Despite outstanding sales and marketing performances being important for a business, it is not enough to guarantee sustainable growth if consumers have too many choices.
In today’s environment of intense competition within the market, annual customer contracts are not a viable option anymore, due to the rising cost of customer acquisition.
In the modern world, sales and marketing are no longer considered a priority for success. The thing is all businesses now focus on customer success as a way to grow.
In this blog, we will give an in-depth guide on Customer Success, its importance, and strategy. 💡
🔑 KEY HIGHLIGHTS
- Customer Success is a commercial strategy based on using your merchandise or service to help a consumer meet his or her desires.
- Customer Success encompasses understanding both the “how” and “why” of customer interactions and leveraging data to enhance customer efficiency.
- Customer Success Management is a strategic approach centered on helping customers attain their desired results and derive the maximum value from a product or service.
What is Customer Success?
Customer Success is a commercial strategy based on using your merchandise or service to help a consumer meet his or her desires. It is also applied to embrace a client-oriented management style that ties the consumer’s targets to business goals.
This strategy focused on reducing the customer churn rate, the cost of gaining a new customer, and the ability to cross-sell them. Customer success is more comprehensive in terms of approach and thus guarantees a positive experience during interaction with a client.
Who needs a customer success strategy?
Every company needs a customer success strategy, especially where the customer base is the key to business revenues and growth. This is especially true for pure-play subscription services such as telecommunication & finance and other sectors like healthcare, where customer loyalty and satisfaction are paramount.
Any new business hoping to attract a constant flow of customers, a traditional company looking to minimize the rate of customer turnover, and any business organization interested in customer retention and satisfaction needs to use the concept of customer success strategy.
How Does Customer Success Work?
Customer success may be defined as a strategy that involves anticipating and implementing measures to help customers attain the results they want out of a particular product or service offered by a particular company. Here’s how it typically works:
- Onboarding: Customer success involves the interaction between the buyers and the sellers to ensure that the clients are satisfied and get value right from the time they purchase a given item.
- Customer Education: Tutorials and training sessions are which make it possible for customers to explore the full potential of the product through seminars and training sessions.
- Proactive Engagement: Some of the roles that are associated with customer success management include call interactions, touchpoints, and business review calls.
- Usage Monitoring: Through data analysis, the success of the customers will be determined by the kind of data generated, hence identifying how the customers are using this product.
- Feedback Loop: The opinions of the customers should be often gathered. The types of activities through which the customer success teams obtain some information about the customers’ needs and issues include surveys, interviews, and direct feedback.
- Relationship Building: Other related stakeholders are involved in the customer organization, thus making the company support the goals of the client and enhance their trust.
- Advocacy and Expansion: Customer success teams are also able to analyze and determine further products or services that a particular customer might need in order to benefit them more.
Thus, through such prepared and constant efforts, customer success teams are able to ensure that clients get the most out of the products they have purchased, resulting in higher levels of satisfaction and fewer defect rates, as well as increasing each client’s lifetime value for the business.
Why is Customer Success Important?
The reason why customer success is important for businesses can be attributed to the fact that it is essential for the level of customer satisfaction to be achieved and loyalty maintained. Here are the primary reasons highlighting the importance of customer success:
- Boosts Customer Loyalty and Revenue: Customer success helps to correlate customers’ goals with the proposed use of the sold product or service, hence, more sales of loyal customers.
- Reduces Churn and Increases Retention: By handling customer calls providing solutions to their issues, and also providing solutions and even extra service, a customer success strategy can help agents conquer what leads to churn and customer retention.
- Turns Customers into Brand Promoters: Customers satisfied based on customer success can become regular customers who spread a positive image of the brand and cause more traffic to the company.
- Provides Value-Added Services: Customer Success provides insights into ways in which the clients can get more value out of the product or service, individual training, and orientation.
- Makes CX Proactive: Customer success is a process that focuses on predicting the potential problems a customer may face and working to rectify them before they become large issues.
- Increases Customer Engagement Satisfaction: When customer needs are understood and accommodated, customer success teams can drive satisfaction and better engagement.
- Maximizes Revenue Per Customer: Customer success enables businesses to take advantage of the upsell and cross-sell opportunities for the potential customer value as revenue per customer.
- Key to Building Brand Loyalty: Customer success is one of the key concepts in client acquisition and retention. This means it is very helpful for the business organization to grow and be sustainable in the market.
Customer Success Management
Customer Success Management is a strategic approach centered on helping customers attain their desired results and derive the maximum value from a product or service. It entails active engagement, tailored support, and ongoing assistance to help customers navigate their journey.
Here, customer success managers serve as a crucial link between sales and support teams, facilitating quick time-to-value, maintaining customer engagement, fostering loyalty, and advocating for both customers and the company.
Examples of customer success include demonstrating how customers were able to meet their objectives and may have surmounted various hurdles by utilizing the company’s solutions, and such stories include revealing familiar issues, personal narratives, or actual accomplishments.
Customer Success Vs Customer Service Vs Account Management: What is the Difference?
