But what, exactly, do you need to know about each type of customer?

Look beyond buyer personas

Buyer personas are commonly used to describe the types of people who are likely to buy from you. The problem is, personas are primarily a selling tool—so they aren’t designed to be useful after the initial sale. They don’t offer the right insights to help improve the customer experience, build loyalty, or provide the right support at the right time.

For that, you need to understand customers on a different level—their relationship to your company or product, their buying behaviors and motivations, and what makes them happy. While every customer is different, they often share certain characteristics that can help us group them into broad categories that we call types of customers.

Here are six of the most common types of customers, along with recommendations for meeting their unique needs.

6 common types of customers

1. New customers

New customers are those who have just joined your customer base for the first time. When a new customer makes their first purchase, they tend to be more engaged and more receptive to your message than at any other time in the customer relationship. So be sure to make the most of every touch point.

First-time buyers have some unique needs, but they also present unique opportunities. This “honeymoon period” is your best chance to reinforce the purchase decision, build loyalty, and set the stage for repeat business. 

How to embrace new customers:

• Welcome them properly. A well-crafted welcome email (or email series) can help new customers feel appreciated, provide important product information, and ensure they know where to go for help.
• Set them up for success. New customers often need help learning how to use your product or service. Self-serve onboarding resources like walk-throughs, blog posts, demos, and tutorials can help new customers understand your product better and increase stickiness.
• Make help available. There will inevitably be questions your onboarding doesn’t address, so customer service is a must. Make sure your contact information is prominently displayed in all new customer support materials.
• Deepen the relationship. While this probably isn’t the right time for an upsell, new customers can be great candidates for future testimonials, product reviews, and case studies. Build feedback requests into your new customer communications to help identify happy customers who might be willing to sing your praises soon.

2. Potential customers

Potential customers—also known as “lookers” or “prospects” —aren’t actually customers yet. They’re gathering information and exploring their options before making a buying decision. Since they haven’t made a purchase, they’re still somewhere toward the middle of your sales funnel.

Lookers may not be ready to buy yet, but they’re typically looking for a specific product that meets a specific need. That interest level is what separates potential customers from casual website visitors.

The following are some things you can do to move potential customers deeper into the sales funnel and assist with their decision-making.

How to convert potential customers:

• Make a great first impression. You need to create the right experience for your website visitors if you want to turn browsers into buyers. Start with beautiful design and a good user experience (UX), then remove any elements that could be confusing or distracting—like pop-up ads and complex navigation.
• Demonstrate value. Potential customers already have some degree of interest in your product or service, so make it irresistible! Assets like white papers, testimonials, and case studies can show the benefits of your offering without making an overt sales pitch.
• Nurture warm leads. If your potential customer downloads a resource or fills out a contact form, be sure to follow up on that touch point. Adding them to a nurture campaign gives you more opportunities to share information and demonstrate value.
• Offer to help. Make it clear that you’re available to answer any questions a potential customer may have.

3. Impulse customers

Impulse customers make buying decisions in a snap. They are highly emotional buyers who typically don’t spend much time researching their purchase—so they don’t need to be “sold” with a compelling value proposition.

When the mood strikes, the best thing you can do for an impulse customer is get out of their way. Here are some suggestions for appealing to this valuable customer segment.

 How to influence impulse customers:

• Keep things simple. Impulse buyers value an easy and enjoyable shopping experience. The fewer steps required to complete a purchase, the less likely they will lose interest. Remove distractions (like pop-ups) on your landing page and expedite the checkout process with streamlined forms and autofill functionality.
• Offer timely upsells and cross-sells. Once you know what an impulse shopper likes, upselling and cross-selling offers can help you capitalize on their urge to buy. Consider adding “related product” recommendations to various touch points, including the checkout screen, order confirmation, shipping notice, and follow-up emails.
• Enable self-service. Impulse buyers don’t always read the fine print, so they’re more likely to need help with returns and exchanges. Anticipate these interactions and provide easy, self-service processes to keep impulse customers happy (and reduce customer support tickets).

4. Discount customers

Discount customers are the polar opposite of impulse buyers. They know what they want and they recognize the value of your product, but they’re willing to expend a lot of time and effort to find the best deal. Bottom line, they refuse to pay full price.

