Detailed Notes
In this episode of Building Better Developers, part of the Building Better Businesses season, hosts Rob Broadhead and Michael Meloche explore customer communication strategies. From tone and timing to tools and follow-up processes, they share real stories and practical tips that every developer and entrepreneur should know.
Read More: https://develpreneur.com/customer-communication-strategies/
🎧 Challenge of the Week
“Have a plan. Build a process for follow-up communication.” – Rob Broadhead
This week, take action: create your own communication follow-up routine. Define how long you’ll wait before checking in and how you’ll reach out. Whether you’re a solo developer or a founder managing a team, it’s one of the best customer communication strategies you can implement.
đź‘‹ Connect with the Hosts
Rob and Michael welcome your feedback at [email protected]. You can also leave a comment on your favorite podcast platform, or social media:
* https://develpreneur.com/ * https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZOuFN_LhczvGyT2KSItH_g/featured * https://facebook.com/Develpreneur * https://twitter.com/develpreneur * http://linkedin.com/develpreneur
*Additional Resources*
* Communication Noise vs. Content (https://develpreneur.com/communication-noise-vs-content/) * Business Communication – Critical For Success (https://develpreneur.com/business-communication-critical-success/) * Navigating Communication Tools in Modern Workplaces (https://develpreneur.com/navigating-communication-tools-in-modern-workplaces/) * Honest Communication Is Critical For Consultants (https://develpreneur.com/honest-communication-is-critical-for-consultants/)
Transcript Text
[Music] button and we are here. Uh some of us are chilling out their tea because it was a little too hot. So while I walk over here, uh thoughts on uh ways to communicate with customer, email follow-ups, tone, stuff like that. What are your what are some thoughts on that? So like when talking to some of the customers like we've run into recently and seems you have too is you send an email to someone you don't get a response and then you kind of find out either they didn't get the email, they didn't get a document, something didn't get communicated and you're out of sync, right? So you're waiting a couple days and you've lost time because they never had it. Yeah, that's a um that's an interest. I mean, we've talked about a lot of communication. Maybe I think it's probably not a bad thing to do. Not only followup, but tone. I think we can get into like cuz some people sometimes it's like something's gone wrong and it's, you know, it's rare. It actually I just that's actually good because I just had a situation with the storms and everything that I missed something totally missed something for a customer. Uh, it's actually maybe that'll be next one is when to rebate a customer because you know that's actually so I think that's actually a pretty good one. Let me write where did I put my paper? Just a second. So, let's start with um we'll start with like followup and communication tone because I think that's probably a good little combo of stuff. Get my little note babies here. Yeah, it's kind of like one of those where it's like do you overcommunicate, undercommunicate, how do you follow up? Um how do you ensure that they get what they are supposed to have? Because I know in past seasons we've talked about like email, Slack comm, you know, team communication, but I don't think we've ever really touched heavily on like communicating with your customer like how to like to go like market yourself and you know try to sell your uh company and that but we haven't really talked too much about like the customer focused side of that. Yeah, I think that's I think we can go quite a ways with this one. So, I think that sounds like a good starting point. So, we'll start with that and then we'll go into like I said, I think like rebates and sticking your when do you when do you offer discounts and rebates and when do you stand your ground and stuff like that because there's there's a lot there, but I think that's probably a good good area to wander through as well because it's it's in the same genre basically of of topics and stuff like that. So, uh, before I start, hey, all of you out there, shoot us an email at [email protected] just because I want to try the beginning instead of the end of one of these. So, we're going to go three, two, one. 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. Don't 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 our 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 developer, also a founder of RB Consulting, where we are what is referred to essentially 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, you know, 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. And so we help you figure out how to leverage technology, create a 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. Um, since the last time, well actually somewhere along this time, there were uh 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 hadn't. We'll talk more about that in a future episode. So, you know, sometimes it's uh 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 Malashsh. I'm one of the co-founders of Developer Building Better Developers. I'm also the founder of a company called Ambition QA where we take a test-driven approach to software development and we help small to midsize 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 uh like Rob said we've had storms it's non-stop. Uh almost 5 days straight of weather, you kind of get into that fog of like where am I? What am I doing? Uh sleep deprived. Finally getting caught up on sleep. Not quite there yet. uh did uptick the caffeine a little bit more uh just for a few days. But finally, uh 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 sort of going to talk about communication but we're we're going to take it a little step further a little different approach I think than we've talked about in the past is we have talked about the the value of clear and constant communication we've even talked about the idea of overcommuting thing communicating things such as uh 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 you 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 you know 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. Now I want to talk start with the uh when the response is not what you expected it to be. Now this could be in the matter 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 uh 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 like to schedule a meeting with you you know next week or in the near future something like that. Now sometimes and this is where I think you need to take a step back before you you overthink the situation and just uh moderately think the situation we'll say is 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 um you know the normal templaty 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 it's it's probably on you. So, first think about before 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 days go by, a couple 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 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 uh 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 wanted to 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 falling up. And you can even add the little things like um maybe this got lost in the filter or something fell through the cracks. And a lot of times, honestly, it does. So, it's 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 if it's gone beyond what would be the normal time is I'm just gonna I'm 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. I'm just going to say 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 him 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 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 that'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 uh moving forward now 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. And if there's a subject, I'm going to have a whole different subject. Then I'm honestly I'm going to now have on the subject would like to sk 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 get to the point where I may 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 I am going to start moving towards how about 10:00 on Tuesday or something like that and then at some point I'm probably just going to go ahead and put an a calendar invite if I can or something like that and then just see where it goes. Now, at some point you just you give up. If 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 I don't know how many times I think 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 this one customer that I 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 them 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 to think about it as you know maybe it's just like you things just happen sometimes try to adjust because it's as the more that you can control it the more that you can adjust your uh 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, cuz 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, Jira, 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 you don't want that. You want to make sure that the way you communicate with your customer meets the customer's needs. 