Customer success screams credibility. If your business relies on collecting regular payment from existing customers this is something you should consider implementing, if you’re not already.
Customer churn is costing businesses more than $1.6 trillion per year. Now, that’s a fairly big amount not to be concerned about.
The risk that churn poses to business who use recurring revenue models have started focusing on customer success as a way to reduce churn.
Through the customer success strategy, companies are able to retain a high number of customers.
What Is Customer Success?
Customer success is a long term professionally directed strategy for maximizing customer and company value.
It is also about creating valuable relationships and understanding your customers’ needs to achieve their goals.
To ensure that your customers achieve their desired outcome through their interaction with your business, you need to actively work towards a customer success strategy.
Following the rise of digital businesses, customer success has evolved itself.
But despite the rise, less than 20% of the companies have actually implemented it effectively to manage their customers, with many struggling to achieve their customer-centric goals.
How Customer Success Is Different From Customer Support?
One of the first questions which cross everyone’s mind while talking about customer success is whether it is the same as customer support.
It’s misunderstood that both of these serve the same purpose, but in reality, customer success serves a totally different purpose.
Customer support is more of a reactive process and customer success is on the proactive side.
Even though the customer success vs customer support debate has been on for so long, both play critical roles within the customer relationship cycle.
Customer service is when you have people employed for the purpose of solving your customers’ queries.
They are reactive problem solvers. They solve customer problems via email or call, by whichever means the customer wants.
Customer success, on the other hand, is used to empower customers to get the best possible use out of your product or service.
This could include training and providing them with free demos to set them up correctly from the start.
| Customer Support | Customer Success |
| Reactive process | Proactive process |
| Provides customer satisfaction | Provides value to the customer |
| Solves each problem separately | Helps customers through their entire customer life cycle |
| Single-focused | Multi-focused |
Customer Success Strategy Framework
Customer success management has evolved over the past decade. It should be practiced throughout your organization but you’re going to need a dedicated team for a successful customer success strategy.
Some teams will focus on customer retention and renewals and some will focus on up-selling and cross-selling.
But both of these strategies require a proactive approach to build meaningful relationships with customers.
A lead management system helps you in the segregation of customers that further helps in strengthening the customer success strategy.
So how to work in a customer strategy framework?
Customer Success Team
You would need a team of people that help you in retaining customers or cross-sell and up-sell.
Those are the people who build customer loyalty by providing them solutions that help customers to get the best out of your product or service.
Customer Success Solution
It’s difficult to run an effective customer success program without some kind of tool or software to help you measure customer interactions.
An integrated CRM platform helps you in identifying opportunities for growth and keeps all your customer interactions organized.
Customer Success Strategy
The process of customer success strategy will go like:
→ Identifying your customers’ goals.
→ A roadmap for specific objectives.
→ Make your team understand the roadmap.
→ Track the result using an integrated platform.
Major Benefits of Customer Success
Setting the right expectations for the right customers during the sales cycle is crucial.
Customer success helps in managing and maximizing opportunities in the sales process.
Here are the major benefits of customer success that help your business.
Product or Service Adoption
It is important for your entire customer success strategy. If you get it right, your customers will be using your product or service properly and for a long time.
To successfully make your customers adopt you should help them implement the solution in their organization and track how often they used it.
Check-in with them to identify possible problems they are facing and help them make the most of your product.
Customer Retention
Customer success helps your customers to realize there’s more value in your product or service.
This leads to increased renewal rates and longer customer tenures. This in turn increases the customer retention rate.
Building ongoing relationships with customers is important to ensure that there’s minimal customer churn rate.
It's also important to use CSP software to keep track of customer interactions across different touchpoints, allowing you to personalize your communication and address their needs effectively.
Offer timely support and constant assistance of your customer success team.
Business Expansion
If your customers are in a good position and satisfied with your product or service, they would help in the expansion of your business.
70-90% of a customer’s lifetime value is generated via renewals, up-sells, and cross-sells.
Some of the happy customers would also like to upgrade their existing packages, which directly helps your business to expand.
Customer Acquisition
An effective customer success strategy turns your customers into marketing your product or service.
They would be willing to recommend your product, refer customers, and provide testimonials.
The word-of-mouth marketing works wonders. Accelerate acquisition validity, grow market share, and open doors to new market development with an effective customer success strategy.
Improved Business Operations
With an integrated platform, you have the chance to improve business operations with your customer success strategy.
It helps you with recurring revenue predictability and capacity planning. Therefore you need to constantly communicate with them to ensure that happens.
An IVR service will help you to communicate with your customers effectively and track incoming and outgoing business calls.
Company’s Success Depends on Customer Success
Your customer success strategy hugely depends on your communication strategy as well.
The process you use to demonstrate your product or service to the customer plays a vital role in driving the company’s success.
Customer success gives you a great opportunity to come out victorious from all your competitors. It should be something that your whole organization should embrace.
Although a special team could do so much more in terms of creating a strategy and building it.
It’s time that you add value to your customer at every stage of their journey with your customer success strategy.
