Bad News
By Russell Bourne
Story
If you’ll indulge me in telling a story: once upon a time, I had a customer who wasn’t acting in the best of faith. I won’t go into details, but let’s loosely say they knowingly mis-used the product to the point where it wasn’t working for them, and then tried to claim it was a faulty product to get out of the remainder of the agreement. I had to host a meeting to have the difficult conversation of re-setting the boundaries around the cause-and-effect, and sharing the news - bad, from their point of view - that the issue was their mis-use and the contract would remain in place.
I try as hard as I can to be empathetic, so I’ll say there was one customer contact who must have been having a bad day, and decided to try spite as a last resort. In front of other people on the call from both companies, they said, “You know, this is a bad customer experience, maybe that’s something you should think about since that’s your line of work.”
It was so bizarre and so blatantly intended to make me emotional, that it didn’t. In fact, one of my first instincts was, what a great topic for an article. Relaying bad news, no matter what the cause, is a customer journey touchpoint that has to happen sometimes. But bad news doesn’t necessarily mean bad customer experience.
While you can’t control what positions other people will choose to take, here are some best practices you, the deliverer, can control to facilitate the best chances for a positive experience amid bad news:
Before the Call: Prepare
When you learn there’s bad news to share with a customer, spare a thought to why the news will be bad from their point of view. Consider the impacts it’ll have on their business, and give special attention to what they value from their business relationship with you. Hopefully, you know what they value because you asked great questions during onboarding and any subsequent refreshes to your joint success plan.
I’ll give another relevant example: years ago, I worked for a data protection company. While migrating customer data from one server to another, there was a software error. Data from one of our customers, a law firm, was corrupted and not retrievable.
I knew the reason this law firm chose to be our customer was to ensure their regulatory compliance - as opposed to other customers who chose us to save the time of their IT employees. Because of that, I knew to prepare talking points related to compliance regulations, how we could help them stay in compliance despite the lost data, and so on. It wasn’t a fun call, but the law firm certainly appreciated that we knew their concerns and started down a path to alleviate them. Imagine how flat we’d have fallen if we came in blazing with talking points about time savings: “These guys just don’t get it”.
Knowing what they value, and in collaboration with your internal teams, prepare a few realistic options that are possible to do in pursuit of fixing the problem. Bear in mind your options may be different depending on whether the bad news applies to only one customer you can fix manually, versus a mass-customer issue that must be fixed at scale.
Delivering the News
Delivering bad news is an art unto itself. The basic rule of thumb here is, be quick and empathetic.
If you have to schedule the bad news call:
Bad (too scary): “We need to talk”. You’ve probably gotten that text message from someone. Terrifying! Don’t do that to your customers - don’t make them wonder.
Bad (doesn’t drive urgency): “Hi, I’d love to catch up, let me know when you’re free”. This accidentally communicates that the meeting is optional or otherwise unimportant.
Good: “We need to talk as soon as you’re able - it’s bad”. Creates the appropriate amount of urgency without making them wonder why - and will usually get them to schedule something fast.
When you hold the call, whether you scheduled it in advance or caught the other person on the fly, get to the point early in the call. It can be tempting to spend 15 minutes building rapport, but when you finally share the bad news, the other person will probably think a combination of “How could they be so socially carefree knowing they were about to drop that bomb on me?” and “Why did we spend time on socializing when we could have spent it problem-solving?”
Instead, try saying “Listen, I have to share some bad news”, and then say what it is. This serves two purposes. One, by acknowledging it’s about to be bad, you’re showing empathy early. It breaks trust when someone tries to spin bad news as not so bad. Two, it gives the other person a split second to brace themself, and still gets to the point.
From here, you might say something like, “I’m guessing this impacts you because _______” and then lean into your pre-meeting value research. You can always ask if you’ve missed anything to uncover other concerns. When your customer responds, listen and probe with genuine curiosity, and use silence as needed.
If your product is highly technical, your Product or Operations teams might provide a Root Cause Analysis (RCA) document to explain events. RCAs can be useful because they frame what happened in a thorough, objective way. The downside is the technical nature of the language can ignore or even inflame the emotional impact the issue is having on the other person. Whether you have an RCA or not, read the room and pay attention to whether you need to dial up more objectivity or more empathy during the conversation. You might prepare a few different talk tracks so you’re prepared no matter what you may encounter. If you already have relationships with your audience, knowing their DiSC (or other personality assessment) profile may help you plan. DiSC is especially nice because if you don’t know your audience in advance, it’s relatively easy for you to identify someone else’s DiSC profile.
The customer may have an idea of what they want you to do about the situation. Again, it can be tempting here to lower the temperature by saying yes to everything. Unfortunately, that sets your customer up for disappointment later in addition to creating extra work for you. If you must tell a customer you can’t do something, it’s always nice to immediately suggest something you can do.
Follow-up
In all likelihood, whatever corrective path you and the customer(s) agree on is going to involve a project that needs management. Take advantage of tools that can help you. Common ideas include Gantt charts, calendar tasks, automations that live in your CRM, CS Platform, ticketing system, Marketing platform, and integrations therein. Share these resources for collaboration or visibility internally, cross-functionally, and externally as appropriate. The bottom line here is, you must follow through and do what you said you’d do.
It’s true that in many cases, customers who have been through difficult issues with you have a stronger relationship with you than they did before, and stronger compared to other customers who haven’t been through a hard time. It makes sense - it’s easy to live through easy times. If you haven’t worked with someone under adversity, you don’t know if they can handle it; but if you have, you know what they’re made of. In fact, the legal customer I referenced earlier ended up renewing multiple times and serving as a reference for us.
Ultimately, most humans understand things don’t always go according to plan; it’s part of being human and frankly, part of software too. Most reasonable people don’t expect perfection out of their vendors (or anyone in their life!) and it’s for this reason I bring us back to the idea that bad news doesn’t necessarily create a bad customer experience. It just needs to be planned well.
The Success League is a boutique customer success consulting firm. Among our offerings is a CSM Communications training program that includes classes such as “Tackling a Difficult Situation” and “Communicating to Build Trust.” Visit TheSuccessLeague.io to learn more.
Russell Bourne - Russell is a Customer Success Leader, Coach, Writer, and Consultant. In a Customer Success career spanning well over a decade, his human-first approaches to leadership and program management have consistently delivered overachievement on expansion sales and revenue goals, alongside much friendship and laughter. Russell serves on the Board of Gain Grow Retain as co-lead for Content Creation. He is passionate about equipping individual contributors and business leaders alike to lean on their Success practices to grow their careers and help their companies thrive. He holds a BA from UCLA, and in his free time plays guitar semi-professionally.
