Customer success is a huge factor when it comes to business success. You cannot have one without the other. Like other aspects of your business, effective customer success does not come without effort, time, and dedication. 

But what exactly is customer success? Why is it so important? What should the customer support team be doing? How can your business implement useful customer success strategies?

Read on as we guide you through the answers to all things customer success.

What Is Customer Success?

Customer success is the act of providing your customer base with productive answers, efficient solutions, and positive experiences. When a customer chooses your business, their experience is everything. Customer success refers to ensuring that each customer feels supported during interactions with your business. 

Why Is Customer Success Critical?

Customer success is critical for any business but even more important for small businesses. Small businesses rely on positive customer experience, reviews, and referrals to optimize the retention and acquisition of new customers.

Customers who have a positive experience with your business are more likely to spread the word. They are also more likely to return themselves.

Having strong and consistent customer success strategies are essential to business success. 

Five Essential Duties for Customer Success Teams

Whether you have a business that allows for an entire customer success department with customer success managers (CSMS) or a business of just one person, your customer relationship management (CRM) must keep the customer in mind.

Read on for the five essential duties that every customer success team must practice. 

1. Communication 
2. Monitoring 
3. Onboarding Clients
4. Providing Customer Insights to Product or Service Teams
5. Renewals

Communication 

Communication is key! Without communication, businesses fall apart. When it comes to effective customer success, communication is a two-part duty.

Internal Communication

What a business practices behind the scenes is just as important as what they do on stage. Internal communication must be throughout the team to promote filling customer needs.

When creating a communication structure for the customer success team, consider:

• What method or platform should teammates use to communicate?
• How should teammates collect and share customer information?
• How can teammates use customer data and KPIs to enhance personal performance?

Client Communication

When your team members communicate with clients, they should do so consistently. This will help build your brand and create a consistent feel for the customer. 

When creating a communication structure for client communication, consider:

• Is there a script you want teammates to follow during customer communication?
• What parts of client communication can be handled through automation using customer success software?
• How can the business’s desired outcome align with the client?

Monitoring 

Monitoring refers to keeping an eye on the things that matter regarding customer success. Items to monitor are:

• Customer retention and churn: a metric that shows how many customers continue or end subscription or use of business
• Customer health score: a metric that shows growth, renewals, upsells, results of surveys, and feedback
• Product usage: data that shows how and how often customers engage with your product and business

Onboarding Clients

When you acquire a new client, there must be a process by which they get to know your business. Consider implementing touches like:

• A welcome email
• Step-by-step set-up instructions with interactive how-tos
• Resource section
• Check-in emails

Providing Customer Insights to Product or Service Teams

Providing customer insights to the product teams is an aspect of internal communication. For a business to run smoothly, there must be interdepartmental communication. Customer success teams are closest to the customer success metrics and should share useful insights with the product and service teams to make necessary improvements. 

Renewals

Customer retention is a huge part of business success. Being able to reduce churn and optimize renewals is a central factor when it comes to progress. Strategies to encourage renewals include:

• Build customer relationships and trust
• Engage and help customers through product personalization
• Leverage data
• Track customer lifetime value and customer lifecycle

Six Pro-Tips To Support Customer Success

1. Create a Customer Feedback Loop
2. Focus on Customer Success Early
3. Identify and Track Red Flags
4. Proactive Onboarding
5. Track Key Metrics
6. Understanding How Clients Define Success

Create a Customer Feedback Loop

For your business to remain in touch with its customers, you must know what your customer likes and dislikes. This is where a customer feedback loop comes in. Customer feedback loops should include:

• Customer feedback surveys, case studies, or phone interviews (with incentives, if possible)
• Reliable survey distribution method
• Survey documentation and results analysis
• Make constructive changes based on survey results

Focus on Customer Success Early

Customer success evaluation is always useful, but it is of the utmost importance for a new business. When you put your heart and soul into your business, it can sometimes be difficult to see outside your every day. But utilize your customer base as a resource to grow your business and work out the kinks early on.

Identify and Track Red Flags

Part of being a successful business owner is identifying weaknesses and red flags. Red flags can come from employees, processes, operations, or product bugs. Identifying these as early as possible is important to make corrections and keep professional services positive for your customers. 

Proactive Onboarding

Onboarding employees is just as important as customer onboarding. Providing a proper onboarding process for support team members ensures competency and consistency and helps eliminate reactive situations like miscommunications throughout your business. 

When onboarding, consider:

• What materials and resources do your employees need
• Clear chain-of-command
• Useful and relevant training
• Regular check-ins to promote support

Track Key Metrics

When it comes to metrics, there are countless aspects you could focus on. But when it comes to customer success, key performance metrics (KPIs) to focus on can help improve customer success.

1. Customer lifetime value: the amount of profitability expected during the customer journey
2. Repeat purchasers and customer retention: customers who decide to give you their business more than once and stay with your business
3. Customer churn rate: the number of customers lost over some time
4. Customer satisfaction score: how customers rate your company (gathered in surveys)
5. Net promoter score (NPS): tracks customer loyalty to your business

Understanding How Clients Define Success

Clients define success by whether or not they are happy with the outcome of their experience. If customers feel they have been helped, supported, and respected, their experience was successful. Customers will always remember how a business makes them feel.

From quality of products to quality of interactions, customers always want to be treated like they matter. 

Conclusion

Customer success is what drives businesses forward. Without customers, businesses cannot succeed. It is vital to have initiatives and prioritize quality control in this department.

As you work to build an effective customer success program into your business model, remember:

1. Customers value positivity and efficiency
2. Internal and client communication is key
3. Create and maintain a check and balance system to ensure your business is providing top-tier customer support
   
   

Source:

How to Calculate Customer Churn Rate and Revenue Churn Rate | Salesforce.com

How Do I Create Customer Feedback Loops? | Small Business Chronicle

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs): Definition and Examples | Indeed.com