It’s hard to cultivate loyalty among bargain hunters, as they’re likely to drop your product or service once the discounted pricing expires. Discount customers can be tricky to manage, but here are a few tips.

How to satisfy discount customers:

• Explain the deal. Most discount seekers enjoy research, so give them clear and complete information about the terms of your deal. Make sure they understand exactly what they’re getting, in terms of discount pricing and/or increased value.
• Deliver exceptional service. This is not a customer who’s just going to “let it go” if a coupon or promo code doesn’t work properly. Keep your customer support team up to date on the details of every promotion so they can ensure a smooth transaction every time.
• Provide added value. Before your discounted pricing runs out, reach out with a new or extended offer—especially if it’s something they can’t get anywhere else. Going the extra mile might be enough to keep the discount customer satisfied.

5. Angry customers

Whatever your business, angry customers are inevitable. And while they may be difficult to handle, unhappy customers are a valuable source of feedback. When managed properly, their complaints can uncover critical flaws in your product, service, or processes.

It’s important to remember that angry customers are frustrated for a reason—and delivering good customer service can turn angry customers into your biggest fans. Here are some tips.

How to handle angry customers:

• Have a plan. A confident, positive approach can go a long way toward defusing a difficult situation. Make sure your customer support staff is well-trained, so they aren’t caught off guard by angry customers.
• Practice empathy. One of the most effective ways to handle an angry customer is to simply hear them out. Try to see things from their point of view. Wait to offer a solution until you fully understand the issue, or the customer may end up feeling dismissed.
• Take appropriate action. The resolution to a problem should always fit the circumstances—whether that’s a refund, a replacement, or even a letter of apology. For example, a discount on future purchases will only frustrate a customer who never received their order.

6. Loyal customers

Loyal customers are the gold standard for any business. They love your company and your product. They make repeat purchases year after year. And if you’re lucky, they’re also devoted brand advocates who share their positive experience at every opportunity. 

That said, customer loyalty should never be taken for granted. Long-term customer retention requires deliberate effort, to ensure your fans don’t lose interest over time.

 How to retain loyal customers:

• Highlight their success. Featuring your best customers in a spotlight article or case study can help to increase their exposure, while providing you with a valuable sales asset. You may also consider offering an incentive for referrals and testimonials.
• Invest in loyalty programs. Offering a loyalty discount or bonus program can help to strengthen a long-term relationship. Depending on how they’re structured, loyalty programs can also be a valuable source of behavioral and purchase data.
• Learn from your best customers. Ask for feedback from long-term customers. Find out about their experience; ask how they use your products. Then apply your learnings to improve the customer experience for others or shape future product enhancements.

Delight every type of customer with a customer-centric solution

Today’s customers want relationships, not transactions. At the end of the day, knowing each customer at an individual level—and giving them what they need—means having the right data. From basic contact information and purchase data to deeper insights like customer behaviors, attitudes, and preferences, the right CRM puts customer data at your fingertips so you can deliver an exceptional experience, every time.

Insightly CRM was designed to help teams build lasting customer relationships through a simple, scalable platform. Insightly’s unified solution aligns cross-functional teams like sales, marketing, and customer service on a single, shared data platform with a single customer view. The result? Unprecedented transparency, better decision-making, and a seamless end-to-end customer experience – for all types of customers.

Get started with a free trial of Insightly CRM today, or request a personalized demo to see how it can help your company achieve its business goals. 

The post 6 Types of Customers and How to Delight Them appeared first on Insightly.

Navigating this complexity in the digital age requires a strong set of tools. A manufacturing customer relationship management (CRM) system is an essential tool for managing your business and understanding your customers’ needs to be able to provide them with a positive experience. In this post, we’ll break down how a manufacturing CRM benefits your business and why Insightly is the best CRM for manufacturing.

Why your manufacturing business needs a CRM

In the manufacturing industry, the success of your business depends on your ability to consistently produce high-quality products and to do so efficiently. Low-quality or defective goods will lead to unhappy customers and will negatively impact your company’s image. The end result is less revenue and more difficulty winning new business.

But, in today’s market, simply producing good products isn’t enough. The most successful manufacturing companies also create great client relationships that match the quality of their products. To provide great client experiences, you need to know the ins and outs of your customers’ needs so that you can provide a service that matches their expectations.

