To achieve success a company needs exceptional sales and marketing to achieve results. However, with the advancement of digital, where customers have more and more endless options, only sales and marketing are not enough to sustain growth. This is where the customer success, or “customer success” comes in.
Companies cannot rely on annual contracts only to ensure profits and retain customers. Not to mention the cost of acquiring customers has steadily increased over the last decade.
So the question that is asked is: what more can companies do to achieve success today? The answer: investing in customer success, after-sales strategy, which if well structured and applied can be the differential to stand out in the market and above all, to keep the conquered customers and businesses longer.
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Understanding the Customer Success
Customer success can be explained as any effort made by a company to help its customers succeed more, both with their product and more generally.
Customer success teams take a proactive and data-based approach to help customers use a product more effectively.
This approach helps businesses achieve a number of higher-level targets, including:
- Increase in sales and renewal revenues
- Inspiring customer loyalty and retention
- Reduce turnover
By ensuring customers achieve success with a product or service, customer success increases the likelihood that customers will remain close by, forming part of the portfolio.
For SaaS and other subscription-based businesses, this is a vital component of the growing monthly recurring revenue, which is covered by the acronym MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue).
Difference between customer success and customer support
Don't ever confuse both. In a way, the customer's success is better defined in relation to what is not. Customer success is not the same as customer support or service. Although there are a number of differences between the two, the biggest difference is this:
- Customer support is reactive
- Customer success is proactive
According to Hubspot's definition, market-leading digital marketing tool, “Customer success is to anticipate customer challenges or questions and provide solutions and answers proactively. Customer success helps increase customer happiness and retention, thus increasing your revenue and loyalty.”
The idea of your customer succeeding in using your product or service is simple to understand. To conceptualize it as it is being used today, we must look at the birth of modern cloud computing.
Why is customer success important?
As mentioned above, one of the factors that drive customer success is the growth of SaaS and subscription-based business models.
Instead of selling large single businesses to customers, companies sell monthly subscriptions. They need to be able to justify the renewal every month, and this requires an emphasis on helping the customer see the value and success of his product.
But customer success is universally beneficial for all companies – not just for SaaS's business.
Data shows that for each customer who comes in contact with the support of a company, 26 customers with problems do not contact. These are all the customers a company can lose if the problem is not solved. And the research also shows that 91% of those who do not complain simply shut down.
By proactively eliminating potential customer problems and proactively correcting those that arise, customer success offers your business a better chance of retaining the other 26 customers.
When done effectively, customer success can reduce turnover, improve retention and renewals and generate revenue. For today's companies, these are vital goals.
How to build a customer success team
Like any new function, much depends on building a customer success team from scratch. It can take a good amount of time and budget to make it work. However, this does not mean that the customer's success is beyond the reach of smaller companies.
In this sense, it is important to highlight two factors:
1. If your scarcer features are time or experience (or both), you can choose to hire an experienced customer success manager and fill in a complete customer success team to support them.
2. If your most scarce resource is finance, you can start by bringing together members of your product, sales and support teams to collaborate, focusing on improving customer success.
Anyway, building a successful customer team starts and ends with the commitment to put customers first and do everything you can to ensure that they succeed with their product.
Best Customer Success Practices
Regardless of the size or scope of the customer's successful operation, I suggest applying some recommended practices that can help ensure that you get the benefits of customer success. Follow me:
Face customer success as a goal and priority
Whether you have a team dedicated to customer success or not, it is important to emphasize customer help throughout the organization. From sales and marketing to product, from senior leadership down, customer success should be a goal and a priority for each member of your team.
Emphasize customer success from the beginning
Customer success must be an effort by the entire company, which means that the prioritization of customers and their needs must be incorporated into the culture of the organization.
The easiest way to make this happen is to start early, from the start of your business. As the saying goes, the best time to start was yesterday – the second best time is now.
Find out what success means to your customers
We talk a lot about “success”, but what does it really matter? Effective customer success teams allow customers to tell them what success is like. Success with your product will look different to different customers, so it's important to let the definition lead.
Success, as defined by the customer, should be the goal of the customer's success team – not success as defined by your company. It may seem confusing at first, but when it is well structured, it becomes understandable through the results that have been achieved.
Prepare customers for successful proactive integration
The role of customer success begins the moment someone becomes a customer. Proactive and high-contact customer integration ensures that these new customers start on the right foot, understanding that your company wants the best for it.
This covers setting up the product to better meet your needs, learning how to use the resources you need and becoming more familiar with the use of the product in a more general way.
A little extra help during the onboarding or integration process can help eliminate many potential problems that will never reach the customer support team in the future. Here again the word “proactivity” makes perfect sense.
Monitor customer metrics and share data between teams
As mentioned, customer success is a data-based goal. This is true of dedicated customer success teams and other teams in the organization.
Effectively prioritizing and sponsoring customer success is all about tracking the correct metrics and sharing that data between teams. Here are some key customer success metrics worth tracking:
- Value of customer life
- Repeated purchase rate
- Customer retention rate
- Customer retention cost
- Turn rate
- Net Promoter Score
- Customer satisfaction score
- Customer effort score
Keep an eye on the customer feedback
Customer success is not a unique project that is transported from one customer to another. It is an enterprise that requires constant updating and improvement to better meet each case and follow up a constantly changing product.
Create a cycle in the company that continually brings real customer feedback, being a way to keep track of these changes and ensure that you can remain proactive for a long term.
Set and identify the client's red alerts
When you analyze customer data, there are usually warning signs that indicate that a customer is having problems with their product. It is the work of the customer success team to identify these warning signals and find a way to put customers in trouble back on the path of success proactively.
Your system must be configured to signal these indicators to customer success managers for approach. From there, they can work directly with the customer and rectify any problems, crashes, provide any education or help needed, etc.
Conclusion
If it's to highlight a key phrase in the context of what you've read so far is: Help your customers succeed, always!
There is no other way: the most successful companies prioritize helping their customers succeed.
With the growth of subscription-based business models and a broader cultural emphasis on putting customers first, all companies or businesses can benefit from implementing a customer success program.
Whether large or small, a customer success team can have a decisive impact on customer loyalty, turnover, revenue and more.
Forget the after-sales. Proactive customer success is what makes the difference between entering the game and winning the match, in front of its competitors.
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