What is customer success?
Customer success is the process of anticipating your customer's challenges, questions or issues and proactively providing solutions before they arise. As the name suggests, it's used to set your customers up for success while using your product. Part of customer success is to give them the knowledge and tools to use your product to its full potential in order to reach their goals. It's about working with the customer to gather feedback and to make sure they gain value from their purchase. Customer success helps boost brand loyalty, customer retention and increase return revenue in the long-term.
By helping your customers succeed, they become your biggest promoters and advocates. We've spoken about net promoter scores before and how promoters can help you drive customer reviews so I can't stress enough how important these people are to your business. If you're not already targeting your existing customers to re-purchase or to promote your brand, you're overlooking a whole pool of potential sales. Customer success is an essential part of your customer retention strategy and it is tied directly to your bottom line as it helps reduce churn rates, improve renewal and satisfaction, and therefore, boost revenue.
5 Tips To Help Your Customers Succeed
1. Use a customer success strategy
With every business process, you need to plan a strategy to achieve it. Winging it as you did back at Uni won't get you to your goals and you're most likely going to get mediocre fours for your efforts. With proper planning and buy-in from stakeholders, you can create a customer success strategy that will help your customers get the most out of your product or service and increase your chances of re-purchase.
A customer success strategy will vary depending on the product or service you offer but there are several key elements to include when building your own;
- Your customers' end goals (why do they need your product?)
- Your customers' pain points
- Who will be responsible for customer success within your business?
- What tools or software are required?
2. Educate your customers
Education on how to properly utilise the features of your product or service is essential as part of your customer success strategy. A major key for customer retention and customer success is ensuring your customers are educated on how to get the most out of your product. Peak frustration is not completely understanding how to use a product, making a mistake and using it wrong so educate your customers and give them every chance to succeed.
3. Clear onboarding program
Your onboarding doesn't need to be a 3-day intensive course at your office with seminars, guest speakers and product sessions, that would just be ridiculous and a complete waste of time. It's 2023, you've got technology on your side to streamline your whole process. Drip-feed your new customers videos, articles and how-to guides as they begin their journey with your brand. Arm them with the tools and knowledge to succeed from day one and you'll have a happy, satisfied customer every time.
4. Internal communication is key
Make sure your internal departments are talking with each other, not about their weekend plans or last nights Bachelor, but about their interactions with customers and what the customers are feeling or saying. The customer success team should work closely with marketing for onboarding content, work with sales to understand pain points and customer service should be living in the pockets of the customer success team.
5. Promote customer loyalty
Loyalty is a result of the positive experiences your customers have with your brand. Rewarding brand loyalty helps to build long-term customer relationships and is an essential way of establishing brand advocates and promoters. You can do this through a customer loyalty program or a group for loyal customers to discuss features, deliver feedback or for you to deliver special offers.
The most successful businesses have their customers coming back for more time and time again. By building strong relationships with customers and encouraging brand loyalty, you give your customers every reason to re-purchase and promote your brand. A customer success plan and strategy using the above tips will help your customers feel supported and help them get the most out of your product and service while at the same time helping you reduce churn rates, improve satisfaction and increase your businesses revenue.