Customer horror stories: Sunset leaves customers staring into darkness
Today’s inSi-DED story comes from no one other but Mary Poppen, CCO extraordinaire. In this story, she shares what happens when you forget to include a crucial date in your change management plan. (No big deal.)
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Our Product team determined the final sunset date for a product feature many customers had grown to love. The Customer Empowerment team within Customer Success had built a fabulous customer change management plan to ensure our customers had plenty of advanced notice and a transition plan for users to adopt alternate features.
Everything was well thought out related to the customer experience and communications.
…or was it?
The product roadmap gets updated monthly and the timing of the update was missing from the customer change management plan. The product team updated the on-demand roadmap (housed on our Community) to reflect the sunset timeline before we could put our change plan in motion. YIKES!
Needless to say, we spooked some customers by catching them off guard. Our support team had to field several escalation calls, and our CSMs jumped into motion to communicate with all customers to try and be proactive with those who hadn’t seen the update while addressing concerns from those who had. Unfortunately, we had to spend time firefighting versus proactively guiding the customer through the change.
We were able to work through the confusion and communicate a path forward with all customers who would be impacted, but it took a while to build back trust in our partnership with those who read the news before we could proactively communicate with them.
The biggest lesson learned was that all internal teams need to be enabled and aligned on customer change management plans before taking action, or you may leave your customers in the dark.
Want more horror? If you think you can handle it, head over to customerhorrorstories.com.
