Summary
- Retaining customers beats constantly chasing new ones - Companies face the challenge of reducing customer churn and increasing loyalty to avoid the hamster wheel of high marketing spend and a lot of time bringing customers through the sales funnel repeatedly.
- Executives avoid getting blindsided in meetings - Customer success software enables executives to understand customer health scores, support contact frequency, frustrations, renewal dates, and engagement levels before walking into meetings, plus identify top clients for useful feedback.
- Product teams prioritize based on actual customer needs - Development teams see customer requests for changes and enhancements, review and prioritize them, identify which features get heavy use, invite top users to focus groups, and announce upcoming releases to the right audiences.
- Customer success begins after the sale and lasts the lifetime - The process manages business and technical relationships with dual goals of increasing customer value to the vendor (driving corporate growth) and ensuring customers receive maximum value (making them more productive and profitable). Want to improve customer success?
Customers are the building blocks of any successful business. Without them, a business cannot survive.
One of the biggest challenges with maintaining these building blocks is retaining customers. That’s the painful part. A customer buying a product or service is great, but if they do not buy again you remain on this hamster wheel of constantly chasing down new customers.
We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It’s our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.
— Jeff Bezos
This means high spending on marketing and advertising and a lot of time spent bringing a customer through the sales funnel.
Ideally, a company wants to retain their customer base while slowly adding onto it with new customers.
The trick is reducing customer churn and increasing customer loyalty. Turns out, one of the most recent methods for accomplishing this is through customer success software.
Customer success is starting to become an essential function in companies, in particular businesses in the software world.
It manages the business and technical relationships with customers. Actually, that makes it sound simpler than it really is. The end goals are two-fold.
The first is to increase the value the customer can provide the vendor, making corporate growth and profits rise. The second is to ensure that customers are receiving the utmost value for the product or service, allowing the customer to be more productive and profitable.
The customer success process begins immediately after the initial product or service sale and is carried out for the duration of the customer lifetime.
Enter customer success software.
If you are looking to systematize how you bring new clients on board and set them up for long-term success, a structured onboarding workflow can make all the difference.
Who customer success software helps
Yes, customer success software has been designed to provide a better experience for the customer and better information for the company, but it really provides more benefits to a wider variety of teams in a company than first meets the eye.
Executives
The executives of an organization can use the customer success data to be better at their job.
When they are in a customer meeting, they will avoid getting blindsided. Instead of walking into a meeting and not knowing where the customer is in their use of the software, customer success software enables them to understand a customer’s ‘health score’ and the other data tied to them.
They can know how frequently the customer has been in contact with the support, what their frustrations have been when they need to renew their subscription and how engaged the customer has been with the software.
Executives can also use the software to identify the top clients and regularly reach out to them to get useful feedback so that they know where they need to concentrate their efforts.
Product development
The product development teams can also use customer success.
The software enables the team to see customer requests for changes and enhancements. These can then be reviewed and prioritized to allow the team to provide customers with exactly what they want and need to derive true value from the product.
In addition, the development team can pick apart features and identify which customers most heavily use which features. From this information, they can invite top users to focus groups.
And often times the software will allow the development team to announce upcoming product releases, patches and add-ons to customers.
Support
The support team is likely the most obvious group that will benefit from customer success software.
Like the executives, the support team can avoid being blindsided by customer problems. They can use the metrics that are built into the software to evaluate the usage, customer health, and other indicators to ensure that they are appropriately serving the customer.
They can also use the software to prioritize the customer tickets that need to be addressed first.
Service
Services teams will find customer success software to be a brilliant tool also.
If multiple support tickets are submitted by customers in a short period of time, all relating to the same aspect of the software, this can serve as an alert for a needed training session or workshop.
The services team can also use customer success to identify which customers do not have designated administrators and therefore are not ready for onboarding. The team will then be able to provide managed services to the client that are catered to their specific needs.
The services team has the additional benefit of being able to monitor the onboarding process.
They can work with the project manager to get feedback and keep the project on track. Feedback from operations teams shows that building step-by-step transparency into the workflow dramatically improves the experience - teams no longer waste time chasing status updates or following up on missing information.
Customer success workflow templates
Client Onboarding
- Gather Basic Information
- Send Welcome E-Mail
- Conduct a Kick-Off Call
- Conduct a 1 month check-in Call
- Request Feedback
+1 more steps
Customer Relationship Management Process for Service Teams
- Invest in employee training
- Create a fulfilling workplace for your customer service reps
- Improve first call resolution rate
- Set up a customer feedback loop
- Personalize customer interactions
+4 more steps
Customer Complaint Resolution Workflow
- Acknowledge the Complaint
- Categorize and Prioritize
- Investigate the Root Cause
- Propose Resolution to Customer
- Implement the Resolution
+2 more steps
Conclusion
Having the ability to fully use customer success software can allow companies to have a much fuller picture of their customers. Does it solve everything? No, but it gets you most of the way.
They know when to reach out, when to help, when to sell and much more. The software also allows each customer to feel that you know them and their needs on a more personal basis.
But to really take full advantage of the software, every department needs to understand how they can adapt it to be helpful for them.