Seeking customer comms strategies from large companies

— Do you have any insights to share as a member of the Sprout Social team?

is at Zoom and they have a lot of products. I know has been hoping to connect with other large companies. has worked at multiple large companies and I think his experience with Adobe would apply here. I’ll think of others as well.

We have a gazillion products at SolarWinds, and somewhere in the neighborhood of 300K accounts. Can you tell me what you mean by customer comms and I can either give you details on what I've done, or I can point you in the right direction at SolarWinds.

We are just looking into how we better target our customer comms all around e.g. we are EOL a product feature but don’t have confidence in the data that shows who is using that feature.
I would love to understand how others are tackling these types of product comms where there are data, opt-out, and spamming challenges

This requires a lot of coordination and partnership with your martech and marketing operations team + acct teams that have to deal with the downstream implications of product updates, company changes, etc. We had to create governance councils to have oversight on content, comm channels - email, social, web, community etc, targeted and segmented audiences etc. It can be a goat rodeo especially when ppl think you need to blast your database for every comm under the sun.

Eventually having a customer data platform or CDP can help drastically but a technology does not solve for people and process challenges

Hey! I previously worked at Twilio—Segment where we had a large product line and happy to share insights!

Some key areas I can speak to include:

1. How we sliced and diced our diverse customer base for targeted comms
2. Our approach to balancing product updates/product releases/EOLS/nurture sequences, etc across multiple offerings
3. Personalization at scale
4. Tools and processes we implemented for managing comms at scale
5. Measuring our comms if they actually worked (and how we tweaked them)
6. Mapping features to the customer journey
7. Using real-time user behavior to craft super-targeted messages
8. Partnering with our data and product folks to nail down what we needed to track (and why)
9. How our team was set up to tackle comms (and how we adapted along the way!)

My team would love to speak to you if you’re open to it! This is all the stuff we’re working through now and it’s always helpful to hear how other companies have approached similar challenges

I’d love to chat! I’m always up for connecting with other teams and sharing insights. What’s the best way to set something up?

& - At Alphasense, we are creating a Communication Council business case as well. If you don't mind, would it be okay if I joined your conversation?

pls add me. Always looking to see where I can improve this at my org

It looks we may need to have host a Friday call !

OOh Sounds good

Such a great (+ loaded 😄) question, ! Popping in late on this thread (thanks for the tag, )! +1 to the insights shared here. I'd like to add that the key is to balance your organizational goals and business objectives/OKRs with what customers actually derive value from. It's very tempting to communicate about every little product update, or find reasons to send an email/comm every week - but the important thing to remember is to start with the customer. Map out their journey, segment-wise insights or patterns that you know of - and also be mindful of the difference between the ideal state vs current state versions of the journey. This can help you identify gaps in channels + resources, outreach milestones/frequency, and also prioritize goals so that you're not broadcasting communications from every channel (stealing 's 'goat rodeo' reference here). A cross-org planning council is always helpful to support you in the driver's seat, so that you can assess the downstream impact + needs of a holistic comms infrastructure, align on priorities and swim lanes, and be able to make data-backed decisions. It's also important to bake in ongoing reporting/tracking in the comms infrastructure that you build, so that you can see what's working and what's not. Data is undeniable, and especially when you're overhauling a massive comms setup - you always want to make sure that data and not hunches are informing your decisions, and your stakeholders also have visibility into it.