To satisfy customers long-term, they first need to know your high-level plan to meet their goals near-term.
Without a strategy, and adoption facilitation plan you have no true north... no map or guide for customers to fully adopt your product. And when customers can't bridge the gap from sales close to product 'delivery' and goal attainment, they may be plagued with a lackluster first impression from the onset of your relationship.
Creating and reiterating value is a daily task and function of Customer Success.
Let's equip you with proven strategies that allow you to start with a solid foundation and give you enough fodder to pivot and land on your feet in this dynamic and exciting industry.
Customer Success is Critical to Business Growth
It's no secret that SaaS and subscription-based business models are pretty much a part of our new normal, and it's due to that upward trajectory that Customer Success has become critical in driving business growth.
Instead of the sale of big, one-time deals, many companies are taking on a subscription model and with that, value needs to be proven incessantly to warrant a renewal. Customers can opt out of agreements in a heartbeat and jump straight into competitors' subscription cycles just as fast.
Having said that, customer success is universally beneficial for every company, even without the renewal and contract cycles.
This brings us to a dire need to understand the strategies and espouse the values that surround effective Customer Success.
Winning Customer Success Strategies
Build your CS function with these fundamentals, and you'll be well-equipped to scale, pivot and boost your revenue-generating customer success efforts:
Know and Understand your Customers
You cannot satisfy who you do not know. It's one thing to know your target market and quite another to fully understand your individual customers, their needs and their motivations. Both are equally important. And more than anything, it's essential to know who you will ultimately serve.
Getting to know your customers by demographics, generational-type and company structure, will bode well in how effectively you tailor your CS strategies.
Use these pointers as a start:
Use relevant data to segment customer lists
Consult with Marketing and Sales to understand their specific target market
Appreciate the company's reasons to attract a certain clientele and foster growth strategies for the CS team that aligns
Develop success-plays that lean into your customer base's 'identity and personality'
Develop Seamless Processes
Once you've segmented your customers and identified tiers in terms of various qualifying criteria (eg. Contract Value, Lifetime Value, etc.), you can start packaging various tiered levels of support, success, escalation and touch-point intensity offerings for them.
Having a well-defined Customer Success process will equip all concerned (internal and external) with the foundations needed to set them up for success.
CRM's are critical to scalable Customer Success
If a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool, is not yet part of your arsenal, get one! CRM's help you keep all client contacts and their various stages of the sales cycyle in a clear organized view. You gain the ability to max out efficiency, target customers at various intersections of their lifecycle and can easily identify opportunities for upsells and gauge data-driven pain points.
With better automation, cleaner data and associated intelligence, the benefits are endless and include:
Increased Sales
Detailed analytics
Complete customer journey transparency
Automated reports
Customer loyalty and retention
Ease of auto-triggered customer communications
Full-scope Team role assignments and management
Some noteworthy CRM's are:
Proactive Education
Clients who are equipped with resources to find answers to their own personal questions regarding use of your product, are proven to feel more empowered.
According to an article by Harvard Business Review, 81% of all customers try to find the answer for themselves, before reaching out to support. The need to reach support follows after time has already been spent looking for answers. Most likely, this only brings a frustrated client your way who has already been tasked with an extra touchpoint, after already succumbing to not being able to use your product self-sufficiently.
Make sure you eliminate this by providing easily accessible information.
More than that, offer thorough education so they rarely need to find additional answers.
Some helpful examples of educational resources are:
Webinars
Triggered Email communications
Documentation
Feature videos
Tutorials
Case studies
Best practice informationals
In-app onboarding and adoption experiences
Chat-bots
Support auto-responders
Educating your customer base helps them perceive and experience value, and results in increased loyalty.
Use Automation
The more menial tasks you can replace with automation, the more time and space your human employees have to do impactful work of a more interpersonally productive nature.
Take the guesswork out of the equation and use data-triggered communications to assist Customer Success and Sales teams in moving clients along their customer journey. This ensures you're saying the right thing, to the right client at the most relevant time.
With automation, you can trigger email communications at distinct drop-off points, along notable usage patterns and holistically across the customer lifecycle.
Know and consistently deliver on the main moment of Value Realization
The proverbial 'ah-ha!' moment! This should be well-defined and documented across customer segments and be the main push for all actions with, and for your customers.
There may be multiple milestones along their journey that will ultimately lead to fully-fledged customer success.
These moments of value realization could be anything from initial contract execution to full data integration or taking the first actionable step within the platform.
Your task is to get them to these moments as fast and as eagerly as possible!
Listen to your Customers and encourage a feedback loop
Ensure that customers know how to reach you to provide honest feedback both directly and indirectly. When they do, listen to them and respond timeously with valuable, thoughtful feedback.
Your customers dictate the value and making them feel heard is the first step in retaining them.
Always remember the human element. Automation is great but that, and AI cannot provide empathy, critical thinking and custom-made solutions.
Data-driven feedback loops are imperative. Correlate data aggregated at specific points of the customer journey where others move on from, to understand how impactful your efforts are at moving them along.
Obtain consistent, but strategically paced feedback requests in the form of CSAT and NPS surveys.
Find out why your clients use your product and also why the leave. Negative feedback may be painful but it paves the way for better iterations of your product, service and customer success levels.
Closing thoughts...
Remember to be human. Your customers are human beings who need to see, feel and hear your humanness too. Connection is still what makes the world go round and we are all interconnected.
Use technology to improve efficiencies but use your team's sense of humanity to win hearts and build relationships.
Keep learning and keep improving your product. Measure your efforts and pivot where results are underwhelming. Acknowledge, appreciate and make use of your customer's feedback to inform and advocate internally and iterate your product where it makes sense, from a holistic data-defined perspective.
Read Leadership in the Age of AI to understand how leaders need to grow and adapt in the fast approaching new-normal.
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