Customer success is a complex subject since customers have more options than ever. While you may have an outstanding sales and marketing team, it’s not leading to long-term growth and success. Success is one of the most important concepts in business. In this guide, you’ll understand what success is and how to master it.
What is Customer Success?
Success helps customers achieve success through a product or service. They work directly with your marketing, product development, and sales teams to achieve this goal. Similar to sales and marketing, success involves a team effort. It also involves cross-sells, upsells, and word-of-mouth advertising to achieve those outcomes.
Success is most closely aligned to your customer support team. Their goal is to increase customer satisfaction and to maintain it. Since customer support address concerns, issues, requests, and questions over e-mail, live chat, phone, and social media, a success team is focused on working with customers throughout the buyer’s journey. This helps you increase the value of your products or services.
How to Master Success?
Remember that each customer is different. They will have different goals and expectations with your products or services. You should keep these expectations in mind for what you want them to achieve. By understanding your customers and improving the customer experience, you can achieve success. Here are six ways to master success.
1. Brand Awareness
Creating your buyer personas is the first step to encouraging brand awareness. Even if you don’t have these profiles in mind, your success strategy can help you create and promote content that’s relevant to your customers. Sixty-nine percent of B2B buyers agree that content that reflects their company is the most influential aspect of their website. No matter what products or services you’re selling, you need to create a strong base for success.
This is a good time to take a good look at your branding, content, images, etc. Make sure that they speak to your business and industry. If you feel that your marketing materials are all over the place, then it’s time to rethink your marketing efforts. Consider your customer profiles and target buyer personas when improving your brand awareness.
2. Customer Acquisition
Your sales team has control when it comes to customer acquisition. It’s up to them to move the customers along the sales funnel. From the moment that they close a deal and become a customer, they’ll expect that same level of service. That’s why your sales team should continue to build a relationship with your customers.
Discovery calls are one way to keep your customers engaged with your brand. This allows your sales team to learn more about their needs and to discuss how your products or services work. Most customers leave the business after they make a purchase. That’s why it’s so important for your marketing, operations, product development, and sales teams to work together towards a goal.
3. Guided Onboarding
Do you have an onboarding plan in place? If so, then you’re halfway to improving success. If not, then you’ll need to focus on those details. Onboarding is the most important stage for every company since there are so many things that can go wrong.
To ensure a smooth transition from acquisition to onboarding is to get everyone involved through each aspect of the sales process. It also keeps your sales team actively involved in each stage of the process. When your customer feels good about using your product or service, they’ll spend more time with your account manager and sales team. It’s a common practice for most businesses to spend most of their time discussing features and prices with customers during the onboarding process.
4. Value Realization
This is the stage when your customers realize they love your product or service. It’s also important that you have a greater understanding of their desires and expectations. You should assign a person who checks in with them on a regular basis to ensure those expectations and outcomes are being achieved. Your company should ensure that your customer receives the value of your product or service.
5. Customer Support
Since you can’t always hold their hand, you should provide them with accessible customer support. How you help your customers overcome roadblocks will be a determining factor in success. Your customer support team should be readily available to address questions and concerns. You can also implement customer service tools and self-service support options that allow customers to find answers to questions on their own.
6. Customer Loyalty
Customer loyalty means that your customers wouldn’t consider choosing another business or service. Most loyal customers offer a referral, review or testimonial. Once you’ve developed customer loyalty, you need to maintain it. This is a good time to meet with your customer service, marketing, and sales team and come up with a plan to identify a time to reach out to customers. Maybe you’ll want to create e-mail templates that you can use for various situations.
