Why Over-Communication Is the Secret to Creating a Positive Customer Experience
This article is a part of our Q&A series, The Power of Conversation, powered by Aircall. Have a question about creating memorable customer experiences, meeting your business goals, and increasing internal collaboration? Join the Support Driven community, and we’ll get your question answered by Customer Support leaders and practitioners.
Q: Hi Friends!! Need advice on communicating with users when you’re sunsetting a product feature. See thread - appreciate your help!
- Communication Struggles
Emily Gregor, Content Lead at Aircall: Hi, Communication Struggles! When you’re communicating with customers, it’s important to be up-front and transparent while providing an 11-star customer service experience, but there’s an added layer of complexity when the news isn’t necessarily positive. We turned to our community members to weigh in.
Communication Struggles: We’re preparing to remove a low-usage feature from our product that’s pretty buggy/old. It doesn’t serve a lot of purpose for the future of our product and has a lot of tech debt associated with it. We plan to give users who have recent activity with the feature (less than .1% of daily users) a three-month warning that the feature is going to be sunset.
I’m seeking advice on how to communicate effectively and empathetically with the people still using it. Any tips/learnings you can share from writing communications to the small subset of users still using this feature? Looking for anything along the lines of “This type of language worked well” or “Don’t make this critical mistake!”
Lauren Eimers, Senior Customer Support/Success Lead at Big Cartel: We’ve made moves big and small with sunsetting features, and the biggest takeaway is: Over-communicate when the changes will occur in all the channels you have and with lots of notice. Three months is a great starting point! I also think transparency into the “why” y’all are making the change can help users with the transition. The last thing to note is that change can be difficult—even with all the notice and empathy—so give you and your team some grace when the squeaky wheels surface after the change has gone through.
Dave Dyson (he/him): Proactively sharing any possible workarounds can be helpful as well, FWIW.
Community Member: Our company has been doing some streamlining, and the thing that’s been most helpful for our support specialists has been that the group closest to the feature/function works to anticipate complaints/reactions/concerns and provide the why that Lauren mentioned above in context.
It helps them understand the user’s reaction so they can lean into empathy but also provide tangible help (and demonstrate that the decision wasn’t frivolous). It also gives us a starting place to add user concerns as they roll in (since inevitably there will be something you haven’t thought of). But yeah, over-communication is key.
Emily Gregor, Content Lead at Aircall: Thanks, everyone! So the overwhelming response here is to communicate frequently and early on that change is coming and to be proactive when it comes to identifying workarounds, pros, and cons to the change.
Communication Struggles: Thanks, everyone! Change is hard, and you are absolutely right: The team will need grace and support in helping users transition.
About the Editor
Emily Gregor is a Content Marketing Lead at Aircall, an integrated, easy-to-use, cloud-based phone solution.