How to build sustainable customer success for your organization?
Simple!
You build a marketing team to get new leads. You put together a sales team to bring in new clients. And you put together a customer success team to make sure those customers stay with you and are happy.
Exactly, there are so many places to start when trying to figure out how to keep customers that it’s almost impossible to know where to start. So let’s break it down one by one.
Table of contents
Defining customer success
Customer success is the ongoing process of making sure that a customer gets the most out of the products or services an organization offers. It is a way to build long-term relationships with customers by helping them use the product well and get the most out of it. This means helping customers get the most out of their investment in the company’s solution by giving them education, support, guidance, training, and other tools. Customer success is about making sure that a customer’s needs are met throughout their relationship with a company so that they have a good time and use the company’s services for as long as possible. The goal is to make sure that customers get what they want by using the solutions an organization offers well, which will lead to loyalty over time.
Why does customer success MATTER? 😊
Customer success is important for businesses that want to keep their customers for a long time. It helps companies understand their customers’ needs over the course of their lifecycle, figure out where they might need help, and give them the tools they need to get the most out of their investment in the company’s solution. By helping customers use and get the most out of their products or services, businesses can make sure they’re getting the results they want, which will increase customer satisfaction and loyalty over time. Successful customer relationships also lead to higher rates of customer retention, which in turn leads to more ways to make money and a better reputation and market share for the brand. By focusing on customer success, companies will be able to set themselves apart from their competitors by giving better service and making more money at the same time.
5 Actionable steps to build a sustainable customer success strategy for your organization
1. Create an Onboarding Process👦
You may believe that learning how to utilize your product or service is simple. While this may be true, it’s easy to forget that you deal with your products every day, and what may seem obvious to you may not be to others. Keep in mind that you are an expert, whereas someone new to your firm may not pick up on things as quickly.
Your customer success team can benefit from an excellent onboarding procedure at this point. Instead of expecting clients to adapt to your products and services on their own, your team intervenes proactively and teaches them how to use your products most effectively. This saves consumers time during the initial phases of their customer journey by preventing them from encountering typical bottlenecks that the majority of new users encounter.
For instance, Our latest release includes property tags and onboarding directly from Tackle’s Chrome Extension. In addition, we have added AI-powered tag recommendations based on historical tagging patterns to help our users quickly organize their calendar events.
2. Deploy a survey at each stage of the customer lifecycle 🫂
If you want to keep expanding your customer base, you’ll need a more reliable system for gathering customer feedback. Establishing and utilizing a regular survey system should be a top priority for hearing consumer input on any and all aspects of the customer experience.
A Net Promoter Score® (NPS) is a common way to survey your customers, but you can also add surveys to other parts of the customer lifecycle — without sending too many messages, of course. Two good times to poll customers are right after they sign up and right before they cancel. The more you can learn about why and how a customer cancels, the more you can help them in the future and keep them as paying customers.
3. Be the voice of the customer 🔊
One of the most important reasons to have a customer success team is that you are the best people to represent the voice of the customer i.e. how customers feel about your product and company because you work with them every day. You should collect this feedback by writing a paragraph a week with the title “What it’s like to be a customer at [Your Company].” Explain what the customers liked and didn’t like about the feedback, and make sure the whole company can see this through email or any other internal communication system you use.
If you need to, set up a weekly meeting for your customer success team and representatives from your product development and engineering teams to talk about customer feedback and pain points.
4. Provide Self-Service Resources 💰
It’s critical for your customers to get quick, simple answers to their questions when they use your product. And sometimes, their preferred method of getting help isn’t jumping onto a phone call — it’s conducting an online search to get their questions answered. That’s where a knowledge base comes in — like ours here at Tackle.
Write down any questions that customers ask more than once or twice. This is a simple way to start building up your knowledge base. Once a question reaches this level, you need a helpful resource to give customers the information they need and help them get around a common problem.
Usually, how-to articles are how-base help resources, but a modern buyer may benefit more from a quick answer, a how-to guide, a video explainer, or a webinar. When deciding what kind of knowledge base content to make, think about your persona and what they would most likely do if they ran into this problem. Not sure? Just talk to a few of your customers!
5. Develop Scalable Customer Success Features ✨
Your new customer success program is easy to get excited about. At the end of the day, you’re building a relationship with your customers that will make both of you successful. But you want to make sure that this relationship can last as both your business and your customers grow. Your efforts to help customers may be working well right now, but if they can’t be scaled up, you risk disappointing your current customers in the future.
One way to make sure your business can grow is to give your customer service team tools they can use to automate their daily tasks and functions. For instance, a ticketing system can handle service requests that come in and send them to the right people on your customer success team. You can also set up email templates that employees can use to talk to new customers, in the same way, every time. Customer service tools can save your success team time and help them take on more work because they won’t have to do these kinds of small tasks.
Measuring the Success of Your Customer Success Strategy ⚖️
Your new customer success program is easy to get excited about. At the end of the day, you’re building a relationship with your customers that will make both of you successful. But you want to make sure that this relationship can last as both your business and your customers grow. Your efforts to help customers may be working well right now, but if they can’t be scaled up, you risk disappointing your current customers in the future.
One way to make sure your business can grow is to give your customer service team tools they can use to automate their daily tasks and functions. For instance, a ticketing system can handle service requests that come in and send them to the right people on your customer success team. You can also set up email templates that employees can use to talk to new customers, in the same way, every time. Customer service tools can save your success team time and help them take on more work because they won’t have to do these kinds of small tasks.
