How To Re-Engage Unresponsive Customers by 23% through Change Management

In today's digital world, teams are expected to be more productive and efficient with their work. This has led to an increase in the adoption of new technologies and software tools. 

However, with the introduction of new tools, there is also a need for proper training, onboarding, and enablement for employees. Without ongoing support, it’s easy for teams to let workflows and tools slip through the cracks. For go-to-market teams, the consequences of failing to adopt new systems can impact the customer’s experience and, in some cases, pose a threat to revenue.   

Change management is the secret weapon to getting employees to successfully adopt new technology in the workplace. According to Prosci, a leading provider of change management training and certification, companies that adopt a structured change management approach are six times more likely to report project success compared to those that do not. 

Spekit is a just-in-time learning platform that delivers bite-sized knowledge in the tools teams use every day so they can be more efficient, productive, and drive real business outcomes. The Customer Success team at Spekit serves as the customer’s strategic partner in helping them boost their employee's productivity and drive revenue growth. 

Hannah Brotherton, the Customer Success Operations Manager at Spekit, believes that change management is a critical aspect of operations, but is often overlooked. For any change to be successful, the end-user or consumer needs to be emotionally and physically ready to approach the change. Lack of this readiness can lead to the failure of the change, even if it is expected to directly improve company objectives like increased revenue or retention.

“ Every employee has different skill sets and depths of knowledge. Design your learning environment so that, regardless of an employee’s tenure, they can easily access the information they need to be successful when they need it. " Hannah Brotherton

Hannah led the implementation of Spekit’s Customer Growth Platform, Catalyst. During the initial rollout, the team focused on platform adoption, account documentation, and note utilization. However, a few weeks after rolling out new workflows to her team using Catalyst, Hannah noticed that the team was bombarded with too much information and they weren't actually taking the expected actions. 

To address this, Hannah decided to combine Catalyst with Spekit's just-in-time learning platform! Her goal was to provide bite-sized information to her team directly in Catalyst to increase the adoption of the tool, surface the right information at the right time for her team, and ultimately impact revenue goals. 

To address the adoption problem, Hannah first identified two key areas that needed improvement:

1. Bridge the gap between new teammates and more tenured ones: Hannah wanted to ensure that the playbook resources were accessible to both new and experienced team members. She aimed to make the playbooks more efficient by removing the extremely detailed information and, instead, linking out to resources so new team members could get the context they needed to get ramped.
2. Make the playbook resources accessible and digestible: To increase the adoption of the playbooks, Hannah wanted to make sure that the information was easily accessible and understandable for the team. Customer-facing teams should be able to take action without having to scroll through pages of irrelevant information. In addition to using Spekit and Catalyst, The Spekit team also used bite-size walkthrough videos that could be easily revisited. 

Here’s the step-by-step breakdown of the Play: 

It was clear to Hannah that too much information and too many processes were introduced at once. To remedy the issue, she decided to pivot and focus the team on its top priority: mitigating risk by ensuring the team has regular interactions with its customers. 

A bit of background: the Spekit team collects data on an account's risk reason using a field in Catalyst that the account owner updates. When an at-risk review is done, the owner would select the most applicable “Main Risk Reason”:

• Economy 
• Competitive Risk
• Product Risk 
• Low Adoption 
• No Champion 
• CS Experience Risk 
• No Executive Buy-In 
• Leadership Change 
• Poor Risk 
• Unresponsive 
• Customer Risk  

Using this data, Hannah ran an analysis and concluded that the biggest risk factor was “Unresponsive,” which is defined as an account that hasn’t had interaction in the last four weeks and/or multiple (5+) attempts have been made to contact with no reply. They cheekily named this group of customers “ghosted accounts (don’t worry, this comes back later).” 

Given the findings and the potential consequences – impact on revenue targets – Hannah identified this workflow as the top priority for the Customer Success team.

When Hannah launched the first iteration of this risk mitigation workflow, she created a note template in Catalyst to outline the process. In it, she shared a step-by-step guide and included the fields to be updated and the associated email template to use.

After realizing that this process wasn’t getting adopted and tasks weren’t being completed, Hannah reached out to her team for feedback, and they shared the following: 

1. They didn’t feel enabled on how to respond to emails related to this topic
2. They didn’t feel comfortable working in outside channels (i.e., LinkedIn)
3. They felt overwhelmed by the lengthy documentation preceding the actual call to action, taking time away from solving the actual issue

This feedback gave Hannah the information she needed to re-evaluation the current workflow and make changes.

Hannah views her role in Operations as delivering the “Hello Fresh for Customer Success”! When the Customer Success team is hungry and wants to cook at home but doesn't have time to do all the pre-work and thinking, Hannah needs to send the right ingredients– templates, tasks, and associated enablement–along with the right recipe, or instructions, at the right time. 

