By 
Customer success is important for all businesses with a subscription-based revenue model. When it’s implemented properly, it can lead to increased conversions and renewals. Success can also increase advocacy and customer satisfaction, increase revenue, and reduce churn. Here are six of the best practices for improving success.
1. Find the Right Customers
The first thing your company should focus on is to find the right customers. The right customers can help you increase revenue. Meanwhile, the wrong customers can cause you to make costly business mistakes that could impact your bottom line. While most companies focus on their products, it’s up to you to focus on your customers.
The first step is to create a customer profile. This can help you come up with a combination of methods that can help you attract your potential customer base. It’s important to sell to customers who fit the overall vision of your brand as well as your products. Your sales process should also meet their expectations.
Highly-targeted customers can lead to increased internal customer alignment. The right customer and vendor can help you meet your business priorities.
2. Define & Set Milestones
It’s the goal of your CS team to help customers achieve their desired outcomes. They should go beyond these touchpoints and focus on desired customer outcomes. Desired outcomes can ensure that your customers receive the products and services they want. The first step is to determine whether your products are helping them meet their milestones.
You can also see if any success gaps lie and if any change is necessary from your product development team. You might also have to make changes to your customer’s business process, which is not always obvious when you’re focused on milestones. The second step involves coming up with a clear definition of customer experience, which includes the best customer experience you can provide. You should get to know your customers and improve the experience based on those needs.
3. Focus on Customer Health
Success is focused on managing customers. If your customer is faced with a problem, then it’s going to keep them from progressing. There are several factors that can decrease the health of your customers, but your main focus should include product usage and support processes. Other factors often include consumption of marketing and training materials, feedback, executive and overall relationship, financial problems, and referencing advocacy.
Analyzing these factors and other data is key for noticing problems. It can help your CS team focus on improved customer profiles that can reduce churn.
4. Establish Effective Communication
Since success is an ongoing process, communication is important for establishing a relationship between your company and your customers. It’s a four-step process that includes active listening, prompt responses, regular interactions, and responsive adaptation to customer feedback. Showing appreciation for your customers and sharing knowledge can also help establish strong relationships.
5. Build a Success Culture
Success isn’t just a single process. It’s a comprehensive process that’s based on customer relationships and organizational structures. That involves building a strong CS team. Or, it could mean improving the relationships between the CS team and the other teams within your organization.
6. Know the Difference Between Customer Success & Customer Happiness
Most companies assume that happy customers are successful customers. But the difference between these two terms is that happiness is a vague term. Meanwhile, success is usually based on goal-driven and quantifiable results. Some successful customers may seem like happy customers, but they’re only using your products because of the value it brings to their business.
This could possess challenges and problems for your brand and product. This is a time when you’ll want to come up with new solutions that can turn them into successful customers. This involves providing more opportunities for growth. If they’re frustrated or not satisfied with your product, then they won’t move to another product.
Infographic provided by Applica, a document automation solution company
Comments