Customer Success- Definition, Importance & Benefits

Look at your manpower and check how many of them have the responsibility of getting happy customers. Don’t be surprised if you find each one of them falling into the same category.  

Your sales team gets new customers for you, the customer service team is there to help and assist them, and the development team works on making new product offerings to wow them. By now, you must have understood the most crucial objective of your company, which is customer success. 

Though you are doing many things to woo customers, still you find that most of them are not happy. As per SurveyMonkey, more than 75% of companies say that they have kept customer satisfaction as their priority. But according to 81% of consumers, companies are more concerned about making money.  As a business owner, you must be thinking that your customers are satisfied but they are not actually. The same customers are feeling neglected. So, to deal with such issues, let’s understand first what customer success actually is and define a proper strategy for your business.

What Customer Success is All About?

As per old-school marketing models, a successful customer is someone who buys the product and does not have any complaints. But the true definition of customer success will be knowing what your consumers want even when they don’t say or complain about anything. 

To make it simpler, let’s say customer success is an initiative that you will take to make your customers successful in two important areas-with the products and their business operations. 

Managing the whole customer success area is quite tough. To make your customers successful you need someone or maybe a team who will work for this wholeheartedly. Thus a dedicated team always takes a data-driven and proactive approach to help customers with the product or service in a more effective way. 

From, customer engagement to a renewal of the service, the customer success team should handle all these areas like a pro. This kind of realistic approach may help your business to achieve several important goals like

• Increased sales 
• Consumer loyalty and customer retention
• Reduced churn
• Increased Annual Recurring Revenue(ARR)

Why Customer Success is So Important?

As per Gartner 2017 marketing survey, all most two-thirds of all organizations say that the major driver for the competition is mostly the customer experience. As per them, within the next 2 years time, 81% of the companies will be competing mostly on the basis of the best customer experience. 

So, by now, you must have understood the importance of the customer success journey. If a customer gets successful with your product, he will promote and engage with your service even more. On the other hand, the more value you give to the customers the faster your company will grow. 

With great customer success, you are definitely going to get the best advocates for your company. Apart from that, customer success also leads to a reduction in churn rates. These two together will help you to retain customers and turn them into loyal ones. The equation is simple here- customer success is the direct path to company success. So take it very seriously.

The Whole Customer Success Journey

Let’s divide the whole life cycle of the customer journey into 4 different stages. These 4 stages show the different aspects of the customer, and how his opinion and understanding of your product gradually evolved. 

1. Onboarding
2. Adoption of your product
3. Escalations
4. Renewals

Each of these stages has some objective-based and result-driven initiatives to help you in building customer trust in business and overall engagement. Meeting these goals will help you to get some happy customers for your company. 

• Onboarding

It is a process of making aware your customer of your product offerings so that he can easily incorporate your service into his daily life. The quicker customers can finish this transition the faster they will get benefited from your service and start believing in you. 

Tips: Focus on developing onboarding materials and easy-to-use interfaces so that the transition is easier and faster. 

• Adoption of Your Product

This is the stage where the customers spend most of their time in the life cycle. It actually defines the customer’s usage of your service or product-the working life to be precise. This is the stage where the customer starts getting the ROI and achieving other business objectives. 

Tips: Ensure that your customer can easily use your product or service in his daily workflow. You can provide some user manuals or promotional materials to your customers that they can use in their businesses. 

• Escalation

Customers may face issues and definitely will escalate. Like other relationships, your relationship with customers also may face problems from time to time and it is completely normal. The crucial part here is how you will respond to it. The way you tackle such situations will create a direct and long-lasting impact on your relationship with the customers. 

Always try to give a personal touch to customer complaints and fix those as soon as possible. If you personally handle complaints, and from time to time inform them about the different stages of those escalations, trust me you will regain the love and trust of your customers.  

Tips: Be transparent with all the complaints and customer feedback. Personalize all your communication with them and remain kind and calm while handling the fussy customers. 

• Renewal

Renewal can be called the lifeblood of all the subscription or SAAS companies. Whether a customer wants to renew your service or not is completely based on his experience throughout the whole product journey. Don’t forget that customers remember each and every communication, engagement and experience with you, and all these together can work as the deciding factor for their likelihood to renew the agreements with your company. 