Now, there are plenty of tools and data sources to gather this information. However, challenges arise when your data is spread across multiple platforms. Teams often use different tools, leading to data silos and slow communication to get necessary information. With these limitations, you lack the clarity required to create connected customer experiences.

A manufacturing CRM gives you a single tool for storing and managing your customer data. Everyone on your team can work from the same system, so there are no data silos or need for inefficient methods of collaboration. By bringing all your information into a centralized platform, your business is better equipped for managing leads, converting them into deals, and providing great experiences as customers.

Essential features of a manufacturing CRM

Before you adopt a CRM for your manufacturing, it‘s essential to know what makes a good CRM system. The right tool can have a profound impact on your business success, while a poor selection will lead to suboptimal results. Here are some key functions to look for in a manufacturing CRM.

Pipeline visibility

As a manufacturer, you face the challenge of accurately forecasting your upcoming sales, whether it’s for the upcoming month, quarter, or fiscal year. With long and complex sales cycles, built with many distributors, dealers, and retailers, your marketing and sales teams must create accurate, in-depth projections if the business is to plan effectively.

A manufacturing CRM should give you a single tool to visualize and manage your entire pipeline. You want to see every detail of your current deals as well the value of every open opportunity in your pipeline. With this data, your team can accurately forecast future demand to know exactly where the business stands.

Customizations

No two businesses are the same. Everything from your sales cycles to the nature of your customers will vary based on your unique needs. Because of this, it is important to adopt a CRM platform that is customizable. You want the ability to create custom fields and objects and adjust the steps in your sales process to match your business operations.

Real-time reporting

A good CRM for manufacturing will enhance your data analytics. You want direct, real-time insights into each of your contacts to see how they are evolving through the customer journey. By understanding each customer’s complete picture, you can understand past performance, including which products sell the best and which distributors drive the most revenue. Having this information at your fingertips will help you know where to focus your efforts.

Insightly is the best manufacturing CRM

A CRM for manufacturers should streamline important tasks while giving your team powerful features to help them perform at their best. Insightly comes packed with all the features your manufacturing company needs to create stand-out experiences for your customers.

Here are some of the reasons why Insightly is the best CRM system for your manufacturing business:

Personalized communication 

Insightly comes packed with powerful segmentation features to help you organize your contact lists based on interests, demographics, industry, and more. By creating highly refined audience segments you get clear insight into what past buyers value the most and where new opportunities are in the buying process.

With this information, you can personalize each interaction based on individual interests and needs. By doing so, you create a more relevant and meaningful experience, increasing your ability to build a long-standing relationship with the customer.

Project management built in

Insightly CRM includes project management functionality to help you deliver on projects. You can convert won opportunities to projects and work them inside Insightly, rather than moving them into a separate PM tool. This is not only convenient, it also avoids data loss. From there, you can track project milestones, manage processes, and integrate with external systems to ensure on-time delivery and happy customers.

Reporting and dashboards

With Insightly, you can create customizable dashboards to quickly show the information that is vital to your business. For example, you could set up views to see the value of the current opportunities in your pipeline to create more accurate demand forecasts. Or you can create a visualization for your project pipeline to see how many projects you have going and their current statuses. 

Powerful Integrations

To make the most of a CRM system it needs to be compatible with the other tools your business uses. After all, the end goal of the platform is to boost your overall efficiency and your ability to provide great experiences to customers. 

With AppConnect by Insightly, you get ready-made integrations for hundreds of the most popular business software. This includes accounting software like Quickbooks, HR platforms like BambooHR, and communication apps like Slack. By setting up integrations for your favorite tools, you can automate processes to remove the need to switch between solutions, helping to save valuable time that can be spent on your customers.

Expand your manufacturing business with Insightly

CRM software gives manufacturers the tools to handle the complexity of their business. With Insightly, you can see every detail of your sales pipeline to know exactly where your business stands and the amount of demand to expect in the future. Robust automation streamlines essential processes, freeing you to focus all your attention on what matters most, satisfying your customers.

Start with Insightly CRM, then expand to Insightly Marketing for lead generation and management. Add on Insightly Service to manage customer support ticketing and more. Then, use Insightly AppConnect to integrate the tools you use across your business. Insightly grows with you every step of the way.

Start a free trial of Insightly CRM or request a personalized demo to begin empowering your manufacturing business.

