Customer Success: An outcome that hinges on sales, marketing, and quality to help customers get the most value out of products or services.
How do you define customer success?
It is a revenue-generating team, similar to sales and marketing. Customer success can be seen as a proactive outreach intended at increasing upsells and cross-sells, and positive word-of-mouth.
Most teams build their overall success on the accomplishments of individual members. However, things are different when it comes to customer service, customer support, and customer success. Businesses should resist the temptation to measure success just by the team’s outputs.
It’s true that figures, such as the CSAT score, the NPS of the support person, and the number of cases resolved, are vital to track. However, they don’t necessarily convey the whole story. Even more critical than assessing the outputs of customer-facing teams is measuring the output of customers. This means determining whether or not customers are successful in obtaining value from products or services.
Customer Success: The Next Growth Engine
Customer success is the next growth engine. Marketing and sales best practices are well-understood and recognized as growth engines. Therefore, not it’s time to move on to the next frontier.
Growing organizations are more likely to put a high priority on customer success than companies with stagnant revenues. This should come as no surprise.
Part of the reason for these disparities in priority is that they aren’t aligned. This likely stems from the old corporate concept that customer service teams are a cost center. People have believed that they are made up of workers and technology that you must invest in to keep your customers happy. In addition, you must prevent them from walking out the door if you don’t match their expectations.
However, customer success is an investment in the growth of your company. It is not a cost center.
Customer success enables you to engage and guide customers so that they grow into happy power users. They become people who will recommend your brand and help you expand your business. Furthermore, they will do it as quickly as sales and marketing would.
Businesses are now focusing on customer success. This is not merely to reduce client turnover. In addition, it is to help consumers get the most out of products and services in order to help them succeed.
How to Promote Customer Success
1. Make a customer service program a priority.
The first step to using your customers as a development engine is to devote time, attention, and resources to developing and growing a customer service program.
This entails devoting time and effort to strategic planning and goal-setting. In addition, it means securing personnel and budgetary resources to establish and scale a team. Further, it means gathering a team with top people and cutting-edge technology. This will support the customer service program’s mission.
Investing in a strong customer service program pays off. As a result, you can effectively address and resolve customer issues.
Furthermore, you can offer proactive support and suggestions to your customers. In addition, you can offer information about how to achieve their goals faster with your products or services. In addition, you help your customers succeed. After that, tap into your satisfied customers and loyal supporters to offer case studies. They, in turn, write reviews and testimonials and create user-generated content.
2. Customer success is aided by making training and retaining excellent employees a top priority.
It’s true that competent customer support talent is scarce. Further, many firms are unaware of what capabilities are required to succeed in such a new and dynamic field. Therefore, be aware that talent can make or break a customer service program.
Creating a talent engine that analyzes and learns from top-performing customer success managers is a vital step. Construct a training and education program that allows reps to schedule classes and training. This helps them specialize and advance in their careers.
Investing in specialized training and education for CSMs and customer service representatives is crucial for establishing a competent team and reducing employee attrition. This is another area that growing firms emphasize over stagnant ones.
Feeling disempowered in their work and a lack of clarity on career routes and prospects causes a lack of enthusiasm among employees. In addition, not feeling valued within the firm as a whole is another cause for slowing down career progression in customer success.
3. Make customer success a team effort.
It should come as no surprise that SFTC, or Solve For The Customer, is a great guiding philosophy for every single employee and team in your business. Every single employee, team, and asset adds to the quality of the customer experience.
Inbound marketing has been on the rise. This includes blogging, eBooks, templates, and social media. Therefore, your customer’s first engagement with your firm is no longer with a sales rep. A blog post, a Twitter poll, a Facebook update, or a content offer are more likely to be their first contact. Therefore, they’re more likely to comment on an Instagram story before picking up the phone.
This means that in order to gain the rewards of improved customer success, businesses must get everyone on board, from the top down. It’s about more than just one team’s job. It’s about developing a company concept that’s redefining what it means to provide a great customer experience. This means one that goes from the first interaction to months after a sale is closed.
Conclusions
Growing businesses prioritize customer success.
If that sounds like a no-brainer, you’re right. Focus on customer satisfaction, and experience when selecting how to scale your customer success program. In addition, keep requesting and using customer feedback and loyalty data to figure out what’s working and what isn’t.
