How to implement customer success to drive growth

/ by

I’m sure you’ll agree that the customer is a key determinant to the success of any business.

Do you go the extra mile to delight your customers? Does your product or service meet your customers’ needs?

Your answers to these questions provide a solid indicator of whether your business is on the path to customer success.

In an overly competitive business environment, it’s challenging to maintain existing customers in your books. By the same measure, customer loyalty doesn’t come cheap.

It’s an elusive pursuit obtained through continuous improvement, detailed research, and customer-centric strategies.

Even so, businesses that achieve customer success yield huge and sustained profits. Therefore, customer success is a strong pillar for long-term business growth.

To that end, let’s take a look at how a company can build on customer success to drive growth.

Create a Customer Success Strategy

A strategy creates a framework for decisions, policies, and the channeling of resources for customer success. Businesses that disregard customer needs struggle in the long-run.

Let’s explore the various strategies you can employ on that front.

Find the Right Customer

How do you find the right customer for customer success?

You’ll need to gather various data points on your potential customer. The information obtained will shape the product path, and all solutions your business tries to achieve.

Here’s a breakdown of points for scoring a potential customer:

  • Culture — Do their beliefs, traditions, or morals agree with your product and your brand?
  • Resources — Is your target customer endowed with enough money, time, and other supporting resources for product consumption?
  • Competence — Look out for information regarding educational background, unique skills, and requisite knowledge that goes with your product.
  • Functions — For a technical product, does this customer require special modules or functionalities?

On acquiring the data, your business will then have an objective approach towards achieving customer success.

Ultimately, the perfect buyer has purchasing power, will to buy, and is actively looking for the product.

Embrace the Customer Sales Journey

<Alt tag: customer relationship management>

Digital media has enabled the tracking of customers’ shopping behaviors and patterns.

It’s now possible to identify the stage of the customer in the sales cycle. As a result, you can make early interventions to delight potential clients or leads.

Some of the practical steps you can take to bolster your customer success include:

Publish Valuable Content

Customers search the internet for information and relevant products to address their needs. This poses a great opportunity for your company to create a blog to publish valuable information.

Consequently, the blog will attract massive traffic, convert them to buyers, and assist in retaining customers.

Invest in Product Information

Scanty information on your products leads to low customer loyalty and sales. Beef up your product pages with ample resources like instant demos, tutorial videos, product catalogs, and reviews.

These resources will create an ecosystem that drives sales, repeat buyers, and referrals from satisfied customers.

Develop a Friendly Onboarding Process

An onboarding process assists customers in using the product successfully and minimizes after-sale complaints.

Whether it’s a structured process, live chat, demo, or free trial period — your business should have an onboarding plan in place.

To succeed here, you can personalize the process, create milestones, and attach value or points to each step. The faster and more straightforward it is, the happier your customers will be.

Here’s a success story detailing how Yell transformed the onboarding process using our CrankWheel software.

Create a Dedicated Customer Success Team

For the purpose of implementing customer success strategies, you’ll need a dedicated customer success team. The team will be in charge of product development, processes, and building trust in your products.

The team will also foster customer relationships and harness growth.

So, what does the customer success team comprise?

It includes customer service reps and a customer success manager who drives the agenda.

For clarity’s sake, let’s explore a customer success manager.

The Role of Customer Success Management

Most businesses are familiar with an account manager who handles client business demands and sales. On the other hand, a CSM bears similarities to an account manager, but with a bias to customer satisfaction.

Let’s look at the roles of customer success managers in a business.

Customer Retention

One of the manager’s tasks is to nurture long-term client relationships. A CSM achieves this by monitoring products, collecting customer data, and handling any concerns or complaints.

To achieve this, your success manager must maintain communications and monitor product usage.

Customer Training

In the past, businesses sold products through direct sales pitches. Now, with increased competition, companies need to take a more practical approach to drive sales.

Consequently, a customer success manager transforms the sales process with better tactics and information. Some of the tactics a CSM uses include face to face training, customer visits, elaborate features, and facilitating product conversations.

Collecting and Implementing Customer Feedback

For a business to grow, it must incorporate feedback, reviews, and criticisms from customers. Often, a CSM sends surveys just to get more feedback and suggestions from its customers.

During this stage, the business relies on the customer success team to collect meaningful, quality data. Subsequently, the team applies the data collected to improve the products, processes, and industry in general.

Create a Customer Experience Strategy

Customer experience is a collection of interactions, perceptions, and impressions that a customer acquires during the purchase journey. A positive experience brings forth customer loyalty.

When a business goes the extra mile to wow customers, they transform a regular sale into a comprehensive client experience. An example of an outstanding gesture includes sending flowers to a grieving customer or prompting a meal order.

Let’s explore the various strategies to put the customer experience into motion.

  1. Have a Clear Vision

You’ll need to guide the organization’s workforce and decisions, so they’re in line with improving the client experience. Even so, some businesses have an existing culture that puts the vision into perspective.

An organization’s culture shapes the company’s overall communication, employee conduct, and manner of handling clients. Defining a clear set of principles simplifies the strategy’s implementation.

  1. Understand Your Customer

It’s not possible to customize a service without prior information about the client. The customer service department must invest in a system that captures and processes customer data.

For technical products, collecting data on your customer’s knowledge and age is crucial for setting up a demo. A 24-year-old tech-savvy customer won’t require much assistance — a link to the information would be sufficient.

On the other hand, tech-challenged users may need a demo for the usage of more complicated products.

  1. Create an Emotional Connection

Customers prefer brands that show empathy for their situations. To appeal to your customer’s humanity, your business must find ways to make an emotional connection.

Think about inviting your customers to join in on your company’s celebrations, anniversaries, and other creative ways of connecting emotionally.

  1. Facilitate Real-Time Customer Service and Feedback

In the digital age, there are several innovations you can embrace to improve your customer experience. The solutions may include a live chat, social media support, and prompt email follow-up.

The platforms will assist you in gathering feedback and extend customer service support.

Acquire Customer Success Software

Your business can purchase customer success software to capture your customer base and accelerate growth. The CRM tool is popular among many enterprises because it automates the sales process and enhances customer service.

Below are some of the benefits of the software:

  • Anticipating customers’ actions during the sales journey
  • Obtaining client data for the development of customer profiles
  • Integration with other systems results in synergy and better productivity

A Summary of the Customer Success Process

Step 1: Create a customer success strategy.

Step 2: Drive the agenda using a customer success team.

Step 3: Integrate a client experience strategy to build on the momentum.

Step 4: Acquire customer success software.

Implement Our Success Software to Drive Growth

Your business must be willing to go the distance to delight clients and achieve customer success. To that end, you must be prepared to invest in a solid strategy, a competent team, and treating your customers well.

In the modern world, technology solutions work to accelerate the customer success process. Which is exactly why we developed CrankWheel.

CrankWheel will power your business through live sales presentations, conference calls, and a platform for CSM to manage customer success teams.

Try the CrankWheel free plan today to get a glimpse of the helpful features we offer.

This is a guest article from LiveAgent: Stand out from your competitors with a strong customer service culture.