The post Best Manufacturing CRM: Unify Your Business with Insightly appeared first on Insightly.

One of the most important tools you’ll need to implement is a customer relationship management (CRM) system. A CRM gives you a centralized platform to store customer information and manage every interaction regardless of the touch point. While you may not have many customers right now, you are growing. A CRM is essential to satisfying customers, and it is easiest to implement earlier rather than later.

In this post, you’ll learn what you should look for in a CRM for a startup and why Insightly is the best solution for getting your business off the ground.

Why your startup needs a CRM

Your new startup doesn’t come with customers. As such, it may seem like a waste of capital to invest in a platform for managing customers when you don’t have many. It is natural to believe that you can wait until your business is established with a solid number of customers before you can see tangible rewards from a CRM. 

However, every startup can benefit from a CRM. The reason is that the success of every business, regardless of industry, is based on providing the best possible customer experience. By taking on a customer-first approach early in your business, you establish a strong precedent and ensure that every customer you add has the experience that will allow you to move forward in the market.

Here are some of the things you can achieve by adopting a CRM for your startup:

Prioritize and organize your work

In a startup, there is no shortage of responsibilities to juggle. How do you know what is important enough to merit your utmost attention? And, how do you keep track of everything so that your business can operate efficiently?

A CRM tool gives you a centralized place to store all your important tasks and the information about leads and customers. When you have all your customer data in a single place, you get a clear picture of where to spend your time and energy. Founders, managers, marketers, and sales teams will all be on the same page, regardless of location or time zone, and your team can act quickly to foster your business’s growth.

Generate new leads and customers 

A strong sales pipeline is key to gaining your first customers. A CRM system helps you capture leads and move them through your sales process while automatically routing leads to the best sales rep. You get a detailed understanding of how effective your sales pipeline is. You can see where you are losing potential customers in your sales process and which activities are yielding the best results.

Manage contacts and partnerships

In the digital world, organizations rely on a variety of communication methods to engage their customers and business partners. A CRM connects all interactions across touch points for you so that you can manage your contacts from a single platform. Sales, marketing, customer support, and any other team working to build strong relationships will have this information at their fingertips.

You don’t have to worry about losing track of a conversation. CRM software can store details from every conversation in one place instead of spreading them out in spreadsheets and notebooks. You can also use a CRM to set up automatic reminders to ensure you regularly check in with your valuable contacts.

What to look for in the best CRM for startups

Now that you know why your startup needs a CRM, let’s look at some of the key features to look for in CRM software for startups:

Affordability

First, you should evaluate CRM platforms on affordability. Every dollar counts in the early stage of your business, and you don’t want to overspend on any of the tools. A CRM price should reflect the level of functionality the platform offers. 

Many CRM providers scale their pricing based on the number of users you enroll. As a new business, your initial costs should be on the lower end as you won’t need spots for many users.

Be sure to keep an eye out for hidden charges. Some platforms don’t make their key features available unless you purchase additional add-ons. Others will charge for integrations if you want to connect the CRM to your other tools.

It‘s also beneficial to look for a tool with a free trial (or even a free plan for 1-2 users). This will allow you to try out the platform before committing to paying for the software.

Flexibility

No other business is quite like yours. The intricacies of your operation are what makes it special. The right CRM will be flexible and customizable to add fields, pipelines, processes and the like to fit to your organization – not the other way around. 

Task and email automation

In the fast-paced startup environment, making the most of your time is critical. Everyone on your team can benefit from reducing the amount of tasks needed throughout their daily activities.

A good CRM for startups lets you set up automated workflows to handle routine tasks. Generating reports, sending email follow-ups, and scheduling tasks are some of the common functions you can automate with a CRM.

This automation helps everyone on your team increase their productivity so that the startup can move with greater agility.

Reporting

Visual reporting gives you a real-time overview of the current state and success of your business. This helps you understand the number of deals you have open, the value of opportunities in your sales pipeline, how well you convert deals to sales, where your best leads come from, and more.

Integrations

A CRM gives you a powerful tool for managing many parts of your business, but it is not the only tool you will need to use. To extend the efficiencies afforded by a CRM to every area of your business, you want a platform with ready-made integrations for other popular tools. For example, integrating your CRM with accounting software like Quickbooks can streamline record keeping and invoicing. Or integrating your CRM with Slack can improve communication throughout your organization, allow you to act on new leads fast or share wins in real time.

