How to elevate your Customer Experience

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Today's edition is brought to you by Intercom. Scale your customer service and resolve up to 86% of your support volume with human-quality answers with Fin AI Agent.

The end of customer service trends as we know them

AI has transformed customer service forever. Intercom’s 2025 Customer Service Transformation Report reveals how over 2,000 support professionals feel about and adapt to this new AI-first era.

You’ll discover:

• The new economics of customer service in an AI world

• What customers really think about AI-first CS

• How to take advantage of AI – before the window of opportunity closes

The future of customer service is here. This is your blueprint for success.

Hi, Markus here. Welcome to a free edition of the Customer-Value-Led-Growth Newsletter.

I share strategies and guides to help you become a proactive CSM delivering more value for your customers and revenue for your company every week.

Need additional help? Check out these resources 👇️ 

• Training Platform

• Coaching Services

• Notion Guides

• CSM Operating System

• Free Templates

It can’t be emphasized and repeated often enough. Your customers are not purchasing your product to click buttons, adopt features, and spend 24/7 using it.

They are buying it because they want to

• increase revenue

• lower costs

• improve productivity

• eliminate risks

• …

and accomplish their personal goals connected to these business outcomes. The purpose of CSM is to lead customers to the promised land. But the how also matters. Customers want to get there fast and easy.

A poor customer experience can sabotage all your efforts and cause customers to leave the path prematurely.

In today’s episode, I’m sharing 5 customer experience killers you must avoid to keep your customers coming back for more.

1. Slow Responses

You get 50 customer E-mails every day. 100 more messages in Slack (or any other channel). It’s hard to keep up but you are relentlessly responding to all of them. Following the first-come, first-serve principle.

This is a big mistake. If it takes you 3 days to help a customer get unstuck the damage is already done. AI can help you accelerate your response times if it’s trained well. Because a fast response that does not help the customer is not a fast response at all.

For all the tasks that require human input, you need to prioritize ruthlessly. Not everything is urgent and not everything is important. There are must-dos, can-do’s, should-dos and should-not-dos. Where the latter e.g. refers to customers asking you to do something they should do themselves.

If declining sounds like a paradox in terms of a great customer experience think about the opportunity costs. What are the odds that this particular customer, who does not want to put in the work, becomes successful? They are pretty low I would say.

If you are doing something you should not do you have less time for the must-dos. It’s better to have one poor experience than a dozen due to a bad trade-off.

2. Inaccurate Information

There’s probably nothing killing the customer experience faster than tedious forth and back. Solving problems by trial and error. Why is it happening? Because you don’t have absolute clarity about the problems your customers are trying to solve.

So you send them a response to what you think is the problem. Or, my personal “favorite” - sending 10-20 links to articles that might contain the answers customers require. If there’s only a shadow of a doubt you need to further investigate.

It’s better to send 1 additional E-mail and ask customers for further explanation than sending 5 with input that is leading customers nowhere. If the problem appears to be more complex you should not shy away from asking for a chat.

Simply tell them the reason why you are asking for their time. Most customers appreciate your intention to provide the right solution the first time. It should work the same way at scale with AI.

3. Unwanted Outreach

You’ve just encountered an interesting industry report. You have added 5 new tutorials to your knowledge base. There’s a new guide that has just been released. Your customers need to see all of it.

The only problem is that they don’t care about any of it because it has no relevance for them. This is a classic example that meant well is not well done. If you are constantly reaching out with stuff customers don’t care it’s no surprise when they become disengaged and non-responsive.

Before you reach out to customers you need to make sure that what you have to share meets 3 criteria:

• What you are sharing with your customers is relevant for their use case

• It helps customers to move forward in their journey to accomplish their goals

• Your content is optimized for easy digesting and implementation

4. Pointless meetings

There are CSMs who are taking great pride in their packed schedules. They are running customer meeting after customer meeting. They are confusing a high number of activitiy with high impact.

The worst kind of customer meetings are check-ins. They have no agenda, no goal and no outcome. In the end you are talking about miscellaneous topics and wasting time on both sides.

Replace your check-ins with dedicated follow-ups. They are not scheduled over you panicking over declining health scores and product usage. They are planned in advance with a specific purpose e.g. giving customers feedback on their creations (campaigns, reports, etc.)

Contrary to random check-ins, recurring QBRs do have a purpose. However, most CSMs make them a complete waste of their customers time. They turn it into a monologue instead of a conversation.

They bore their customers across 40-50 slides with data and metrics they could not care less about. The purpose of a QBR is to evaluate your customers’ progress towards their goals. Discussing what worked, what did not and why.

To eventually conclude whether to keep the course or make corrections. If you turn your QBRs into CVRs (Customer Value Reviews) you will no longer have to worry about customers declining to meet with you.

5. Neglecting Customers

A while ago I was looking for ways to simplify and accelerate my content production. So I signed up for one of the numerous AI writing tools and gave it a test run. 2 days after signing up for a trial I got a message:

“How likely are you going to refer X to a friend or colleague?” That’s the perfect time to ask this question, isn’t it? The product was not a good fit for my needs anyways but this experience left a sour taste.

No inquiring how things are going but straight asking something of me. Ok, this might be an extreme example but in the end it does not matter whether it’s 2 or 200 days. This is certainly not a way to show that you put your customers first.

But there’s something that’s much worse. You are closing in on rock bottom when the only time you are reaching out to customers is when you ask whether they are going to renew. And you are definitely hitting it when you ask your customers to buy more.

Especially when you are doing it to customers paying 5-figures (or more) per year. The more your customers are paying the better experience they rightfully expect. There’s no excuse for neglecting them all year round.

As a CSM, you are at the forefront of the customer experience. If you are not delighting your customers throughout their journey then who is?

Show them that you care. Show them that you know them. Turn every touchpoint and interaction into something they are looking forward to.

Your customers have infinite choices. Show them that they won’t get a better experience anywhere else.