cold users. There has been limited to no follow up with most users, 60% +/- after they started using the site. Over the last 2 years. Now I am instituting a reach out cadance and working to reengage inactive users. But this is were I would love to hear about best practices for engaging non-users. 

About my ICP for reference, North American travel agents. With or without affiliate agencies. We are paying them a significant commission % to book via our website us opposed to other available channels. We arent selling software, instead selling product and service. 

Any and all feedback is greatly appreciated. 

Thanks CS Fam!

Harsh Shah

Hi @Colin Smith, my heartiest congratulations on your new role!

I believe you're doing amazing with new users by engaging with them from the start but for the out-of-touch customers, you might need to create some plan to start a conversation again. Before finalizing any strategy, try to find the general reasons of why there is lack of engagement in the first place. This will give you a good starting point to create a strategy based on those reasons. You can use below tactics to bring users back in communication:

1. Understand your users and their business by doing some background check
2. Send personalized emails/messages to know more about their lives and how your solution is helping them to start the communication
3. Ask some relevant questions to develop rapport with them
4. Send some use cases or personalized demos to showcase the capabilities of your solution
5. Share some best practices of your solution which their direct competitors are using and getting success
6. Remember timing is important for these activities
7. Personalized follow-ups increase the probability of a reply

I hope this would be helpful to you!