Scalability

Your business may be small now, but it won’t be forever. As your startup grows, you will have bigger teams, more leads, and more contacts. You need a CRM solution that can grow with you as your business expands. You’ll want to map out the features you’ll need down the road and see if you can get them now while staying within your budget. Even if you need to pay a little more upfront, it could end up being less of a hassle than needing to migrate platforms in the middle of more extensive operations.

Ease of use is a key part of scalability. When you need to onboard a lot of sales reps, you want to get them up and running quickly so that they can spend time engaging customers. Plus, you don’t want to add more work for your experienced team to take the time to train new team members.

CRM first 

There is a distinct difference between a platform designed for managing customer relationships versus one that is designed for marketing as a whole. There are many marketing platforms that were built as a marketing tool that retroactively added CRM functionality.

Two good examples are Hubspot and ActiveCampaign. One was designed as a more generic marketing platform, while the other originated as an email autoresponder that eventually added more traditional CRM features.

A ‘CRM first’ platform that was built around the needs of sales leaders and is much more effective in building quality relationships with your customers. It prioritizes pipeline management and visualization, so you always know exactly where you stand when it comes to winning new deals. Plus, it will provide you with unified profiles for each contact so that you can engage them in a more meaningful manner, all from a single platform.

Insightly is the best startup CRM

Insightly is a powerful CRM for startups of all sizes. The platform is easy to get started with, customizable, and it provides you with a single, comprehensive tool for managing every aspect of your customer experience. Here are some of the key reasons Insightly is the best CRM for startups.

Highly customizable

Your business is unique. You should have the flexibility to create and name fields that work just for your business without writing lines of code or hiring an integrator. Insightly lets you tailor the CRM to your business (read: geeks love us). You can add unlimited custom fields to your records, and you can customize each stage of your pipeline to match your sales process.

The interface is highly customizable, allowing you to apply various views and filters to make the platform easy to navigate. You can create stunning data visualizations with simple drag and drop builders so that the information you need is always at your fingertips.

Start for free

You cannot overstate the importance of affordability for a startup CRM. Insightly removes any worry from a potential purchase by letting you use the platform for free for up to two users. Your free account includes all the CRM’s key features for you to get a real understanding of the platform’s capabilities before you buy. No commitment or payment method is required.

As you add teams, don’t add more vendors

You shouldn’t have to complicate your startup with too many vendors as it will inevitably slow down your growth. When you add a marketing team and a customer service team, Insightly has you covered with Insightly Marketing, a full-featured marketing automation solution, and Insightly Service, a help desk ticketing solution to service your accounts.

Insightly unites these functions so all of your teams can work from the same tool. Data is centralized to provide a complete 360-degree view of each lead, contact, and customer to keep everyone on the same page.

The AppConnect integration suite lets you seamlessly connect the CRM to the tools that you already use (e.g. HR, accounting, and communication apps). With the no-code integration engine, you can create automated workflows between apps without the need for technical expertise.

Grow faster with Insightly

The right CRM can help your startup find early success and set the stage for future growth. Insightly understands the unique needs of startups and has created a fully customizable platform that can be tailored to your business.

Don’t wait until you’re no longer a small business to make the most of a CRM. Get started with a free trial today to start your business on the right foot.

The post Best Startup CRM: Launch Your Business with Insightly appeared first on Insightly.

When it comes to technology solutions, or how to invest in technology, businesses often choose providers based on trust in the brand. But they are also looking for a fast time to value (TTV), i.e. how fast will a product or service solve their issue and help them gain a positive return on the investment. The faster a business solves an issue, the stronger the customer relationship becomes.

What is time to value?

Time to value is a measurement of the time it takes from when your customer purchases a product/service, to when they start deriving value. The faster a solution solves a problem, the better the customer experience and the more money a brand makes. It’s as simple as that.

Over time, you want to work toward decreasing TTV for your customers. A healthy TTV metric is an indicator of business growth and efficient operational performance.

What does time to value mean for the customer experience?

When it comes to technology, customers are looking for a quick return on investment. Every company has its own goals to drive the growth and success of the enterprise.

