Customer Communication Strategies How To Improve Client Interactions

Welcome to building better developers, the developer podcast, where we work on getting better step by step professionally and personally. Let's get started. Hello and welcome back. We are continuing our season of building better developers. Actually, this season is building better businesses. Our podcast is building better developers. Also the developer podcast. I'm going to ask why we had to change it because we actually covered that several times in the past. Why we have two, yes, two names for a podcast. I have one name, but it's like three names, but my name is Rob Broadhead. I happen to be one of the founders of Develop and Or also a founder of RB Consulting where we are what is referred to as boutique consulting. And there's a lot that that means. But in our case, what that is, is that we sit down with our customers, we walk through your business and we understand your processes, your procedures, your business and your technology, whether it's a nice little app that you've got or you've got this all these things of this technology sprawl that you're dealing with and all of the exhaustion that comes with trying to actually make use of all of these things out there or even keeping up with all of the new features and the AI tools and all that stuff that's out there. We're out here. We live it. We love it. We can help you figure out how to leverage technology, create a recipe that is specifically for your business for success today, tomorrow and into the future. We do that through integration, simplification, automation and even innovation. We can help you build a team. We can help you build software or we can help you pick the right things off of the proverbial shelf to use to make your business better. In the world of good things and bad things, since the last time, well, actually somewhere along this time, there were storms, big storms here in this area. The good thing is I survived, but because I like to do both sides of a coin, the bad thing is, is during that time I was receiving customer emails and managed to miss a few of them that I really wish I had. We'll talk more about that in a future episode. So sometimes it's a sometimes it storms and sometimes it really storms. But today you're going to get a little bit of sunshine in your day because you're going to get to listen to Michael introduce himself. Go ahead. Hey, everyone. My name is Michael Milos. I'm one of the co-founders of developer building better developers. I'm also the founder of a company called Envision QA, where we take a test driven approach to software development and we help small to mid-sized businesses really analyze their software stack, understand their processes and make sure that the software works for them so that at the end of the day, they are, you know, the software is working for them. They're not working for the software and hopefully their customers are having a good customer experience with their software. Good and bad. Like Rob said, we've had storms. It's been nonstop, almost five days straight of weather. You kind of get into that fog of like, where am I? What am I doing? Sleep deprived. Finally getting caught up on sleep. Not quite there yet. We did uptick the caffeine a little bit more just for a few days. But finally, the good thing is we're almost out of allergy season because all the trees are finally almost in bloom because the storms washed away most of that pollen. So allergies doing better. Storms tore things up. So hopefully we're getting into a better spring. So this episode, I want to talk about, we're starting to talk about communication, but we're going to take it a little step further, a little different approach I think that we've talked about in the past is we have talked about the value of clear and constant communication. We've even talked about the idea of over-communicating things, such as like a weekly status or regular status meetings. And what do you put into those kinds of documents and things like that? We even have examples and templates in the book, and we've got a lot of discussions around this. But I want to get a little bit more into, and basically because recent storms and things like that have brought this up, is two things. One is tone when you're dealing with a customer. And we're going to talk about the various types of customers that you may be dealing with and essentially approaching the uncomfortable kinds of things of like, are you actually listening to me kinds of communications or did you actually get that or could you please respond and things like that and how do you handle them? I want to start with the when the response is not what you expected it to be. Now this could be in the manner of tone or it could be in the manner of timing. More often than not, we're going to run into timing. It's going to be things where we shoot an email out and say, hey, we need to, for example, these are things I've had on a regular basis. I'll send something out to a customer and I'll send like a status and along with the status I'll say, hey, I'd like to schedule a meeting with you next week or in the near future or something like that. Now sometimes, and this is where I think you need to take a step back before you overthink the situation and just moderately think the situation will say. Step back and go, okay, well, one, was I clear in whatever my request was? And I'm