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 like email where okay, send me an email, SAS 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 site 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 um 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 a new customer 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've had a customer that things were working out. We had issues initially where um I guess my email was falling into his junk or spam. Something was happening. He wasn't getting all of 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 him a text and say, "Hey, did you get my email yesterday?" Uh, because this customer does prefer text uh or a phone call. Uh, 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 uh clients will allow you to send um like a response uh receipt. So, when the person gets your email, they open up, you get a response or at least if they receive it. Uh those are very helpful, but not all tools or all email services work with that. Uh but that is another way to kind of keep track of that snail mail that you send out. Uh other forms of communications again be careful of but like if you use Slack or Teams uh just understand that well as a developer you know in your internal teams during business hours you're probably going to get more responsive uh 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. Uh and if you have to send documents, one interesting uh way I kind of subverted this issue is I created a uh 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, uh 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 you again, you just got to be careful and follow up initially to make sure what works and what doesn't work. Uh and lastly, uh to kind of circle back around to the tone of the communication, um 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 uh suggestion. If you need to schedule a meeting with a customer, separate the email. Keep your emails focused on um 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 uh 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. Um again, email is a little hard to do this with. uh 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 u right after that or right before that. Hey, can we schedule a meeting? Here are some scheduled times. Uh if you have apps like calendar, uh 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 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 um right sizing your your conversation is probably one of the the most important ones there is that you really want to be able to uh email. It's 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 character, 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 um 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 you know 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 su succinctly ly and precisely so that they could have that conversation or not. And I have I've had many arguments actually discussion discussments 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 was basically he got a TLDDR. It's like, I'm sorry, I don't have time to read six pages of a 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, 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 point, 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 overblat your emails. And trust me, if you want to see how it can get uh misconstrued, write a big email, throw it in an in a 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 developer or something like that." Challenge of the week this time around is have a plan. Have a process for followup. particularly this is really I mean this is going to work if you're an employee and and working with your boss but particularly with customers is create a uh 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 6 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 uh 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, you know, 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 [email protected] because we'd 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 uh 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.com whether it's out on X at the developer. You can follow us there developer page on Facebook. You can also go out to YouTube and there's a developer channel developer channel and there's 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 podcaster is, we are happy to get, you know, 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. Bonus material. So, we've talked a lot about like email and different types of communications. Uh, the bonus piece I'll throw at here is make sure you understand the tools that you're using. Make sure that you know how spam filters work, how firewalls work, and make sure you send test emails to other people. If someone says they're not getting email from you, you may have something set up to where you're completely blocked. Uh, also, there's some uh different tools and things you can get to kind of help monitor your email, things like that, or you could even use like uh Mailchimp or things like that. But even there, you can still have problems uh with sending email. So, be very careful with the tool that you use and that you understand how the tool works when it comes to kind of scanning, checking emails, and blocking things. I I will follow up on that. I will say I will add uh filters and rules and things like that are very powerful in your mail clients and they can be very helpful to make sure that you get receive the email you're supposed to receive. Uh not everybody does that, but definitely understand your tools and and spend the time. I've I've mentioned before it it is very at least for me it is it is a very tedious and timeconuming process but over time it is worthwhile. So build out your filters, build out your rules, be careful, test them uh on a regular basis, especially because I just recently was updating some and managed to lose some important emails along the way. Um also, for lack of a better term, read the room. When you're sending an email, if you expect it in a if it feels like it should you should get a response within a certain period of time, then go ahead and do something like, "Hey, I just want to follow up. I let you know." And the more you make that your regular routine that you follow up, then the more they're going to get a feel for like what your expected, you know, time frame is. Um, now they may eventually make that a crutch where they're not going to respond until they hear your your secondary follow-up, but that's okay. At least now you know that that's going to, you know, that's going to move the dial as it were. That being said, we have reached the end of yet another episode. We will be back. We are not done with this season or anything like that. So, we're going to go uh ride off into the sunset for a little bit. We'll let you guys do the same. Go out there and have yourself a great one. And we will talk to you next time. [Music]
Transcript Segments
[Music]
button and we are here. Uh some of us
are chilling out their tea because it
was a little too hot. So while I walk
over here,
uh thoughts
on uh ways to communicate with customer,
email follow-ups, tone, stuff like that.
