The statement “customer success” seems pretty obvious, but do you really know what means? Keep reading to find out.
Every company knows that keeping customers happy is the secret behind their success.
This includes a variety of things that goes from having the right approach to customers, to provide quick support and ensure clients have a good overall experience with your product, so they can keep coming back.
Customer success is a part of that process and it’s about ensuring your customers achieve their desired outcomes while using your product or service.
Above all, customer success is based on the customers-brand relationship, and it aligns their mutual goals for a win-win result.
You may now wonder, how you can achieve customer success in your company?
Well, we have it all explained to you in 6 steps.
Step 1. Become an expert about your product
Having an in-depth knowledge of your product will ensure you can share relevant best practices, weigh in on how to optimize configurations and workflows, and identify potential case studies.
As a result, all the things you will share with your customers builds on your foundational understanding of your product or service.
Most importantly, this is how you will know how to highlight your product’s best features and everything that makes it different and better from the competition.
Step 2. Speak with your customers
As well knowing your product is the start point to customer success, you will learn even more by speaking to real-life customers.
Look through your customer database to identify the ones who might be willing to walk you through their use case, discuss any challenges they’re facing, and review how their progress compares with their purchase goals.
Step 3. Understand your Ideal Customer and Use Case
Ask the sales, marketing and support departments to describe your company’s ideal customer and use case. Then, compare these responses to what you heard on your customer calls.
Share the resulting customer profile across the entire company and make sure it gets updated frequently.
Step 4. Map the Customer Experience Lifecycle
The customer experience lifecycle outlines the various phases of the customer’s relationship with your company.
This map will allow you to customize your interactions with customers depending on where they are in their lifecycle.
Let’s check the stages of a SaaS customer lifecycle:
- Acquisition.
Is marketing targeting the right type of prospects?
Does Sales close customers who can derive value from our product?
- Engagement.
Do we have a clear product owner within the customer’s organization?
Are the people and systems we’re working able to drive success?
Does user activity indicate they will remain engaged with our product long-term?
- Retention.
Are customers achieving their goals and objectives?
Can we demonstrate value?
Do features that we release enhance value?
Are customers growing and expanding their usage?
What’s our NPS?
Step 5. Connect the elements of successful customers to data
Product usage is a key component in both the Engagement and Retention stages of a SaaS customer lifecycle.
Through your initial conversations with customers, you collected examples of how they use your product; but how do the workflows and implementations your customers described translate into product and feature usage?
Moreover, how do you know which characteristics and behaviors lead to a successful customer?
By linking anecdotal success indicators to cold hard data. This will allow you to drive value systematically and at scale.
How?
- Recognize which users need additional training or education.
If for instance, a customer says they use your product to message their users; but when you check their usage data, you see they haven’t used new features that allow them to send messages with richer content and more easily segment their user base.
That customer needs additional training.
- Provide better feedback to prioritize the right features.
If a user only logs in once a month to export the data in your system to a separate reporting software.; you need to let him know what features would allow them to run these reports in your product.
- Identify customers who aren’t seeing value and might churn.
For instance, when a customer with an average of 3 active users per week has been inactive for a week; and this customer also used your reporting export feature 5 times in the past month, it might be a signal about him considering moving to a new product.
The previous examples demonstrate that the first step towards implementing a data-driven approach to Customer Success is figuring out what data you need to track in the first place.
However, this data is only meaningful if it helps drive customer value, therefore it’s worth spending some time considering what data will be most relevant for your product and customer base, so you can accomplish customer success.
Step 6. Count with the right tools to help you scale
An effective Customer Success product should leverage usage and behavioral data that enable your team to move towards proactive customer engagement.
Freshsuccess is a customer success software that helps customer success teams get ahead of customer risks and boost their expansion and advocacy efforts.
Wihth Freshsuccess you can gain more visibility into your customers and quickly see account health, support tickets, billing history, communications, and user engagement.
At Gb Advisors we offer you much more than the product you are purchasing. We have a professional team that will be in charge of training your staff and giving you all the help and support you need.
Trust our specialized technicians and project managers who will deliver the product ready to use, following an efficient methodology with defined times.
The software implementation project is an exclusive service from Gb Advisors that you won’t find anywhere else.
Contact us for more information.
