The Art of Customer Success

Irrespective of the product your company has, customer success plays a cardinal role in the company’s growth. Make sure your customers are successful and they will make sure you’re successful. It’s a win-win!

“If you think client obsession is too extreme for you, too bad. Because you’ll be beaten by the competitor who embraces it.”

Gone are the days of traditional software as a stand-alone tool, with its historically complicated tactical methods. The emerging role of Customer Success Management is about a solution to the issues of technology, customer portfolio development, retention and expansion.

At its core, customer success is ensuring that your customers achieve their desired outcome through interactions with your company. – Tweet this.

How We Drive Customer Success At OnlineSales.ai?

We have adopted some programs in order to proactively manage customer relationship:

1. Customer Acquisition: “Customer Success starts with acquiring the right customers.”
   If you do not have product market fit, service, support infrastructure, or even company culture, you may not have successful customers. Understand who your ideal customers are and proactively seek others just like them.

2. Customer On-Boarding: The way you communicate with your client within the first few days of them being onboarded can have a huge impact on how they will contribute to your success by referring others and eventually stay with you in the long run.

Try adopting these 3 brilliantly effective steps that we follow at OnlineSales.ai:

• Deliver what you promise: Never leave your clients hanging with the thought “when will I get what was promised to me?”. This mere feeling of dejection might sprout sense of doubt about your services. Make sure whatever has been promised during the time of sales, is conveyed to your clients and make sure they understand it. Send them thank you emails and give specific timelines on how and what would be delivered.

• Build personal connections: “Words cannot express how much we love having you with us.”
  You feel exulted whenever a new member joins the family. Give your customers a personal phone call welcoming them as a member, giving some tips how to use the product & asking them how they would like to get started. Develops a personal relationship with your clients and make them feel pampered. Right after this personal interaction, you may also want to ship a “welcome kit” as a token of your appreciation. It works wonders and helps build a warm personal connection with your clients.

• Clients love surprises: Your clients never expect free credits for just interacting with your products or rating your services. You can vow them by providing some extra credits for every interactive session they have with you. Our clients completely love it when they earn a couple of extra credits just for liking our Facebook/ Twitter page as well.

3. Customer engagement: “This is a critical phase of the customer lifecycle…either you engage them here or lose them forever.” If the post-sales customer experience isn’t as phenomenal as it is during customer acquisition, you are leaving the very same door that you walked through, wide open for your customers to walk right out. This is an opportunity you’ll have with your customer – to manage their expectations and start building customer loyalty.

We have built the foundation of customer engagement based on:

• Getting a 360-degree view of our customer: including their CRM usage, billing, support query, services, campaign, advocacy and customer satisfaction data
• Incorporating early warning systems – intelligent alerts based on customer data as well as predictive analytics that calculate the customer health and ensure that client issues are resolved at the first level itself
• The program and process for managing and resolving at-risk accounts, which includes auto-raised tickets to our respective internal teams for proper resolution
• The customer feedback loop consists of a Net Promoter Score (NPS), customer delight surveys, creating and monitoring the customer health. After all, constructive feedback always adds to improvement of the process
• Providing technical and functional support to our customers via the LeadManager App. It instantly notifies them of existing and new customer calls and website inquiries and thus helps them keep track of all their leads. We make sure that our customers are engaging through App (not just evaluating it during the trial).

As we’re inundated with new products and apps, it’s increasingly difficult to capture consumers’ attention. But if you can make your product habitual, they’ll continue to use your product, regardless (now you know why Facebook is this addictive).

“Customer Engagement” is the period where you monitor the heartbeat of the customer in a way that’s powered by technology, but involves a good amount of human interactions. So, try and make the most of this period to get better .

4. Maximizing Revenue: Customer Success organizations play a significant role in retaining and expanding revenue. Adopt an “always be renewing” mindset. To avoid any surprise at the time of renewal make sure the following questions have been answered in your favor:

• Was the customer on-boarded properly?
•  Were there any issues in deploying the product?
•  Are there any open tickets that could impact the renewal conversation?
•  Have there been significant changes to the organization chart? If so, how well have we built relationships up and down the organization chart to withstand these changes?

And in case any of the answers raise a sense of concern, figure out the blockage at every touch-point and fix them so that triggering renewal is not grueling.

Repeating myself- “If the customer is successful, the business will be successful.”

Customer success is great for a lot of reasons, but one of its biggest benefits is that it provides a very clear view into the health of the company. If your customers are extracting value from your product or services, then you’ll extract value from them. It’s a very cyclical and mutually beneficial process.

So, go beyond account sponsors to understand your customers like never before. Integrate usage data with marketing automation tools to increase adoption, build your base of advocates, and ultimately improve your overall customer experience.