“A satisfied customer is the best business strategy of all," says business writer and former management professor at the University of New Orleans - Michael LeBoeuf.
Whether you are a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) business, sell products or are a service-based company; customer success is the thing that will take you a long way. Making your customers happy by helping them solve their questions is the key factor to reach customers in the next level in the customer journey. They are willing to switch and take the offering from your competitors at the drop of a hat. And the only reason they will do this is because they are not getting the expected value from you. This means customers today are no longer depending on the price or product but they are becoming loyal because of the experience they are getting. If you are not able to meet their requirements and do not provide the necessary support, they will leave immediately. If you give a good customer experience, it means they will spend more on you.
Customer success has become as important as the quality of your product or service you deliver. According to Salesforce statistics, 76% of customers say they expect companies to understand their needs and expectations.
What Do You Need for Customer Success?
You will get plenty of information from various resources that will tell you about customer success but here we are mentioning some key elements that are essential to get the expected result. In the end, customer success management is about approaches that make differences.
- A clear customer success strategy that includes detailed processes to drive more customer engagement.
- A dedicated team of people often termed as customer success managers (CSMs) who will be constantly available to answer queries raised by customers. The size of the team can depend on the size of business and available resources.
- Access to any information needed in real time which will include feedback, financial statistics or any kind of other information from various departments like Sales, Accounts, etc. so that they can give more and authentic answers to customers.
What Technology Should Be Used in CSM?
To build a successful customer management program, a company should include technology-oriented solutions and empower the customer success management team to nurture relationships with clients. This will allow people in your organization to be promptly available with accurate pieces of information and build trust and credibility with customers.
So what kind of technology solutions you should include?
- A CRM system to store the data and find it quickly.
- Voice of the customer (VoC) solution to collect feedback, analyze it and send it to the right people to make the right conclusions.
- Marketing automation to save time and focus on other important aspects of growing your business.
The important aspect here is to give the ability to customer success managers to have a transparent view of the customer journey to gather authentic information from all customer touchpoints.
What Your CSM Strategy Should Include?
Customer success is a great way to make customers feel valued by helping them achieve their goals. To do so, a CSM team should function as a brand ambassador for your customers. They are expected to listen to every voice and pay attention to solve the problems of your customers. A dedicated team of CSMs will create a customer-centric atmosphere in every part of your organization.
It's a great way to use customers' voices to improve performance not only for CSMs but for the whole organization. At any point, keeping customers at the heart gives a better understanding of what they want and how you can add value throughout their journey with you.
Building a customer success strategy can differ from organization to organization but defining how the customer success program aligns with your business goal will be the key point for long-term viability.
For Which Businesses, Is CSM Applicable?
The reason for customer success, to achieve goals for mutually beneficial outcomes fits almost every organization. But over the years, the customer success management method has been developed specifically by SaaS or B2B companies.
How Does Customer Success Help in Reducing the Churn Rate?
The main factor to consider in customer churn is the lack of value that your customers are receiving from the product or service of your company. On the other side, customer success management walks with a mission to prove value at every stage of the customer journey. Also, it has been said that the cost of acquiring a new customer reaches 6-7 times more than the cost needed to retain an existing customer. This range may differ from the type of industry and the region they are serving. But it concludes that working on customer churn through customer success is always better than finding and applying new methods to acquire new customers.
Takeaway
If you want to know whether your business is growing well or not then you can examine it by ensuring customers' success and happiness. The satisfaction of customers should be your supreme goal if you want to do business more than once with your customers. To make the customer journey more memorable, ask yourself, "What was that one thing that made your customers say 'yes' to your product or service?" No doubt, if you give what your customers really want, they will buy more, recommend to others, renew, and retain becoming loyal customers. However, creating a customer success management strategy needs a thorough understanding of customers' goals and how they can achieve it through your product or service. If you make your customers as successful as possible then surely it is going to improve the customer lifecycle for the company and make a remarkable impact on overall revenue.