What are your what are some thoughts on
that?
So like when talking to some of the
customers like we've run into recently
and seems you have too is you send an
email to someone you don't get a
response and then you kind of find out
either they didn't get the email, they
didn't get a document, something didn't
get communicated and you're out of sync,
right? So you're waiting a couple days
and you've lost time because they never
had it.
Yeah, that's a
um that's an interest. I mean, we've
talked about a lot of communication.
Maybe I think it's probably not a bad
thing to do. Not only followup, but
tone. I think we can get into like cuz
some people sometimes it's like
something's gone wrong and it's, you
know, it's rare. It actually I just
that's actually good because I just had
a situation with the storms and
everything that I missed something
totally missed something for a customer.
Uh, it's actually maybe that'll be next
one is when to rebate a customer because
you know that's actually so I think
that's actually a pretty good one. Let
me write where did I put my paper? Just
a second.
So, let's start
with
um we'll start with like followup and
communication
tone because I think that's probably a
good little combo of stuff. Get my
little note babies here.
Yeah, it's kind of like one of those
where it's like do you overcommunicate,
undercommunicate, how do you follow up?
Um how do you ensure that they get what
they are supposed to
have? Because I know in past seasons
we've talked about like email, Slack
comm, you know, team communication, but
I don't think we've ever really touched
heavily
on like communicating with your customer
like how to like to go like market
yourself and you know try to sell your
uh company and that but we haven't
really talked too much about like the
customer focused side of that.
Yeah, I think that's I think we can go
quite a ways with this one. So, I think
that sounds like a good starting point.
So, we'll start with that and then we'll
go into like I said, I think like
rebates and sticking your when do you
when do you offer discounts and rebates
and when do you stand your ground and
stuff like that because there's there's
a lot there, but I think that's probably
a good good area to wander through as
well because it's it's in the
same genre basically of of topics and
stuff like that. So, uh, before I start,
hey, all of you out there, shoot us an
email at [email protected] just because
I want to try the beginning instead of
the end of one of these. So, we're going
to go three, two, one. 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. Don't 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 our 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
developer, also a founder of RB
Consulting, where we are what is
referred to essentially 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,
you know, 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. And so we help you
figure out how to leverage technology,
create a 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. Um, since
the last time, well actually somewhere
along this time, there were uh 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
hadn't. We'll talk more about that in a
future episode. So, you know, sometimes
it's uh 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 Malashsh.
I'm one of the co-founders of Developer
Building Better Developers. I'm also the
founder of a company called Ambition QA
where we take a test-driven approach to
software development and we help small
to midsize 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 uh like Rob said we've had
storms it's non-stop.
Uh almost 5 days straight of weather,
you kind of get into that fog of like
where am I? What am I doing? Uh sleep
deprived. Finally getting caught up on
sleep. Not quite there yet. uh did
uptick the caffeine a little bit more uh
just for a few days. But finally, uh 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 sort of going to talk about
communication but we're we're going to
take it a little step further a little
different approach I think than we've
talked about in the past is we have
talked about the the value of clear and
constant communication we've even talked
about the idea of overcommuting thing
communicating things such as uh 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 you 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 you
know 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. Now I want to talk start with the
uh when the response is not what you
expected it to be. Now this could be in
the matter 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 uh 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 like to schedule a meeting with
you you know next week or in the near
future something like that. Now
sometimes and this is where I think you
need to take a step back before you you
overthink the situation and just uh
moderately think the situation we'll say
is 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 um you
know the normal templaty 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 it's it's probably on you.
So,
first think about before 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 days go by, a couple
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 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 uh 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 wanted to 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 falling up. And you can even
add the little things like um maybe this
got lost in the filter or something fell
through the cracks. And a lot of times,
honestly, it does. So, it's 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 if it's
gone beyond what would be the normal
time is I'm just gonna I'm 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. I'm just
going to say 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 him
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 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 that'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 uh moving forward now
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. And if there's a
subject, I'm going to have a whole
different subject. Then I'm honestly I'm
going to now have on the subject would
like to sk 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 get to
the point where I may 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 I am going to
start moving towards how about 10:00 on
Tuesday or something like that and then
at some point I'm probably just going to
go ahead and put an a calendar invite if
I can or something like that and then
just see where it goes. Now, at some
point you just you give up. If 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 I don't know how many
times I think 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 this one customer that I
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 them
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 to think
about it as you know maybe it's just
like you things just happen sometimes
try to adjust because it's as the more
that you can control it the more that
you can adjust your uh 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,
cuz 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, Jira, 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 you don't want
that. You want to make sure that the way
you communicate with your customer meets
the customer's needs. 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 like email where okay, send
me an email, SAS 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 site 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 um 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 a new customer
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've had a customer
that things were working out. We had
issues initially where um I guess my
email was falling into his junk or spam.