Tips: You need to personalize the renewal message by referring to the customer achievements and objectives, mentioning the growth opportunities in such a way that it looks convincing and compels the customers to renewals.  

How does the Whole Process of Customer Success Work?

So, are you ready to launch a great customer success enterprise? There are three major components you can lean on to make it effective. 

1. Choose the Best Customer Success Software to Monitor User Activities

To engage with your customers proactively, monitoring all the user activities and how your team is performing, you need to have an all-in-one customer success software. 

REVE Chat can be the best option for you. It lets your support team directly engage with the customers proactively for offering instant assistance. It helps you to make customers successful in their businesses and thus you can get a happy client base. They will love you, refer you to their friends, tell others about your company and offerings, in short, become the advocates. 

What is REVE Chat

It is an all-in-one customer service solution for your company. With REVE Chat you can monitor your customers on the website as well as a mobile application in real-time and track their activities like total time spent on your website, geographical location, viewed pages, etc to personalize your communication. 

You can also automate the whole customer service process through AI-based chatbots, thus eliminating the need for extra manpower. REVE Chat, being one of the best customer success software has several unique features to offer such as

• Live Chat, Voice, and Video Chat: Your customers can anytime initiate voice or video calls with your support team for any kind of assistance. 
• Proactive Chat:  Don’t wait for your customers to poke you for help. It will be great if you offer assistance proactively. REVE Chat helps your team members to initiate chat proactively with the customers and that too with a personalized welcome message.
• Co-Browsing: Here your customer can share the browser with the support team member and the agent can help him to solve the issues. It’s a great feature to look for.

REVE Chat’s Other Important Features:

• Reporting and analytics
• Department management
• Tags
• Canned responses
• Customization
• AI-based chatbots
• Chat transfers
• Offline messages
• Queuing
• Auto triggers
• Multi-channel customer support and many more

2. Train Your Customer Support Team

You need a team of members who can work on customer success. Your customer support team can definitely do the job for you. How much manpower you need will depend completely on how big your company is and other available resources. 

To make your support team steel strong, you need to arrange regular training programs. Monitoring is also important to ensure the quality of the support service and several monitoring and analytics tools like REVE Chat can help you out here. 

It lets you monitor the agent performance in real-time and provide all the required reports and analytics on login and logout time, total missed chats, number of chat transfers, canned responses, number of offline messages, and so on to get a clear picture of how your customer success department is working. 

3. Develop the Best Customer Success Strategy

Your customer success strategy may vary depending on what kind of products or services you are offering and what your customers need from the company. But there are some universal steps that you need to follow for developing an effective customer success strategy. Let’s discuss it! 

• Create a strong customer success team
• Add some useful customer success software for better efficiency and management
• Identify the end goals or objectives of customers
• Build a road map for customer success(short-term and long-term)
• Share the CS strategy with your team members and ensure that each one of them understands and follows the guidelines
• Analyze the outcomes through various reports and analytics

Difference Between Customer Success, Customer Experience, and Customer Support

Both customer success and customer experience are partially linked with each other. The basic difference between these two is customer success deals with the final outcomes (after the communication with your company, did the customers get their desired service?) and customer experience is all about dealing with customer sentiment (are they satisfied with the product offering?)

Here customer support manages both customer success and customer experience for your company. The customer support team helps your customers to resolve all the obstacles they may face in their businesses thus helping to achieve desired goals. It has the capability to turn a negative impression into the positive one. 

On the other hand, customer support also helps your consumers to get a good experience with your service and the company. The support team many times reaches out to the customers proactively to offer instant assistance much before they actually ask for it. It always creates a positive experience and they feel valuable and important to you. 

The result is- you will get happy, satisfied customers and a less churn rate. Increased customer retention will also directly impact increased sales revenues. 

How to Get Started with Customer Success?

No matter how big or small your company is, there are a bunch of initiatives that you can take to make your customers successful. Let’s discuss it!

