If customer retention and churn are a problem for your business, then you need to up your customer success game. Here’s an in-depth guide to customer success and how to improve your strategy.
What is Customer Success?
Customer success refers to the process of providing proactive customer support and service. This includes anticipating potential challenges or issues faced by customers and reaching out to them beforehand to resolve those concerns.
With customer success, the chief customer officer can work closely with customers to improve customer satisfaction and boost relations. By doing so, your business can increase customer loyalty and retention. After all, who doesn’t want to work with a business that takes the time and effort to care for its customers?
Customer Success and Customer Support
To execute good customer success strategies, it is first important to understand the differences between customer support and success. Here is a table highlighting key points:
| Customer Success | Customer Support | |
| 1. Type of approach | Proactive approach; reach out to customers before they reach out to you | Reactive approach; provide support when a customer connects with you over an issue |
| 2. Duration of interaction | Long-term interactions; you work with the customer closely over a longer period of time | Shorter interactions; you work with the customer to provide immediate solutions to a problem |
| 3. Teams responsible | Team collaboration between sales, marketing, support, product development, etc | Operated solely by the customer support or service team |
| 4. Metrics to measure | Customer satisfaction, customer retention, customer health, customer lifetime value, etc | Customer satisfaction, number of cases and tickets issued, first call resolution rates, hold time, average handle time, etc |
| 5. Tasks to accomplish | Improve customer experience, upsells, cross-sells, etc | Technical support, knowledge base and guides, resolve tickets, etc. |
| 6. Discover | Areas of opportunity | Problem areas |
| 7. Ultimate goal | To ensure a successful customer lifetime value | To react and quickly solve issues |
6 Proven Ways to Improve Your Customer Success Strategy
Any company that has customers and depends on customer satisfaction must invest in customer success managers. Being in the service industry, you will notice that it is harder and more expensive to acquire new customers. It is much cheaper and healthier, instead, to retain your current ones by taking care of them. These happy customers, in turn, will make good recommendations and advocate for your service.
1. Increase Brand Awareness
Work on brand visibility to make your brand a real thing for customers. An updated website and social media accounts, stats and valid data, attractive design, and user experience are a few ways to grab customer attention. Use your marketing team to improve the way customers and potential prospects see your brand and interact with it whether online (through social media, your website, web forms, product demos, content marketing) or offline (exhibitions, stores, advertising platforms).
2. Create Buyer Personas
Your marketing and sales team must collaborate to create ideal buyer personas for your product so your targeting efforts don’t go to waste. When developing buyer personas consider these questions:
- Who are you trying to reach?
- Factors or demographics are important to your persona: their budget, age range, income, location, purchasing power, etc.
- What does your persona value?
- Which problems are you trying to help your persona solve?
- What content or information will catch your persona’s attention?
3. Provide Educational and Informative Content About Your Product
Use your website, emails, and social media accounts to provide your viewers with information:
- About your product
- How it is used
- What issues or problems it can solve
- How other businesses have used the product, etc.
The point is to demonstrate your expertise in the field and highlight your product or service’s successes. Maintain an updated website, highlight interviews, customer testimonials, blog posts, etc. Use common terms, avoid overwhelming technical jargon, and make knowledge bases or guides accessible. All of this will help solidify your business’ credibility, making customers trust it more. Educating customers makes your product or service more user-friendly, thereby improving the customer experience.
4. Provide Guided Onboarding
Spend extra time and energy on onboarding new customers. Guide them through the beginning of their journey with your service so they clearly understand how processes work and where they can find help. Once they are well-settled, make yourself available and reachable for initial issues that may turn up. Then, gradually move to automation and alerting so customers become more independent.
5. Offer Customer Support
Whether it is email, phone calls, live chat, or trouble tickets, your customer support team should be easy to contact. Additionally, you must equip your team with resources for quick resolution such as guides, etc. Make your business available 24/7 for customer support. You can do so by forwarding calls to other office locations or remote offices or using an IVR system to help with common issues and troubleshooting support.
6. Work to Improve Customer Loyalty
Customer loyalty means that for your customer, your business is “the one.” They will not look for another service or product to replace you. This is crucial to customer retention because a loyal customer will recommend your service to others and bring in more business.
Are You Ready to Build Successful Relationships With Your Customers?
Customer success is important as it can help your business build strong and meaningful customer relations. If your business needs to increase its customer retention rates, then it’s time to start offering more proactive global customer support today!
