Are you feeling like you’re not getting anywhere with your customer success efforts? Are you finding that your customers aren’t sticking around? Do you have a hard time getting new ones?
If yes, this article will help. Read it to learn everything you need about customer success and tips to do it right.
What is Customer Success?
Customer Success is how a company goes above and beyond for their customers. It’s about having a personal relationship with your customers, understanding what they need, and meeting their expectations.
Why Customer Success is Important
Customer success is crucial because it’s the best way to ensure your customers are happy and continue using your products/services.
When your customers are successful with your business, they’re more likely to stick around and buy from you again. And if they’re really successful with what you offer, they’ll tell their friends about it—which can help bring in new customers!
On the other hand, if you do have a customer success team, they’ll be able to keep your customers happy by:
- helping them with issues at the right time in the right place.
- offering advice on how to use a product more effectively.
- suggesting relevant recommendations.
Customer Success vs. Customer Support
The main difference between customer support and customer success is that the former is reactive while the latter is proactive. In other words, customer support is helping your customers when they have an issue with your product or service and need help fixing it. Meanwhile, customer success is anticipating the needs of your customers before they even know they have them.
Customer support will give you immediate answers to questions or problems. By contrast, customer success takes a more holistic approach to make sure that every aspect of your business—from product development to marketing—is working together to provide the best possible experience for your customers.
Customer Success vs. Customer Experience
Customer experience focuses on all aspects of the customer journey, including everything from how easy it is to sign up for your product through your website to how quick it is to find information about your company after you’ve signed up for an account.
In other words, customer success focuses on helping your customers use your product. Meanwhile, customer experience focuses on the quality of that experience.
How Does Customer Success Work?
Customer success management is a process that helps you understand and improve how your customers are using your product or service. Hence, you can provide them with the highest-quality experience possible.
Customer success management involves three components:
- A customer success solution that is integrated into the product or service, like a tool or software. It should include features like real-time data collection on how your customers use your product or service, as well as integrations with third-party tools like Salesforce so you can get more insight into how your customers are using what you offer them.
- A team of people who are dedicated to ensuring that customers are successful with the product or service (e.g., customer success managers, customer success professionals).
- A strategy for how those teams will work with customers so that they can reach the shared goals.
Who Needs to Implement a Customer Success Strategy?
If you’re a company that has customers, then you need to have a plan in place for how you’ll support them. It doesn’t matter if your business is just getting started or if you’ve been around for decades—a customer success strategy always helps you get the most out of the relationships between your customers and your company.
Customer Success Best Practices
Here we’ve put together a list of tips to help you get started with customer success:
1. Be Proactive
One of the most important things you can do to ensure your customers have a great experience is to be proactive. This means ensuring that your products and services are up to date, that you’re providing the correct information to customers at the right time, and that you’re responding promptly to customer inquiries.
It also means being available to customers who want to reach out. Many companies currently don’t offer phone support or live chat. When you do that, your customers might switch to your competitors. But when you offer those services, you can keep your customers happy and engaged with your company.
2. Build A Customer Success Team
Create a team of customer success professionals to start this area on the right foot.
Customer success professionals are responsible for understanding what customers want and helping them get it. They often work closely with sales teams to ensure the right product or service is being sold and that the customer has everything they need after purchasing.
They also monitor customer data so they can understand trends in buying patterns and usage habits. This helps with planning future products and services and developing strategies for retaining customers.
3. Always Use Data
Customer success should be data-driven from start to finish, so ensure you’re using data to inform decisions as much as possible. The revenue intelligence software like Revenue Grid is a good place to start.
Try out Revenue Grid to make you customer success data-driven
You should also listen to your customers and track their usage of your product over time. This will allow you to see how they use it, where they struggle with it (and why), and what features are most effective at helping them accomplish their goals. Once you have this information, it’ll be much easier for you and your team to create an action plan that will help your customers use your product more effectively.
4. Have a Plan to Handle Customer Objections
If your customers are unhappy with their experience, they might not tell you anything. They might just ignore the problem and hope it goes away. Or they might be angry enough to tell everyone they know about the issue—and then spread that anger around the Internet.
The key is to make sure you’re prepared for any situation before it happens. This means you have a process in place for handling customer complaints or concerns as soon as they arise, so when something does come up, you’ll be ready for it and can handle it appropriately.
5. Determine Metrics to Measure Success
When it comes to customer success, there’s no such thing as “just doing a good job.” You need to know how you’re doing and where you want to be by the end of each quarter or year—and that means having metrics!
Think about the following questions when defining your metrics to track:
- Are your customers satisfied with your help? Are they using your product more? Are they talking about it on social media? If not, what can you do differently?
- Do salespeople have access to the information they need to help customers? Do your marketing materials make sense for your target audience? Do customers know what you’re offering before they even start looking for it on Google?
- Are you meeting customer expectations for quality and timeliness of response time? Are you ensuring all relevant departments are working together on customer issues?
We hope this article helps you understand why you should implement customer success and what you need to start with it. In case you need more tips and tricks to improve your sales performance, don’t forget to follow our blog.