going to use mine as an example. So if I sent a status and a request for a meeting, then it may be that I wasn't clear enough that or it wasn't distinguishable enough within my email that I was requesting a meeting that I was saying, hey, can we, you know, can we meet? Can we get together? It could have gotten lost, particularly if you've got like all of this email and then you've got a little bit of line at the end that says, hey, can we meet? Especially if it's wrapped with, you know, the normal template-y stuff that you do that's sort of like, well, have a great week and it's so fun working with you or, you know, if you have a template, if you have a certain style and then you interrupt that style with something, it's, you're practically hiding it. You know, it's like, it's, it's probably on you. So first think about, for you, you know, worry too much about the timing is look at what it was that you did and it doesn't make sense. Maybe you weren't clear, which is a good example. It's a good way to take the next step regardless is, for example, I sent a status out and I asked for a meeting and then maybe a couple of days go by, a couple of business days go by and I don't hear back. So then what I'm going to do is I can do it a couple of different ways. Now I could just as part of the status, do a reply or something like that to basically forward it again and say, by the way, did you see, I would like, you know, did you catch this part or I just want to know, haven't heard back. When would you like to schedule a meeting? Or you can actually just pretend that didn't exist and then you can just follow up or essentially create a new email that just says, Hey, just wanted to reach out, make sure that, you know, we can catch up with you. We need to schedule a meeting so you can either make it a part of the prior one or just make it something separate. If you make it part of the prior one, be very, it's, it comes off to a lot of people as being rude or obnoxious. If you say, Hey, you didn't see, apparently you didn't see my request in here. Or even if you say, as I said in my prior email or something like that is if you reference it, you're basically like, you know, banging him on the head a little bit and saying, look, I told you right here, see right here, this thing says this. So why didn't you answer me? Chill just like stuff gets missed. And so, you know, either just follow up and just say, Hey, following up one, just see if there's a good time for a meeting. That's like, that's about as it's not very aggressive and it's very much, it's just like, Hey, I'm just following up. And you can even add the little things like maybe this got lost in the filter or something fell through the cracks. And a lot of times, honestly, it does. So it's not a big deal. This is dealing with, I'm talking about this more dealing with like the things that are not as critical. Like we're going to talk in a minute about like when you send invoices and stuff like that. Actually, I think I'm going to wait for a whole other episode for that one. So you honestly, the best way I found is to just sort of, if it's gone beyond what would be the normal time is I'm just going to send another email. I'm not even going to bother about the prior one. I'm not going to follow it up. Now, if there's something I have to respond to, like if it's an ongoing conversation, okay, then I'll say, I'll just make it part of the conversation, but I'm not even going to reference the prior invite. Okay. Particularly because this helps me because if I do that, this gives me an opportunity because my schedule may have changed to now do something a little different. For example, I may send a status on Friday and say, Hey, would you like to meet on Monday or Tuesday? Well, now I haven't heard from them until, you know, it's Tuesday and I haven't heard from them yet. So maybe at the end of the day, Tuesday, I'll say, Hey, I want to like catch up with you guys. You have some availability Thursday afternoon or Friday morning, something like that, because now I've already, I'm shifting some of those availabilities because I sure as heck, even if it's Tuesday morning, I'm probably not going to say, do you want to schedule a call today because I don't want to get a call at the last second. It's like, Hey, let's go schedule a call. I want to have some heads up. I want to have some warning. So this protects me a little bit and allows me to just like be the nice guy, move on and schedule that moving forward. If this is habitual, if this is something that you commonly run into these situations where you ask for something and they don't answer, they don't answer, they don't answer, then initially what I'm going to do is I'm going to take a different approach. For example, if I'm usually communicating through status, I'm going to have completely different, I'm going to have a completely separate email thread if it's email or phone or phone tag or whatever, you know, chat, whatever it is. If there's a subject, I'm going to have a whole different subject and I'm honestly, I'm going to now have on the subject would like to, you know, in this case would like to schedule a meeting and then right away I'm going to say, Hey, I would love to talk to you. We need to get together to discuss this thing on blah, blah, blah days. Here's the availability and I'm going to, I'm going to probably, as we go through this, I'm going to get to a point