adminRobert Gonye
The future of customer success is as a growth engine. It’s critical for companies to view it as a differentiator rather than a risk management tool,
Customer success is an organisational function that helps customers get maximum value out of a product or service, while working closely with sales, marketing, and product to achieve that goal. Like sales and marketing, it is a revenue-generation team. Customer success provides proactive outreach aimed at increasing upsells and cross-sells, positive word-of-mouth, and successful outcomes for customers.
Most teams measure overall success based on individuals’ success.
But when it comes to customer service, customer support, and customer success, businesses shouldn’t give in to the ease of only measuring success as the outputs of the team. These numbers, like CSAT score, support rep NPS, and the number of cases resolved, are important numbers to measure, but they don’t always tell the full story.
Customer success is the next growth engine for businesses. Marketing and sales best practices are well-understood and recognised by most businesses as engines for growth, it is also important to tackle the next border. Investing in your customers’ success will grow your business as quickly as sales and marketing. If as business leaders we think of our customer service teams as a cost centre, we miss the growth mind set.
Making customers more successful is a key element for growing companies which are more likely to prioritise customer success than companies with stagnating revenues.
Customer success is an investment in your business growth not a cost-centre. Customer success helps you engage and guide customers to help them grow into happy power users, and these satisfied advocates will recommend your brand and help grow your business as fast as sales and marketing.
Furthermore are also more likely to prioritise running the business in a cost-efficient way than businesses that were stagnating: We are entering the era of “customer success 2.0” — wherein businesses are focusing and investing in customer success as a way to achieve growth, and not just as a way to prevent customers from churning.
How do you help your customers for the success of the business?
- Invest in a customer service programme
Dedicating time, energy, and resources to building and growing a customer service program is the first step to tapping into your customers as a growth engine.
This means spending time and energy conducting strategic planning and goal-setting, and perhaps most importantly, procuring headcount and budgetary resources to build and scale a team with top talent and innovative technology to support the mission of the customer service programme.
As already mentioned — by investing in a strong customer service programme, you can effectively address and resolve customer issues, offer proactive support and suggestions for achieving goals faster with your products and services, and eventually, by helping your customers succeed and tapping into your happy customers and loyal advocates to serve as customer raving fans through testimonials, and create user-generated content that helps bring in new customers.
- Prioritise training and retaining excellent employees
Talent can make or break a customer service programme because skilled customer support talent is sparse, and because many companies are unsure of what skills are needed to be successful in such a new and evolving space. They suggest building a talent engine focused on analysing and learning from top-performing customer success managers (CSMs) to develop a training and education program that gives reps time in their schedules to attend classes and trainings to help them specialise and grow in their careers. However, most companies have some work to do on this front in as far as prioritising the retention of customer support reps.
Investing in specialised training and education for CSMs and customer support reps is critical to building a talented team and minimising employee attrition which is another area growing companies prioritise more than stagnating ones. A common reason for this lack of enthusiasm for career growth in customer success could easily centre on feeling disempowered in their role, a lack of clarity on career paths and opportunities, not feeling valued within the company as a whole — which is where Step Three comes in.
- Make customer success a team sport
SFTC or, “solve for the customer”. It shouldn’t surprise you to know that SFTC doesn’t just apply to customer support reps and Customer Success Managers — it’s a guiding principle for every single employee and team at the company.
That’s because every employee, team, and asset contributes to our customer experience and whether it’s a good one or a bad one. The growth of inbound marketing in the form of social media now means that your customer’s first interaction with your company isn’t a sales rep anymore. It’s more likely to be a post, a Facebook update, a Twitter poll, or a content offer. Before they jump on the phone, they will more likely chat live with a sales rep, or send a reply to an Instagram Story.
That means that, in order to reap the benefits of improving customer success, organisations need to get everyone on board from the top, down. It’s about more than one function of one team, it’s an evolving business philosophy that’s re-setting the standard for providing an exceptional customer experience, from the first interaction to months after closing a sale.
As a growing company it is important to prioritise making customers happy than stagnating companies. Focus on customer happiness and experience as your guiding light for deciding how to scale your customer success program, and solicit and use customer feedback and loyalty data to figure out what’s working, what’s not, and how to adjust course to make the journey more exciting.
The views given herein are solely for information purposes; they are guidelines and suggestions and are not guaranteed to work in any particular way.
Robert Gonye is a Business Growth Expert and Influencer. He writes in his personal capacity. Comments and views: [email protected]
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