Quick ROI is critical for successfully planning and evaluating infrastructure. Expedient TTV also helps your customers retain more of their own customers, which makes everyone happy.

A brand’s ability to help a business achieve its outcomes depends on the suitability of your product/service to meet those goals. It also depends on maximizing the speed and degree of success during the customer experience.

Therefore, TTV is both a goal and a key performance indicator. It requires an enterprise-wide contribution to delivering value quickly. It also entails consistently measuring how long it takes to deliver that value.

A faster TTV is indicative you have a team that has made a commitment to continuously improve products and services; and gather, share, and act on customer data as soon as possible.

Why is time to value important for customer success?

The value created by a product or service is proof that it works. Fast TTV fulfills the promises made in your sales pitch. When you deliver value time and again, you build trust with your customers, making them more likely to become your brand advocates.

Driving value forms the basis of a customer relationship, where consistent delivery increases satisfaction and cements retention. This continued nurturing of the customer experience leads to more long-term relationships and a lower rate of churn.

Different examples of time to value

TTV can change depending on the customer, industry, and services offered. It’s not about when a client becomes valuable to you but, rather, the other way around.

It’s important to keep track of customer priorities throughout the entire sales process. Since TTV varies so much, it’s possible you may need to track several TTV metrics at once, including:

Time to basic value

This is the shortest TTV metric to measure. It’s the time it takes for the customer to realize they made the right choice. They are starting to see the most basic value from the product/service, but have yet to fully utilize it.

In some cases, time to basic value can happen even before the customer purchases something. For example, a free trial or sample product may lead to a prospect already experiencing basic value.

Time to exceed value

Just like it sounds, this metric represents the time it takes for a product/service to exceed a customer’s expectations and convince them to keep doing business. This may come when a basic plan no longer meets their needs and they upgrade to more features.

The more a brand focuses on time to exceed value, the more it increases customer lifetime value. When you keep exceeding people’s expectations, they won’t be checking out your competition.

Long time to value

Some products and services may take time for people to realize the value. In cases for software-as-service solutions (SaaS), it can sometimes take weeks or months to fully integrate systems and data across different parts of a business.

If what you offer has a longer TTV, it’s important to continue to demonstrate value to the customer every step of the way.

Short time to value

Short time to value is easier to measure. Businesses have a need, they reach out, and that immediate need is met.

However, the downside of having a product or service with a short time to value is that customers have less patience and loyalty. If a brand can do the same job faster, people often switch.

Immediate time to value

Some services provide what is known as immediate time to value. In this case, the reward is instant for a customer’s action.

Any type of online platform where you paste a link and receive something in return is considered immediate TTV. Examples include picture resizing, SEO, filters, or link shortening.

Best practices for meeting time to value goals

The first opportunity to bring value to a customer is during the onboarding process. From product awareness to mastery, it’s all about progressing them through as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Remember, a customer will always remain in the onboarding phase until they can independently integrate your product/service in their daily workflows. Until then, they will require guided assistance for a fast TTV. The sooner they can use what you sell by themselves, the faster they achieve value.

It’s important to show the link between the problem your solution solves, and how that aligns with a customer’s business goals. Milestones should be set based on these outcomes and customer progress measured along the way.

A brand must continuously engage to ensure buyers are on the right track and are completing the onboarding process in an intended time frame. Otherwise, there might be a problem you need to address.

Want to know a few strategies to employ along the customer journey?

Effective engagements

Make sure you have set up engagements that are proactive and relevant. Use customer data to better understand their business and tech setup.

Set milestones

Base these on your customer’s goals. Understand how the consumer defines value and set internal goals to reflect these outcomes.

Early warning

Data will quickly reveal when a customer is struggling. Setup early triggers to alert your team when people need extra attention or help. Follow up immediately, whether it’s reaching out or scheduling a meeting.

Anticipate needs

Use previous customer experiences to keep improving and anticipate future needs. Be aware of potential bottlenecks during onboarding and have solutions on hand.

Additional best practices for time to value

• An agile software solution
• Detailed onboarding guides
• Customer success managers
• Product usability tests

When someone is looking to buy a product or service, they have specific goals in mind. They will consider your brand only because they believe it helps them solve these challenges. Providing value as quickly as possible is your way of saying “thank you” for the trust.

