The term “customer success” may seem rather strange if you don’t know its background. Here’s a quick history that explains why it was coined. In the 90s and 2000s, companies realised that although their sales were growing, they were experiencing unacceptable levels of churn. In other words, they were losing a lot of customers after going to all the effort and expense it takes to acquire them.
The idea behind customer success is that simply selling a product isn’t enough. You need to make it your business to ensure that customers succeed with your product. When customers buy a product or attempt a free trial, they expect it to serve a specific purpose. One might think that if they fail to achieve satisfaction, customers would get in touch with your business. But the truth is that many of them will simply shrug off their purchase as a bad buy or decide that a free trial wasn’t worth their time.
To solve this problem, businesses must be proactive and guide customers so that they can use a product in such a way that it demonstrates its worth. This form of customer service is what customer success is all about and the key word to notice is “proactive.”
What is Customer Success?
Instead of being reactive and waiting for customers to reach out, customer success means anticipating customer needs and helping to fulfil them. Here’s how it looks in practice.
Make the First Move in Person
Contact your customers to onboard them and check in on their experiences with your product. Are they struggling with anything? Would they like any help or advice? Even if they’re fine for now, your call assures them that help is at hand if they should ever need it.
Many businesses think that an automated email will do. It may help, but it’s not best practice. Customers are very used to receiving these, and although the word “nurture” is often used in this context, it’s worth stopping to think about it. Just how nurtured does an automated email make you feel? Do you even open it? An in-person customer success meeting is far better and this brings us to our next point.
Provide Personalised Guidance
Customer success is not generic. It is subjective. Individuals experience products differently, and that’s why personalisation is key. You can and should go into a customer success meeting with an agenda, but you will notice that how it unfolds varies from customer to customer. “Helping” people with information they don’t want or need is not going to lead to customer success – another reason why in-person service is crucial. This leads us to the third important component of customer success.
Measurable Outcomes
Customer expectations and objectives relate to measurable outcomes. For example, they’re hoping to save time, save money, or achieve higher quality results. These are measurables, and it’s up to customer success managers to demonstrate the extent to which their products help customers to improve on the pre-purchase status quo. The first step is to determine what customers want from your product. The second is to show them how to achieve it. The final one is to show how using your product matches or exceeds their initial goals and expectations.
Why Customer Success Matters
While having happy customers is nice, you’d like to know if all the effort you devote to customer success is worth your while. In short, you want measurable benefits from customer success management efforts. These measurables will matter to you:
Customer Retention and Reduced Churn
These closely-related figures show whether customers have achieved success. If your products fulfil their goals, they’ll remain with you (customer retention) and won’t move on to try an alternative product (reduced churn). Your proactive efforts to ensure customers achieve the maximum benefit possible from using your products should mean that both these figures improve compared to your baseline.
Revenue Growth
Keeping customers should mean better revenue despite the costs involved in implementing customer success management. Once again, you have a measurable indicator that will help you to determine whether your efforts are bearing fruit.
Improved Customer Experience (CX)
Customer retention is long-term. Customer experience is immediate. Great customer experiences should mean that you gain their longer-term support. If you want an immediate indication of how well your customer success strategy is working, you’ll find it in CX metrics.
More Referrals
When customers experience success, they’re happy to tell associates who are faced with the same challenges that led them to purchase your product about your business. If you don’t have a referral programme, you can always ask new customers how they discovered your product. Referrals are a great indicator of how your work toward customer success benefits you.
How Customer Success Platforms Help You
Some customers will buy your product and get exactly what they want from it right away. Others may experience obstacles. Since customer success management takes time, and time is of the essence, identifying at-risk customers will help you to prioritise.
For example, if a customer buys or trials a subscription software package and then fails to use it, that’s a sure-fire sign that they are struggling to benefit from it. They may need a little help to succeed.
Customer success platforms can help you to spot customers in need of assistance. They can also help you to automate and track workflows so that there are no dropped balls or unkept promises. Besides this, your customer success platform can be used for market segmentation, helping you to identify and prioritise customers who closely match your ideal client profile.
Tips for Building A Customer Success Strategy
Building and implementing your customer success strategy must be beneficial to both your business and its customers. Decide on the metrics you want to improve on. Customer lifetime value, churn, customer retention, and net promoter scores are all relevant examples.
Clarify the Customer Perspective
Look at customer motivations and experiences. Understand customer journeys and the touchpoints that lead them to purchasing your product. Once you’re clear on why people buy your product, you can optimise their success. Understanding the type of people who buy your product and what they want to achieve will help you to define and work toward customer success.
Get the Right People Focused on Customer Success
Assemble your team. It will be cross-functional. You might include technical experts, sales teams, and marketing teams as well as customer support teams. Each of these has a role in customer success.
For example, marketing teams need to know how to align their messages to your product. Pitching to the wrong people will have a negative impact on customer success. Sales teams need to know who your product will benefit, how it will help, and why. Technical teams will indicate how customers can use the product to achieve customer success and can fine-tune products to overcome obstacles to it. Customer support teams can provide detailed insights into the obstacles to success that customers commonly experience.
Manage, Coordinate and Adapt
Bringing this all together, a customer success manager coordinates the customer success team across functions and ensures that customer success activities are well-orchestrated and effective. Customer onboarding will be an indispensable part of your customer success strategy and customer success managers must ensure that it is timely, relevant, and ultimately serves its purpose.
Outsourced Customer Service and Customer Success
It can be difficult to be laser-focused on customer success. It’s a moving target with a work volume that exhibits peaks and troughs. And, although you’d love all your customers to succeed, making sure that they do is not your core business. You have other things to do.
Outsource customer success to a company that was created with the sole purpose of serving customers. Working as an extension of your business, they provide proactive service that ensures customer satisfaction.
That’s where RSVP enters the picture. Our London-based customer service company provides you with a scalable customer success solution. Whatever your customer service goals may be, we begin with in-house equivalence. It’s only a starting point. Time and again, we’ve proved that we can outperform our clients’ expectations, helping them to deliver customer experiences that are memorable for all the right reasons.
Need help with onboarding your customers so that customer success is a given? Looking for reports that show you where common obstacles to customer success lie? Contact us today and let’s work together. Achieving your customer success goals and building lasting customer relationships begins with RSVP.