When talking about customer success there’s a plethora of opinions and talk. However, if your business is already driving onto a success path, how can you still improve or find ideas to implement that could bring about even more opportunities!? Surely you can increase your clients, partners, and employees Net Promoter Score (NPS).
No. 1 Scale Up
You have to think big and broad about expanding and growing into a great organization. If now you work with 60 customers, you need to dare dream about 600 or 60 000, otherwise, you will be buried under the leaps of other similar businesses.
Think about how you can support a huge number of clients and what would you need for that. What type of technology would you use? What activities you’ll need to carry out and what part of it is going to be human-operated or automated!?
Are your resources available at any time or only on-demand?! Do you do a live call every time you onboard someone still? Can you track usage figures easily or not? As you gradually answer all of these questions, you’ll also understand what measures you need to take.
No. 2 Create Customer Segments
Once you get your customer base organized, you will be able to focus your resources and strategies in a tailored, more efficient manner. Not all customers are the same so your efforts put into each one of them should differ as well. Flexibility is key here as you need to consider the size of prize (SOP), type of industry you’re dealing with, location of customers, etc.
Based on the segmentation you can decide which customers can go full-tech and which ones need a human touch, which ones could work on a single CSM per account and which ones need sales and CSM separately. Open-mindedness pays off here as you expand and adjust your segmentation as well.
No. 3 Marketing to the Rescue
When your client database is huge, you need to ask for support. Do not think you can hold them on your own, because that’s what marketing is there for. The marketing team can support your onboarding process, maintain relationships and push forward campaigns.
This requires some changes in the marketing team as well because their focus will shift a bit. Going from lead generation to helping grow the engagement and NPS of your customer base can make the different in a positive way or the other way around, so plan carefully. Use the teams’ marketing expertise to boom your influence and generate growth.
No. 4 Improve the Way you Engage Customers
Do you know how often you engage your clients!? This is one important metric as your customers need to be constantly aware of their status, investment value and benefits. If your CSM team does not put effort into having good quality connections with customers than you may need to consider trainings, conferences, coaching and additional strategies. Your customers need to feel engaged, valued and respected so next time don’t just call, but video call.
No. 5 Empathy and Full Understanding of a Customer’s Journey
You need to take some time, take a few steps back and look at the big picture. Get up to date with how your clients navigate through your collaboration from start to finish. Open your eyes to harsh realities if the case to get a change to improve. If you stick your head in the sand and pretend customers are being treated the way you fantasize, then you may be sacrificing a lot of business. Map it out in detail and make adjustment if necessary.
No. 6 Learn from Complaints and Issues
When customer support is engaged, valuable information comes to you. It is important how you organize your customer support team and how well the communication channels work with the rest of the organization. Customer Support and Customer Success need to work together and exchange information to be able to improve, change, prevent and fix a lot of the weak links. All this translated to better overall customer experience, the core of any business.
As technology continues to develop and evolve with every passing year, we can take advantages of numerous tools such as ticketing software.
24Stack’s Ticketing Systems helps simplify interactions with clients, potential customers and any other person who contacts a business.
No. 7 Build Product on Customer Success
Your product needs to encompass everything you know about your customer and his/her needs and everything AI. The user should be at the center of any product, of course, reality is less generous. Use cases, user goals and traits of the individual user all lead to higher efficiency, better education and top-notch features that make your product invaluable.
No. 8 Leave Churn Aside
May sound scary, but in reality churn only shows how effective your work is. How about you change your perspective and thrive on the positive engagements of customers instead of the negative. Better quality of customer engagement equals better overall customer retention and success.
No. 9 Good Customer Health Metric
This is your business’s oxygen source. Use all the information you have and help your CSMs engage it. Know your recent history of incoming claims, whether or not the billing system is in place and runs as it should, check if your customers get accurate information or not. When your customer engaging operators have all information, they can do a better job at ensuring good customer experience.
No. 10 Celebration of Collaboration
Don’t miss your quarterly party that shows customers how appreciated they are. Because your business would not stand tall without them and they need to be reminded regularly of that. Elevate your customer engagement, recognize their worth and make it personal. Send random reminders and appreciation notes that your CSM team writes by hand to customers or congratulate them on a win that had your product’s stamp on it.
Business is not easy and there are way too many factors to count in at every moment. But work towards improving your strategy and the rewards follow as long as customers are happy.