Fast TTV also helps to retain customers, improve their experience, and expand your business through word-of-mouth (and other authentic marketing strategies). It simply gives people more reason to work with you.

Taking results-oriented, goal-based action is your way of assuring people they have permanently found the rug.

The post What is ‘time-to-value’ and why is it important for customer success? appeared first on Insightly.

Marketers tend to be heads-down. Many of us are running a dozen programs, managing teams, and trying to keep up with a changing industry. When we’re underwater, it’s tough to remember to come up for air and ask: what do our customers actually want from us?

Understanding the voice of your customer can help you answer this question.

What does ‘voice of the customer’ mean?

The voice of the customer is what your customer wants and needs. It’s how your customers share their experiences with your product and services to inform your product and marketing.

It may seem like a simple concept. Of course, we listen to our customers. Yet, as companies and the number of stakeholders grow, what the customer wants and needs can sometimes get lost.

The customer’s voice can include negative and positive feedback, and it can be delivered in a variety of ways. Understanding your customers’ wants and needs can inform any number of programs across your company.

The benefits of listening to your customers

All companies have the best intentions when listening to customer feedback. In many industries, ‘the customer is always right.’ In others, customers must raise issues many times to feel heard.

When you’re listening to the voice of your customer, you learn what your customers value the most in your product and how they use it. You can use this feedback as market research to inform your marketing programs, product development, and customer success programs. Understanding the voice of the customer is the first step to becoming a customer-centric company.

How to create a customer voice strategy

Listening to your customers should be baked into your marketing strategy. Consider implementing consistent feedback mechanisms that can influence your programs.

Different kinds of customers can provide valuable feedback. Here are some ways each kind of customer can inform your strategy:

Loyal customers

Loyal customers are often the easiest to identify and to request feedback from. They are excited to share their feedback. Even though you have the strongest customer relationships with them, they are often the people to turn to for specific critical feedback about your product. They will also let you know how you can engage them better and keep them as a customer. Their familiarity and dedication make them a great sounding board.

Churned customers

It’s never fun to have a conversation with your ex. But your churned customers—especially those that may have been with you for a while—can often provide some of the best customer feedback. They will be more critical of your product than your loyal customers, but they also tend to be more straightforward. They may even be able to give you insight into your competitors.

“Lazy” customers

Some customers might stop by and buy your product whenever they feel like it. They may have an unpredictable buying pattern, but still appear to enjoy using your product. These customers can give you a lot of insight into customer motivation and how your product fits into the market.

Best practices for your customer voice initiative

Here are some of the methods to hear the voice of your customer:

Interviews or focus groups

There’s no replacing a face-to-face (or face-to-Zoom) conversation. By speaking with your customers one-on-one or in small groups, you not only hear their feedback, but you can understand how they feel. In these situations, you can read body language, hear intonation, and capture emotions. This can give you a human look into how your customers feel about your product.

Surveys and net promoter score

Post-service surveys are—unsurprisingly—one of the most popular ways to collect customer feedback. They’re simple to administer and inherently quantitative. You can aggregate your surveys into a net promoter score, a key metric in measuring customer satisfaction.

Customer feedback on site

A comment field or feedback email address allows for unbridled criticism, but perhaps that’s exactly what your company needs to grow. An open form for anonymous customer feedback can encourage trolling or spam. Yet, it also encourages feedback that your customers don’t know how to give otherwise.

Customer service data

Your customer service team is the frontline of the customer voice—they hear it every day. Ask your team for service tickets, recorded phone conversations, chatbots, and email conversations. You can uncover a buried treasure of what your customers are  trying to tell you.

Sales data

Your sales team is having dozens of conversations with potential customers. They are hearing their concerns and hopes for a new solution from your target market. Aggregate the recordings, notes, and data from sales calls for more insights into your customer voice.

Social media

It’s quite possible your customers are already talking about you. They might use LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook to share their thoughts on your company and recommend it, or not, to other people in their peer group. Use social media listening tools to scrape brand mentions and related conversations.

How do you determine the most effective way to collect customer feedback? Consider a mix of strategies. Some customers may be more comfortable with one method than another. By using a few methods, you can ensure that one method doesn’t show a bias over another.

How to measure and understand your customer voice

So, you’ve collected all your customer feedback. You’ve got a spreadsheet, a folder full of sales calls, notes from a focus group and a smattering of net promoter scores. How do you make this feedback actionable?