To bring her analogy to life, Hannah combined the power of Spekit with Catalyst to serve her team just-in-time information to help them take the right action.  

The first step Hannah took was to break down her directions and highlight the calls to action.

She moved the long instructions into “Speks,” which are content cards in Spekit. 

The team could then open up the Spekit app directly from Catalyst and instantly access more details about the suggested process based on the unique needs of their customers. 

Making this change made the content a lot more digestible, and it also allowed the Customer Success Operations team deliver more resources like email templates to support the process like the one below to reach out to unresponsive accounts through LinkedIn: 

“Regardless of how many times they encountered the playbook (we have some CSMs with large books of business and others that didn’t have any ghosted accounts), they had all the information they needed to navigate the process successfully. It was both detailed and simple, which allowed the team to self-select the support materials they needed but still keep the tasks simple and clear.” Hannah Brotherton

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Hannah believes at least 30% of stakeholders need to be on board with a change for it to be successful. 

“If people feel like they are part of the decision-making process and have a say in how the change is implemented, they are more likely to be invested in making it work. This can lead to increased engagement, feedback, and adoption of the change, which can ultimately lead to a more successful outcome,” says Hannah. 

Hannah recommends creating an advisory board that will become advocates for the change and help to spread the word to others, increasing the likelihood of adoption.

For this workflow, she tasked her board to validate that the new approach addressed the feedback previously provided. They also helped her make improvements by sharing more resources they used in the past that were successful. Ultimately, this small group became Hannah’s advocates and helped spread the excitement about the new workflow even before it launched!

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With the workflow tested and validated. Hannah launched via async communication with a video walk-through, then a live ‘reveal’ with a ghost presenting the playbook (told you the ghost theme would payoff).

The goal of the workflow was to engage unresponsive customers. To measure the engagement, Hannah relied on the data in Catalyst to keep track of the following metrics: 

1. Tasks completed on time by the team 
2. Decrease in the number of accounts with the risk reason labeled “Unresponsive” 
3. Increase in overall health score across the customer base 

Within two weeks of launching the workflow, the Spektit team reduced the number of “unresponsive” accounts by 23%!

Since the launch of this playbook, Hannah continues to see the number of unresponsive accounts decrease and has since worked to launch other playbooks to support additional at-risk reasons.

“It’s now 100 times easier to proactively monitor and improve customer health, making the lives of our customers AND our employees better.” Hannah Brotherton

The impact of this Play was seen in three ways at Spekit: 

1. Reduced Unresponsive Accounts: Using Catalyst, Spekit was able to reduce ghosted accounts by 23% in just two weeks. By providing personalized onboarding and tracking user engagement, Catalyst helped Spekit identify users who were not engaging with the platform and take proactive steps to re-engage them.

2. Increased Productivity and Efficiency: Spekit's use of Catalyst and Spekit resulted in a 25% increase in productivity and efficiency for their Customer Success team. By providing real-time insights into user engagement and the ability to automate certain tasks, Spekit was able to streamline its Customer Success processes and focus on high-value activities. 

3. Improved Adoption: After the at-risk workflow was revised, Hannah noticed a significant increase in the adoption of Catalyst playbooks and tasks completed within the tool. Within the last 30 days, the Spekit Customer Success team logged into Catalyst 4 out of 5 days a week. With the strong adoption of Catalyst, new processes have since been rolled out to the team to drive more results. 

Now it’s your turn!

Here’s how to manage change within your team to increase customer engagement broken down into a three-part guide: 

1. Identify the problem that needs to be solved by analyzing data and feedback from the team.
2. Based on the findings, define the priority workflows that need attention and focus on them.
3. Review the current workflow and take feedback from the team to understand where improvements can be made.

1. Ensure that resources are accessible to both new and experienced team members.
2. Make the resources quickly accessible and digestible for the team to increase the adoption of the workflows.
3. Provide the team with the right information at the right time and in the right place, so they can easily find the information they need without having to go through irrelevant information.

1. Regularly evaluate the progress of the implementation and analyze the results to understand if the workflow is working as expected.
2. Provide ongoing support to ensure the team is comfortable working with the new workflows and tools.
3. Make adjustments as needed based on the feedback and results to improve the workflow and increase engagement and adoption rates.

To mitigate risk, Spekit automates plays just like this through Catalyst’s feature aptly named playbooks, which assigns situational, prescriptive tasks and automates personalized email outreach). If you’re interested in learning more about how Catalyst can help you reduce the number of responsive accounts by 23%, book a demo with us!