Recently I presented at the Guelph Technology Economy Conference on the subject of recruitment. I put together the presentation built off of two posts I had written – The Future of Recruiting is Inbound and The Key to Startup Hiring: Build a Magnet. It went well (I think!) and was fun to do. Public speaking is always tough, but it’s worth doing. And it’s something you have to practice frequently to stay comfortable and successful.

The presentation is entitled: Turn Your Company into a Recruiting Magnet

The basic premise is that companies need to be much more present and build more buzz for themselves in a strategic, driven way in order to attract the right people. The presentation touches on key concepts of inbound recruiting, sales, marketing and social recruiting. Hopefully it helps you and your company think about the importance of changing the fundamentals of your recruiting initiatives in 2010 and beyond.

Since this is a visual presentation, some of the explanation behind the slides doesn’t exist. But if you have any questions, just let me know…

And please let me know what you think!

I’ve said before that great customer support has to be proactive. But what exactly does that mean?

The goal of proactive support is to identify and resolve issues before they become problems. In some cases you can be so successful with proactive customer service that you can solve problems before customers even realize they exist.

We’ve all had an experience where a small nuisance grows into a giant, destructive force. Think about the arguments you’ve had with a significant other; it starts with something small that’s irritating you, but you don’t say anything about it until it grows and grows and grows, eventually festering to the point that you explode and freak out. Your significant other can’t understand why you’re so upset, and you’ve actually lost most of the context as well. But you’re mad. Really, really mad.

The same thing happens with your customers. A small frustration left unchecked can turn into an absolute disaster.

The sooner you implement a policy of proactive customer support, the better. And you can start by using metrics.

You need to know what your customers are doing with your product. You need to track key usage metrics of importance (to you and them) and use that data internally, but also share that data with customers. Remember: Think of customer support as a feature of your product. That’s exactly what you’re doing by tracking usage metrics and sharing them with customers.

LinkedIn does a good job of this. Every week I get an email from them that shows me a summary of activity. I only started receiving these emails a few months ago, but all of a sudden I could quickly scan what was going on inside my LinkedIn network. It’s a great way to create customer touchpoints and increase engagement. LinkedIn doesn’t reach out proactively beyond that, but they probably could come up with some intelligent ways to do so.

Salesforce is another company that sends usage statistics. It’s interesting to get a regular report on people’s activity with the product. Again, I haven’t seen any proactive engagement beyond that, but even this report keeps me engaged. That’s a critical part of customer support’s role.

Dropbox takes it a step further. A few days ago I received an email from them because they noticed that I’ve only synchronized Dropbox on one computer. They explain the value proposition of synchronizing multiple computers with a link to do so. That’s very smart, proactive customer service. Incidentally, it’s also a smart sales tactic. Sales is a critical part of customer support’s role.

Aside from automated emails to customers, you should also add a personal touch. The usage metrics you’re tracking should influence how often your customer support people proactively reach out to customers, and how they do so. Here are some examples:

• High Usage: Empower customer support people to go and ask for a testimonial. Have them send a surprise schwag package. Thank customers with a personal email.
• Medium Usage: Call customers to see how things are going. Listen to the good and bad feedback. Have a sense of “best practices” on how to increase usage. Send a white paper with case studies from high usage clients.
• Low Usage: Call customers immediately and flag their accounts as “in danger”. Get to the root of the problem as quickly as possible. Empower customer support people to make suggestions immediately, but also escalate the issue to management so they can step in and help.

A few additional things to remember:

1. Use a good CRM tool. You should have a CRM tool in place that allows you to track all accounts in a very straightforward way. All issues (bugs, inquiries, etc.) should be recorded.
2. You can’t save every customer. It doesn’t matter how proactive you are, you won’t save every customer. But proactive support can improve client retention.
3. Know what metrics to track. You have to put some serious thoughts into the appropriate metrics to track. Some metrics might give you false positives — such as logins. A customer might be logging in frequently but not using the app “properly” and still be unsatisfied.
4. Don’t assume usage means everything is OK. High usage doesn’t mean that a customer is totally satisfied. The same holds true with low usage; you have to know each customer’s unique expectations and intentions behind using your product.
5. Implement a regular follow-up schedule. Start with a baseline schedule for checking in on customers (via email and phone), and adjust that for each customer based on usage and feedback.
6. Build metrics tracking into your application. Think about the value add you can provide customers by making usage and metrics a feature of your product. Also think about the potential for using metrics to increase virality and engagement inside a customer.
7. Track the Social Web. Your customers are out there complaining. And many of them may not do it directly (to you) but they’ll go to Twitter, Facebook, blogs, etc. and complain there. You need to monitor the Social Web and respond accordingly. Here’s a great example of what happens when you monitor what people are saying about your company and respond actively.
8. Track trends. Each customer is unique – that’s an important thing to realize – but there are trends that will emerge when you track usage metrics. For example, you might discover that certain features aren’t being used much, or they’re being used in ways you didn’t expect. You might also discover trends about the types of customers (by industry, size, etc.) and their usage patterns. NOTE: Ideally, you’ve followed a customer development strategy when building your product, and many of these issues of product/market fit will be “resolved”, but there’s always room for refinement.
9. Don’t go overboard. You don’t want to get so aggressive that customers get irritated. That can certainly backfire. If you build usage statistic reporting into your product, be smart about it — if you don’t see any usage, stop sending the reports. Instead, pick up the phone and call. Or send a personalized email.
10. Noting replaces direct communication. Be careful that you don’t get overly focused on tracking usage metrics and implementing automated reporting and support strategies. Nothing beats a direct, personal email or call to a customer. Nothing beats an actual conversation with a customer for providing proactive customer support.

Customer support touches most aspects of your business. Great customer support will increase sales and revenues. Great customer support will assist with product development. Great customer support will increase brand recognition, and business opportunities. Think about taking your customer service to the next level by implementing proactive strategies, ingrained into the product itself and your support staff’s every day activities.

When was the last time you played Red Rover? The game is quite simple. You create a chain of people who hold hands (roughly at arm’s length from each other) and the other team tries to break the chain of people. Breaking through the chain is usually quite easy. The connections just aren’t that strong. They could be stronger if you were able to lock forearms with the people on either side of you. That would make breaking the chain harder. Now imagine for a moment that each person in the chain has four arms so they can make two connections on either side. Suddenly, the chain gets much stronger. The chain would be almost impossible to break if everyone simply hugged. It’s quite the challenge to run through two people and split them up when they’re hugging, let alone an entire chain of people. Go ahead, try it. I’ll wait…

Everyone OK? Great!

Companies need to create more touchpoints and connections with customers, then work on strengthening those connections on a regular basis. It’s not about providing customer support in disparate environments with no proper communication channels in place; that could very easily get out of hand. But it is about making sure that you’re accessible and available through different mediums – focusing on those mediums that your customers use. And not just for customer service. Being present and visible is important. Customers like to see that the founders and employees of companies they work with are out there, interacting and participating. It adds confidence and builds brand. Think about touchpoints when you work on developing customer service initiatives and policies around employee use of social networking-type tools. The more touchpoints, the better.

And just like the game of Red Rover, it’s not just about how strong a connection you have with the person on either side of you, but how strong the other connections in the chain are as well. If there are weak connections in that chain, your team loses. Companies need to create more touchpoints and connections between customers. That will strengthen the entire ecosystem that exists around the company, helping customers, and benefiting the company significantly.

image courtesy of shutterstock.