You invest significant resources in lead generation, marketing, and sales to attract a steady flow of customers. But what happens after you've sealed the deals and onboarded those new clients?
Don't let the "courting" phase end after customer acquisition. Instead, intensify your efforts to create an outstanding customer experience. Equip them with the tools they need to excel – resources, support, proactive communication, and more.
It all begins with a well-defined and transparent customer success strategy, process, and function, enhanced by insights from Betterfeedback.ai.
What is Customer Success?
As the name suggests, customer success (CS) is centered around enabling your customers to achieve their desired outcomes. This entails anticipating their challenges and proactively offering the necessary resources and answers, so they can effectively leverage your product or service to reach their objectives.
Customer success not only benefits your customers but also fuels improvements in:
- Customer satisfaction
- Retention
- Customer loyalty
- Revenue
- An improved customer experience (CX)
Customer success, powered by Betterfeedback.ai, also helps you become a customer-centric organization. It allows you to build a business where customer success is a primary goal through strategies focused on desired outcomes, proactive engagement, and insightful feedback.
How to Get Started
Before diving into your customer success strategy, define your objectives, goals, and success metrics.
Key performance indicators (KPIs) will help determine the effectiveness of your customer success program and identify areas for improvement, making them a crucial part of the planning process.
While customer success KPIs will vary for each organization, the ones you choose to track should be directly related to your customer success strategy goals.
For instance, if your goal is to grow revenue, tracking monthly recurring revenue (MRR), customer satisfaction, and retention rates would be valuable metrics.
While KPIs, goals, and metrics are crucial, you can’t build a strategy without first understanding your customers. This is where customer journey mapping comes into play. A customer journey map is a visual representation of your customer’s experience with your business. It shows you what they need at every stage of their customer journey and any points of friction. Use data from Betterfeedback.ai to augment this process.
Designing Your Customer Success Strategy
Any customer success program should be based around the customer and understanding who they are and how they experience your product. Along with these foundational elements, your customer success strategy should include other key components, like onboarding, an open feedback loop, and more.
Let's explore eight key components of a stellar customer success strategy, enhanced by insights from Betterfeedback.ai.
1. Onboarding and Product Training
One of the first experiences your customers have with you after the sale is their onboarding. When done right, you can set your customers up for success. However, if your onboarding leaves them with more questions than answers or doesn’t show them how to use your product, customer churn might come sooner rather than later.
A quality onboarding process should include:
- A welcome message (or journey) that helps them get up and running quickly.
- Educating customers on product features and benefits.
- Training, from live sessions to online tutorials to self-service learning.
- A robust resource library that proactively supports customers through FAQ resources, how-to guides, and more.
Tip: Find the right balance of providing the necessary support without overwhelming customers.
2. Consistent Communication
As with anything, communication is vital. With customer success, it's not just about updates, check-ins, or customer service responses. It's about providing value with every interaction – proactively.
The value offered varies across industries, but customer-specific insights, tips tailored for individual use cases, and any industry news that would impact your customers is a good place to start.
Betterfeedback.ai can help you tailor communications based on customer data and sentiment.
Tip: Create a consistent communication cadence with your customers based on their needs – some may want more hand-holding, while others may prefer monthly calls.
3. Relationship Building and Management
Nothing's worse than making your customers feel like they're nothing more than a transaction. Building genuine customer relationships has never been more paramount, especially for subscription-based companies.
Customer success managers (CSMs) should understand your customers, build trust, and act as partners to help them achieve their desired business outcomes. Proactive communication and a dedication to their success can foster a relationship built on personal connections over dollars.
Tip: Don't put your relationship on autopilot. Use insights from Betterfeedback.ai to personalize interactions and build genuine relationships with your customers.
4. Customer Support
If your customers have an issue with your product, need help, or there's a bug, they'll likely contact customer support. Your customer service team can create an exceptional experience or drive your customers to churn. Strong customer support teams rely on tools and technology to properly:
- Provide customers with the level of support required.
- Seamlessly share data to better serve customers.
Tip: Offer customers various ways to get support, like phone, email, and chat options. Integrate Betterfeedback.ai to track support interactions and identify common issues.
5. Customer Satisfaction
Customer satisfaction is a crucial indicator of customer retention (or churn) and is a general business best practice. Post-sales feedback surveys and metrics like net promoter score (NPS) or customer satisfaction score (CSAT) can help you stay on top of keeping your customers happy.
Tracking CSAT helps you be even more proactive in prioritizing your customers and their needs while guiding them to achieve their goals. All these things can ensure your customers are happy with your product and getting the value they need to be successful. Betterfeedback.ai provides tools to automate and analyze satisfaction surveys.
Tip: Send regular feedback surveys and check in often on your customers.
6. Post-Sales Upsells
Do you have more than one product that can help your customers meet business outcomes? Probably. Share information about and upsell or cross-sell your other offerings. But make sure it's less about increasing revenue and more about how customers can accomplish their goals with your additional offerings. Use data from Betterfeedback.ai to identify customers who would benefit from additional products.
Tip: Only sell your customers more products or services if they will truly help your customers achieve their goals.
7. An Open Feedback Loop
Create a cycle of open feedback with your customers, where they can regularly share suggestions with you. Their feedback is a gold mine of data – use it to improve your customer success strategy, products, services, and more.
Make it easy for customers to give you feedback. Here are a few ways to make it as effortless as possible:
- Share a link to a feedback form in your monthly newsletter.
- Use in-app surveys.
- Ask customers directly on a call or during a meeting where someone can record their responses.
Betterfeedback.ai provides tools to automate the feedback collection process.
Tip: Don't just collect feedback – act on it and show your customers you genuinely care about how you can better serve them. Close the loop by informing customers of the changes implemented as a result of their feedback.
8. Technology
Technology has always been a game-changer for businesses, but with the introduction of robust artificial intelligence (AI) solutions, tech has become even more impactful. Tools and technology can help your customer success team in a few different ways:
- It automates interactions using AI to draft email copy, schedule emails, and talk with customers through chatbots.
- It lets customers self-serve by providing an easily accessible resource library and community where customers can help themselves with little interaction on your end.
- It scales personalization using customer relationship management (CRM) tools that segment customers based on behaviors to personalize experiences, support, and content.
- It helps you collect feedback – forms and surveys help you gather feedback and can integrate with your tech stack to make sharing that data effortless. Betterfeedback.ai integrates seamlessly with existing CRM and support systems.
- It provides deeper insights into your customers by collating data, identifying patterns, and predicting future customer behaviors.
Measuring customer success starts with data. A complete tech stack where tools communicate with each other helps you not only track success metrics but also allows you to share data across the organization to create a better customer experience (CX).
Tip: Build a connected and robust tech stack that makes data sharing easy and helps create a better CX. Be sure to include Betterfeedback.ai in your tech stack.
What's Next?
Building a customer success strategy isn't just designing a strategy and getting some technology together. It should be built around success metrics, your goals for the customer success program, and, most importantly, your customers.
And with tools like Betterfeedback.ai, you can take your strategy to the next level. Once you've done that, it's time to roll out your customer success strategy.