• Make Customer Success the Objective of Your Company

You may not have a dedicated team to take care of customer success, but make it a point that everyone in your company should emphasize helping customers to succeed. From the sales, development, and marketing team to the support department, customer success should be a goal for each one of them.

So, educate your employees about customer success, its values, and how it can be beneficial for both customers and your company. 

Your development team, for example, may look into the consumer health score and future expansion of usage, whereas the sales team may look into the total number of existing customers and what value they are adding to your company. But the prime motto of each one of them should be seeing your customers to be successful.  

• Understand What Your Customers Mean By Customer Success

We are talking so much about CS but never ask the customers directly about what it actually means to them. Let them come and tell you what they expect. Success with your service means something to you but it may be different for different customers. So, it’s important to understand the real definition of customer success from the customers only.

The best way to understand this will be to monitor and understand what the customers are actually doing with your service or you can say how they are using the product for their success. You should define customer success as per your customers not as you expect it to be.

• Help Customers with Proactive Onboarding

The customer success journey starts when a person becomes your customer. Proactive onboarding helps the customer to start on the right note which includes setting up or installation of the product to best serve his needs, learning about all the important features, and getting accustomed to the service. 

If you hold his hand during this onboarding process, it will be much easier for the customer. It may not be possible all the time though but you should provide some user manual to help him. You can offer in-app, free trials or some checklist style onboarding, video call assistance to kick start the process. Paying customers always should get more personalized assistance compared to those who are using the free trials. 

• Track Customer Metrics and Share Them with Your Teams

As you are emphasizing and sponsoring customer success, you also need to look into all the key metrics and share the data across different teams. These reports will help them to understand how they are going and other areas of improvement. Here are some of the key metrics worth mentioning:

1. Customer retention rate and cost
2. Customer health score
3. Customer effort score
4. Customer satisfaction score
5. Churn rate
6. Repeat purchase rate
7. Net promoter score
8. Customer lifetime value

• Opt for Customer Feedback

Customer success is not like a one-time venture that you can carry forward from one customer to the other. You need to update it regularly for keeping up with the customers. But if you don’t know what your customers think about you and the products they have been using, how will you make them happy, and work on further improvements for the service?

Here comes the need for customer feedback. After every communication, ask customers for insights on how the team is serving them. It could be about your products, the customer experiences your organization is offering, or even their association with the customer service manager. 

Asking for customer feedback regularly will make them feel important and comfortable with your company. Also, you can constantly update your CS strategy. 

• Identify the Warning Signs

If you go through the customer success metrics, you will find some red flags showing some customers are actually facing issues with the service. The most important job of your CS department is to find out these warning signs and take the necessary initiatives as soon as possible. They need to engage with those customers proactively and help them to get back on the right trail. 

The best will be taking the help of your customer support department. They can engage with struggling customers and offer instant assistance. Apart from that, sentiment analysis can also help to automatically notify the support team of any such issue. The sooner you find out the negative indicators the faster you can resolve those issues, thus providing a better customer experience. 

Role of a Customer Success Manager

Once you get a customer, you make think that the tough job is over but in reality, winning the heart of a customer is much more complicated, and it’s only the beginning. Once your customer buys a product or service, you need to keep on showing that your product is adding value to his life and he is getting benefits. This is where the customer success manager comes into the picture. This is also the reason why businesses look into the merit of customer success manager vs account manager as both are key roles for the business. 

Let’s look into the key responsibilities of a CS manager:

• Managing a long-term relationship with the customers
• Product and brand promotion
• Understand customer needs
• Making the customers believe in your brand
• Customer loyalty promotion
• Encourage customers to renewals
• Brings in new customers
• Develop and update customer success strategies
• Addressing escalations
• Gathering customer feedback

Customer Success can be the Key to Your Success

Because of the rise in subscription-based models and broader emphasis on making the customers priority, you can actually get benefited from different CS programs. If you think about their happiness and success then they will also think about you. By providing customers the best experience and assistance to reach their success, you can get some happy and loyal customers. A good customer success program with help you to build a long-term relationship with those people you care the most-the customers. 

REVE Chat offers a great platform for effective communication and customer success. Want to give it a try? Start your FREE TRIAL today!