Organisations giving products or services these days have enough departments already, why is there a need for one more- Customer Success?

You have got a marketing team and a good bunch of sales reps, but is that all your business needs to reach its success potential? The answer is no.

70% of successful growing businesses say that customer success is very important to them. When everyone in the business world is doing the same thing, you need to go the extra mile to make your business stand out and enjoy the desired outcome of your efforts. So, what else can you do to bridge that gap? The answer is customer success. Customer success is an emerging opportunity for your business to foster growth marketing and expansion opportunities.

But What is Customer Success?

Customer Success is the business method of ensuring customers achieve their desired outcomes while using your product or service. Customer Success is relationship-focused client management, that aligns client and merchant goals for mutually beneficial outcomes. An effective Customer Success strategy typically results in decreased customer churn and increased upsell opportunities.

For example, if you are the owner of a new general store in the market. Customers visit your store and buy products from you. In the first few months, your business had normally been running. However, you are now noticing a steady decline in your marketing sales and revenue generation. You notice that your clients are not revisiting your store. This situation makes you worry about your business’s sustainability, growth, and expansion opportunity.

Just winning a client is not enough. In the sales process, repeat sales matter! You want to make sure that your client remembers you the next time a product or service is needed. That will only happen with a dedicated customer success team in place with well-defined account management responsibilities. Customer success can be your growth architect leading to awesome sales speedup.

The role customer success plays in the long-term is important for better customer relationships, business growth as your happy customers turn into your brand’s biggest supporters and advocates. 

Difference between Customer Support and Customer Success

The fact is a company’s success is fully dependent on its relationship with its customer. How your customer views your company is of the utmost importance to your growth strategy. Both the customer success as well as the customer support departments are essential for fulfilling the desired outcome of the business objectives.

Let us understand the differences between customer support and customer success.

As the name suggests, customer support is a service provided by most of the businesses where they try to solve problems of the consumer. This department also acts on feedback, queries, struggles, and challenges to support customers while using the product. 

Customer success on the other hand is a proactive process done in partnership with customer support so that the customers achieve more value through their purchase. A solid customer success strategy involves building a relationship with your customers, understanding customer success KPIs, and helping your customers achieve and surpass their expectation levels with efficient account management.

Both customer success and customer support work hand in hand to help the business reach new levels. Hare, we’re going to share customer success best practices that you can put into action to better serve your customers.

1-Early focus on customer success

You should start using customer success best practices after you set up your business because then you don’t need to wait until they have bought your product or subscribed to your services. Sales, marketing, customer support, and every other team in your company should focus on customer success. It’s not always easy to identify ways to do that. And it often takes different forms for different companies (and teams within those companies). But if your employees know that you place a premium on customer success, they’ll know it’s something they should focus on.

2- Customer success journey map

Customer success isn’t the area of a single employee or even a single department, it depends on the different groups but with these different groups sometimes it creates chaos. A customer success journey map plots out every step of the customer success process. That includes all of that chaos that can trip you up. It can also include information on the tools and systems that you use, feedback loops, decisions, and anything else that needs to happen during the customer success journey.

3- Add value

In the process of the customer lifecycle, you are going to have many interactions with your customer which initially becomes your first marketing touch. Sales calls, emails, negotiations, customer support services, upselling, and maintenance. The list goes on. If you can add value to your relationship at every interaction, you’ll have loyal customers that appreciate your product or service. Adding value with every interaction sounds difficult. And it does take some practice. But if you develop a playbook or a list of best practices for your customer success agents, it’ll quickly become second nature.

The following are the kinds of additional value you can add-

• Recommending new features
• Suggesting best practices
• Offering training
• Sharing marketing resources (like blogs and podcasts)
• Highlighting industry news
• Congratulate them on successes

4- Multiple Paths

Many times the customer wants to get in touch with a company but couldn’t find a phone number or a contact email address for their customer support. It becomes irritating for the customers and you don’t want your customers to have this kind of experience. 

So make sure that it’s easy to get in touch with your customer success team. Have your phone number and email address prominently displayed on your website. Include a live chat feature if you can support it. If you have an app or another digital product, make it easy to find the same information there.

Beyond that, make sure that your team responds quickly. Customers don’t like to wait on hold when they have a problem. And taking more than 24 hours to respond to an email just doesn’t fly anymore. 

5- What Success means to your customer

You probably think you already know what is customer success and you very well might be. But you need to be sure. Send out short email surveys when people sign up for your service. Call leads and customers to ask about their goals. Talk to people at conferences and events. Get in touch with your contacts in the industry.

The more information you can gather, the better. It’s important to remember that effective customer success addresses each customer’s specific goals and definitions of success. But if you have a general idea of what your customers are after, you’ll be able to build it into your product and be better prepared to start the customer success process.

If there’s one thing that runs through all of these best practices, it’s this: your business exists to serve your customer. And if your company’s employees, from front-line customer service representatives to top-level executives, keep that in mind, you’ll succeed.

FunnL is an all-in-one customer success that comes with Sales Qualified Meetings ( SQM) that helps in sales and B2B marketing throughout the customer lifecycle to ensure the best customer success for your brand. Contact Us!