Something was happening. He wasn't
getting all of 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 him a text and say, "Hey, did
you get my email yesterday?" Uh, because
this customer does prefer text uh or a
phone call. Uh, 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
uh clients will allow you to send um
like a response uh receipt. So, when the
person gets your email, they open up,
you get a response or at least if they
receive it. Uh those are very helpful,
but not all tools or all email services
work with that. Uh but that is another
way to kind of keep track of that snail
mail that you send out. Uh other forms
of communications again be careful of
but like if you use Slack or Teams uh
just understand that well as a developer
you know in your internal teams during
business hours you're probably going to
get more responsive uh 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. Uh and if you have to send
documents, one interesting uh way I kind
of subverted this issue is I created a
uh 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, uh 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 you again,
you just got to be careful and follow up
initially to make sure what works and
what doesn't work. Uh and lastly, uh to
kind of circle back around to the tone
of the communication, um 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 uh
suggestion. If you need to schedule a
meeting with a customer, separate the
email. Keep your emails focused on um
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
uh 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. Um again, email is a
little hard to do this with. uh 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 u
right after that or right before that.
Hey, can we schedule a meeting? Here are
some scheduled times. Uh if you have
apps like calendar, uh 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 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
um right sizing your your conversation
is probably one of the the most
important ones there is that you really
want to be able to uh email. It's 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 character, 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 um 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 you know 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 su
succinctly ly and precisely so that they
could have that conversation or not. And
I have I've had many arguments actually
discussion discussments 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 was basically he got a TLDDR.
It's like, I'm sorry, I don't have time
to read six pages of a 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, 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 point, 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 overblat
your emails. And trust me, if you want
to see how it can get uh misconstrued,
write a big email, throw it in an in a
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 developer or something like that."
Challenge of the week this time around
is have a plan. Have a process for
followup. particularly this is really I
mean this is going to work if you're an
employee and and working with your boss
but particularly with customers is
create a uh 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 6 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 uh 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, you know,
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
[email protected] because we'd 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 uh 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.com whether it's out
on X at the developer. You can follow us
there developer page on Facebook. You
can also go out to YouTube and there's a
developer channel developer channel and
there's 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 podcaster is, we
are happy to get, you know, 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. Bonus
material. So, we've talked a lot about
like email and different types of
communications. Uh, the bonus piece I'll
throw at here is make sure you
understand the tools that you're using.
Make sure that you know how spam filters
work, how firewalls work, and make sure
you send test emails to other people. If
someone says they're not getting email
from you, you may have something set up
to where you're completely blocked. Uh,
also, there's some uh different tools
and things you can get to kind of help
monitor your email, things like that, or
you could even use like uh Mailchimp or
things like that. But even there, you
can still have problems uh with sending
email. So, be very careful with the tool
that you use and that you understand how
the tool works when it comes to kind of
scanning, checking emails, and blocking
things.
I I will follow up on that. I will say I
will add uh filters and rules and things
like that are very powerful in your mail
clients and they can be very helpful to
make sure that you get receive the email
you're supposed to receive. Uh not
everybody does that, but definitely
understand your tools and and spend the
time. I've I've mentioned before it it
is very at least for me it is it is a
very tedious and timeconuming process
but over time it is worthwhile. So build
out your filters, build out your rules,
be careful, test them uh on a regular
basis, especially because I just
recently was updating some and managed
to lose some important emails along the
way. Um
also, for lack of a better term, read
the room. When you're sending an email,
if you expect it in a if it feels like
it should you should get a response
within a certain period of time, then go
ahead and do something like, "Hey, I
just want to follow up. I let you know."
And the more you make that your regular
routine that you follow up, then the
more they're going to get a feel for
like what your expected, you know, time
frame is. Um, now they may eventually
make that a crutch where they're not
going to respond until they hear your
your secondary follow-up, but that's
okay. At least now you know that that's
going to, you know, that's going to move
the dial as it
were. That being said, we have reached
the end of yet another episode. We will
be back. We are not done with this
season or anything like that. So, we're
going to go uh ride off into the sunset
for a little bit. We'll let you guys do
the same. Go out there and have yourself
a great one. And we will talk to you
next time.
[Music]