where I mean early on, I'm always going to have a link. I'm going to say, Hey, you can check my link. You can schedule however you want. moving towards how about 10 o'clock on Tuesday or something like that. And then at some point I'm probably just going to go ahead and put a calendar invite if I can or something like that and then just see where it goes. And at some point you just, you give up, but they're not going to pay attention. They're not going to pay attention, but without all of this, you need to do without copying an attitude. And the easiest way I find to do this is, is looking at myself, is knowing that I have missed things. I have missed emails. I have, you know, fallen. Things have fallen through the cracks. I have sent stuff or thought I don't know how many times I've like, I thought I sent something and then you find that you didn't click send right. Or there was some sort of network connectivity issue because you were sending it from your phone and then it didn't get through right. Or there's just, or spam filters. I is amazing how like, like I changed my email filter and suddenly all of there's one customer, not all, just as one customer that I just suddenly lost his emails for a while. He was sending me stuff and he finally reached through in a different way. And it's like, Hey, are you getting him emails? And I'm like, are you sending emails? You know, so there's those kinds of things. I was like, no, I'm not. I had to go dig through things. So understand that it's probably not personal. If it is personal, then that's going to be easy to fix because let's face it, they don't like you. You don't need, they don't need to be a customer anymore. They're going to get rid of you. So that problem is going to solve itself. So it's probably not personal. It probably is just as much as we feel like we're connected and all that kind of stuff. Sometimes things happen. It could be like somebody's on vacation. It could be that they've got family, you know, things going on or personal life things. I've seen all of that could be storms, like, you know, hurricanes and tornadoes and stuff like that. So all of this to say, go, whatever you do, like take all of this with a grain of salt is to think about it as, you know, maybe it's just like, you know, things just happen sometimes try to adjust because it's the more that you can control it, the more that you can adjust your your communication lines and your threads and your titles and your topics and your approaches, the more you're going to be able to get through to them because it's not really, yes, it's probably partially on them to be able to communicate with you and pay attention, but you're going to be better off if you're focusing on how do I make this suit their communication needs the most. Now, you can do stuff like call people out, too, because I'm going to do that right now. An example of Michael has been sitting here too quiet for too long, and I'm not sure if he's even on the other end, even though I can see him see his face across the Internet. And now I'm going to ask you, what are your thoughts on this, Michael? So I'm going to pick up that last thread you kind of went with. So you've already talked about tone and some tips on ways to communicate and be clear. The big issue that I've run into recently, this is kind of why we're having this discussion because we've each had similar situations with communication, especially with these storms is when you get a new customer or you have an existing customer, make sure that you talk to the customer and find out their preferred ways of communicating. Now in the tech world, we have all these different applications, different tools, different things like Slack, Zoom, Teams, email, Dura, a whole bunch of different ways to communicate things. If you try to force your communication patterns onto your customer, you could potentially overwhelm them. And you don't want that. You want to make sure that the way you communicate with your customer meets the customers. So you may have an old school customer that prefers everything by phone. They want you to pick up the phone and call them to give them updates. Or you have the more traditional email where, OK, send me an email, says updates, things like that. Like Rob mentioned, though, email can be tricky. And lately, with a lot of system updates, Windows 11 updates, I mean, you have all these software changes going on all the time. Things tend to break and you don't know it. These are kind of those like sight unseen things where your side looks like it's working great, but your communications are not being received or they're falling into spam filters, different places where they don't know that they're that you're waiting on something or they send you something and you don't receive it. So early on, one of the recommendations I want to throw out is when you are dealing with or starting a conversation with a potential customer. Not only figure out their preferred means of communication, but also initially follow up on those communications. So, like, if you send an email and you don't hear from the customer within, say, 24 hours and it is a communication that, hey, I need something back, pick up the phone and call them or send them a different form of communication, maybe send them a text or again. At the end of the day, the phone call, picking up the phone and calling someone is the number one way to make sure that