Customer Success, Customer Support, and Account Management are departments that are present in most businesses. However, they vary when it comes to the determination of customer satisfaction and revenue. Here is a breakdown of the key differences between these roles:
Customer Success
Customer Success refers to the process of ensuring that customers get the best out of the product or service they use. This entails participation, continuous support, and adaptation to the needs and requirements of the customers to steer them forward in their course.
The main goal of Customer Success is to increase the customer satisfaction rate, reduce customers’ cancellation rate, and ensure that their interests and key performance indicators are important to the company.
Being responsible for onboarding and training new customers and providing them guidance throughout a customer’s lifecycle is an important concept that needs to be understood better by Customer Success Managers.
Customer Support
Customer Support is more tactical and focuses on addressing customers’ concerns and providing the necessary support at all times. It is based on providing technical help and assistance in moments when difficulties are expected.
Customer Support is involved in the resolution of issues raised through support tickets, chats, and cases as they attend to the customers’ inquiries, embracing problem-solving and guiding the clients.
Customer support representatives are solely focused on resolving current customer issues but won’t necessarily help with the overall long-term planning for customers like customer success will.
Account Management
Account Management essentially involves the cultivation of business partnerships with customers already on the company’s roster to expand sales and increase customer loyalty.
Account Managers have a primary responsibility to interface with the customers with the goals of selling new subscriptions, products, and service renewals. They need to determine the requirements of a client, search for possible ways of its development, and give pointed advice that will improve the situation seen from the client’s side.
Account Management is all about moving and selling or making revenues, while Customer Success is more centered on the results and success that the client achieves.
Customer Success Vs Customer Experience
On a less technical note, customer success is a strategy that organizations employ in order to understand the customer journey. Customer Experience is a broader concept that may be explained as a complete perception that a client has regarding the use of various products, while Customer Success aims to facilitate the understanding of this concept for businesses.
To summarize, customer experience is about understanding the “how” of customer interactions. Customer Success, on the other hand, focuses on three key objectives: Understanding the How, Understanding the why, and delivering data-driven customer service to ensure the customer does everything more effectively.
How to Build a Customer Success Strategy? 6 Tips
To achieve optimal outcomes, crafting a well-thought-out customer success strategy is essential. As you get started on designing and executing your approach, remember to incorporate these six key tips to guide your efforts.
1. Implement a customer success program
When working on the process of building a customer success program and determining how to teach your team to start helping customers before they ask for help, remember each company needs its own approach to customer success to guarantee that all clients benefit from their perfect service and meet their objectives.
As your customer base grows and the needs of the customers continue to change, it becomes paramount to adjust your customer success strategy. This involves evaluating and making changes to strategy periodically to adapt to the changing needs of the customers as well as changes to the product and/or features.
2. Educate your customers
As customer demands change and because your enterprise and its operations grow, it is helpful to periodically review and adjust the processes involved in customer success to adapt it to a new environment wherein their goals, as well as your products and services, are rapidly evolving.
This is specifically so in the case of business entities that deal in items or services that may be complex, such as software. For example, you can make a detailed knowledge base on how and what your company offers or features to consider or add a button that allows users to talk to an expert right on your website so that your support team can assist the clients who are struggling with an app online.
3. Onboard Customers
Most importantly, when it comes to complex goods and services like software, it is apparent that one has to offer reliable support frameworks. This may be accomplished by creating a full summary of your offering, where clients can learn about the product, its features, and capabilities in-depth, or by establishing a live chat option on your website where support people can immediately handle customers’ issues.
Onboarding gives your customers a feel of the experience they are likely to expect from your business. This can include offering commodities like comprehensive guided tutorials, one-on-one support from people of authority, and honoring the accomplishments of customers in terms of product achievements through events to mark major milestones, amongst others, which further ensures a successful product experience.
4. Communicate with Other Teams
When it comes to communication with your customers, this concept is extremely crucial since there has to be a free flow of communication between different departments in a company. It can be done with the help of cooperation with your marketing department to create effective, informative, and clear blogs and videos that demonstrate the work of your product or certain features.
Make sure your sales team helps to pinpoint some of the customer issues that are most crucial to address and cooperate with the support team to provide the customers with professional and integrated attention in both business development and problem-solving.
5. Promote Customer Loyalty
Customer loyalty can be established from the view that customers have high satisfaction and that they have confidence that they will be receiving their value worth. Through follow-up measures put in place within the marketplace, customer loyalty can be encouraged, hence making the consumers a strong force for encouraging brand retention.
To promote customer loyalty, it is suggested to conduct measures like a special membership program for loyal customers or an establishment of online gatherings for customers. Businesses can also set up a points reward system where customers can gain points and be given discounts for anything they purchase from the site.
When Customers Succeed, Businesses Succeed
To build for the long term, focusing on achieving customer success and making it the organization’s goal to make customers happy is the right course of action. Indeed, it is widely believed that for any business to be successful, the aspects of customer service and success are critical ones that ought to be given emphasis.
The concept of attaching customer loyalty over the long term as a key success factor that defines the organization’s performance is the basis for the formation of successful companies in the long run.
A customer success program through which support is offered on an ongoing basis can help build an equally strong and steadfast customer base that will grow into a cadre of brand promoters.