your message is getting received because you're talking to the person. So, you know that they're getting your communication. So, email is tricky because, for instance, I had a customer that things were working out. We had issues initially where I guess my email was falling into his junk or spam. Something was happening. He wasn't getting all my emails. He would get like one email and then the next two would end up in spam. Not sure why. It's just one of those weird things. So what I started following up with is if I send an email and I don't get a response within 24 hours for a responsive email, I'll send them a text and say, hey, did you get my email yesterday? Because this customer does prefer text or a phone call. Typically, he's very busy. So I'll send him a text first. And if he wants a phone call, he'll call me back or say, hey, let's schedule a call. So right off the bat, you can eliminate that unknown, especially with email. Now, some email providers and some email clients will allow you to send like a response or receive. So when the person gets your email, they open up, you get a response, or at least if they receive it, those are very helpful, but not all tools or all email services work with that. But that is another way to kind of keep track of that snail mail that you send out. Other forms of communications, again, be careful of. But like if you use Slack or Teams, just understand that, well, as a developer, you know, in your internal teams during business hours, you're probably going to get more responsive, quick responses from your own team than your customer. Your customer may not see your Slacks or your Teams chats right away, because if they don't have the app in front of them or they aren't at their computer, they may not use those forms of communication. So typically with customers, I would say email, phone, text. And if you have to send documents, one interesting way I kind of subverted this issue is I created a Dropbox folder for my customer. Any documentation I need to provide them, I put it into that folder and send the link to the customer. And I say, here is the link. Any documents I provide you will be here. I'll send you a follow up email. If you don't receive the attachment, it's there. The documents are there because one of the problems we had was they were getting the emails, but the documents weren't coming through. So some again, we are at the mercy of the tools we use, but every organization applies different security, different filters on those tools. So again, you just got to be careful and follow up initially to make sure what works and what doesn't work. And lastly, to kind of circle back around to the tone of the communication, always make sure that you stay customer focused. Like, and what I mean by that is put your customer first when you're communicating with them, like make sure that they are the priority and that you're not bitching, complaining, ranting that, hey, I'm here to help you. So how can I service you? And I liked Rob's suggestion. If you need to schedule a meeting with a customer, separate the email, keep your emails focused on specific topics. Kind of think like a PowerPoint presentation. You kind of want to keep six bullet points on the screen. Don't cram 22 things on the screen and expect your viewer to be able to see all them, understand all them and read them. Keep your communications clear and to a point. No more than maybe three or four bullets. Again, kind of think PowerPoint. But if you do need to schedule a follow up, either bold it, make it very clear. Again, email is a little hard to do this with. If certain email clients only receive text, not HTML. So if you try to bold it, they won't see the bold. So make sure that you send one communication, like a status update, and then a follow up one right after that or right before that. Hey, can we schedule a meeting? Here are some scheduled times. If you have an absolute calendar, you can point them to that. But be careful with even those because I've had issues where my calendar doesn't sync up. And sometimes you end up double booked. So always double check your meeting times and kind of set it up with your communication, with your customer, when you want to meet or what their availability is so that you can have some time to kind of plan for those meetings and not be surprised like Rob said. Yeah, and I think the whole idea of right sizing your conversation is probably one of the most important ones there is that you really want to be able to email. It's easy to get carried away with email. Let's just put it that way. Actually, it's easy to get carried away with a lot of these things like a text. If you text was meant for like 10 characters, 10 words or less. If you start putting long stuff in, it's very difficult to read. On that, though, don't use email as text messages. Um, correct. But honestly, if you have email that is very, if you have short, precise emails, that's not always a bad thing. Now you do have to watch out. You don't want it to, you don't want to send 10 emails. You don't want to each one is a bullet point, but you do want to be very concise if you need to have like a longer conversation or if you need to, um, you know, have, if, if you're having to write a page or an essay as part of the email, then don't do that in email, put it, summarize it and say, I need, you know, I would like to talk, do the best to get there. If you're, if this is a customer that doesn't have time to talk, they're not going to have time to read six pages of an email either. You need to find ways to, you know, to get the points across, uh, succinctly and precisely so that they can have that conversation or not. And I have, I've had many arguments, actually discussion, discussaments with a person in the past that was very much that was, um, his approach was that, you know, I, I am spending my time. That is very valuable information that I'm providing and I'm providing all this in these paragraphs. And this is basically he got a TLDR. It's like, I'm sorry, I don't have time to read six pages of an email, even though it is very important and it's all critical in that email form, people just, you know, they, they check out, they're not going to do it. So it's like, you have to get something and you also have to consider your audience, if you have somebody that loves to write long emails, then great. Write them a, you know, Homer's Odyssey, but most people don't, they're going to look at email, they're going to look at the couple of bullet points and then that's it. And if you have an email that you have, you know, paragraphs and you just have bullet points, you have bullet points to help them out, realize they're only going to read the bullet points. The stuff you have that's in the detail, they probably will not, unless you have something that says like, you will die if you don't read this paragraph and then they'll read the first three words. And if they haven't died yet or haven't seen why they won't read the whole thing. So, you know, realize like be cognizant of other people's time. Yes, it may have taken you a lot of time to write that email and it may have been very thoughtful, but it may have been better for you to have done that through a conversation than through an email. It just, you know, this again, it may depend, depends a little bit on your customers. You know, there's reasons why the mail clients nowadays have AI tools with them that summarize the emails. People don't like long emails. They don't have time. So make sure you keep it short to the point and don't overblow your emails. And trust me, if you want to see how it can get misconstrued, write a big email, throw it in an AI client and tell it to summarize for you. And I guarantee you, you will be like somewhere in there, you'll be like, I didn't say that. I didn't want to say that. That, that is not what I want my customer to hear. So realize that they may get that on the other end. So keep it short and protect yourself. Be very precise, avoid flowering language. This is business. Business communication is about like precise, concise, get it done. Not big flowery stuff that says, look, I know all of these big words like develop a newer or something like that. Challenge of the week this time around is have a plan, have a process for follow-up, particularly this is really, I mean, this is going to work if you're employee and working with your boss, but particularly with customers is create a essentially, you know, an SLA, a service level agreement that says that I'm going to send an email out or when I communicate, I am going to follow up in X amount of time. It may be, you know, let's say six hours later, a day later, two business days later, something, if I haven't heard, I'm going to have something that's just a general follow-up. And maybe it's sooner rather than later. So it's just something where, you know, maybe if you sent at the beginning of the day, at the end of the day, you just go through and say, you know, for the stuff you didn't get response, say, Hey, just checking in, want to make sure that my, you know, that you got my earlier email, looking forward to talking to you. You know, something like that. Doesn't have to be a big deal. Just a quick thing, because sometimes that's just enough to jog their memory where they say, Oh yeah, I got to go look at that email or, Oh, I forgot. I didn't get that for you. It's going to be very helpful in a lot of different ways. What is helpful for us is if you right now go out there and shoot an email to info at developer.com, because we love to hear from you and we will, you can test out our SLAs, you can figure out how fast we respond to all of those kinds of things. And you can criticize us or not, depending on what your, your expectations are of said responses and response times. You can also reach out to us. You can leave us comments anywhere that you get all of this fine content, whether it's on developer nor.com, whether it's out on exit the app developer nor, you can follow us there developing our page on Facebook, you can also go out to YouTube and there's a developer channel, developing your channel and your tons of stuff there, you can leave us comments on any of our past, uh, extra, the lessons and mentor classes and all the different presentations we've done. Plus tons and tons of podcast episodes. And wherever you listen to a podcast, whatever your pod catcher is, we are happy to get feedback from there as well. Good and bad. We really, we really are welcome any kind of feedback because we want to figure out how to make ourselves better building better podcasters in our case. That being said, it's time for us to wrap this one up. So go out there and build a better you have a great day, a great week, and we will talk to you next time. 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