Here are the steps to organize and measure your customer data:

Aggregate the data using one common method

Your customer voice should be singular and consistent. In order for the customer feedback to be actionable, it must be standardized. Streamline your customer data using one or more of the following tools:

• An integrated CRM that can mirror your feedback directly with your customer data
• A dedicated customer experience tool, like GetFeedback, to collect feedback across channels
• A qualitative research tool, like FocusVision, to run focus groups and collect customer data

Determine if there are any gaps or issues with the data

Once you’ve aggregated your data, it’s your job to look for holes. Did you leave out feedback from a certain age bracket or demographic group? Was all your feedback collected during a busy season, or a slow season? Did you forget to ask a key question?

If a mistake was made, now is the time to correct it. The customer voice relies on complete and full data. Without it, we don’t know if we are representing our customers.

Identify trends

It may be tempting to pick out a juicy data point. Maybe you have one customer who has been with your company for 20 years. Maybe you have one customer who churned and came back a year later, Or, maybe you have a customer that said something really cruel or untrue.

When understanding your customer voice, trends are more important than outliers. Take time to understand the commonalities. Your customer voice will never represent all customers, but it should represent most of them.

Don’t fall into data analysis traps

Data analysis is not a perfect science. There are a number of biases and common analysis blunders that come into play, and can impact how you present your final data. These include:

• Errors. Does your data meet quality standards?
• Too small of a sample size. Did you survey enough people to have meaningful results?
• Confirmation bias. Did you ask open-ended questions, or did you use the data to confirm an already-held belief?
• Misinterpretation of results. Did you explore every possible reason for the results that you received?

What if your market research and analysis show no meaningful results? This does not mean your experiment was a failure. It could mean that you need to do more research, or that you need to ask questions that reveal customer similarities, rather than differences. It might also mean that your customers are not ready to give feedback in the way that you asked for it. In the case that trends do not come to light, be sure to use this as fodder for your next customer feedback round.

Report on trends and determine action items

It’s crucial to communicate the trends you uncover to product leaders and decision-makers. The voice of the customer can become a litmus test for new product decisions and marketing programs. It is your responsibility to speak on behalf of the customer using their voice.

You can present the voice of the customer in a brief presentation, a detailed report, or a series of recommendations.

Some immediate action items you can take with customer voice include:

• A webinar to educate customers on relevant product features
• Improvement of your customer relationship management (CRM) system with integrated and updated customer data
• A re-engagement campaign for churned customers, with a renewed understanding of their priorities
• Development of your ideal customer profile
• A ‘surprise and delight’ campaign for loyal customers who have expressed what they value

Conclusion

The voice of the customer is something marketers always think about, but rarely go through the exercise of quantifying. By going through this process, marketers can better understand who they are selling to. This will create stronger products and marketing programs to help their company grow.

Sources:

8 types of bias in data analysis and how to avoid them George Lawton. TechTarget. October 26, 2020

What is voice of the customer (VoC)? Qualtrics

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And, although specific teams may deal with complaints, technical issues, and general troubleshooting, customer service (CS) is the responsibility of everyone within an organization—from sales to support to marketing and even accounts receivable.

Companies small and large are looking for innovative ways to elevate and streamline customer service. One way to eliminate time-consuming tasks and free up staff to focus on engagement is to use workflow automation. Here are a few workflow automation tips for improving the customer experience.

1. Identify your customer service automation goals

Before building your first automated workflow for CS, it’s wise to agree on a shared set of goals. Here’s how to identify your workflow automation objectives:

Set goals that are aligned with your customer service metrics

Start by discussing how workflow automation will help you deliver better customer service. What problems are you trying to solve? How do you plan to measure the achievement of your goals? Be specific and connect desired business outcomes to metrics that you already track, such as your churn rate, customer satisfaction (CSAT), or average customer wait time.

Be realistic

It’s tempting to overcompensate and try to do too many things at once with automation, especially if you learn that customers are waiting for hours or days to get an initial response. Slashing customer wait time from hours to seconds sounds great on paper, but how realistic is it? Setting incremental goals is a better approach. Think in terms of percentages—improving by just 10% per month will lead to an exponential improvement within one year. Play the long game and don’t overwhelm the system.

Use data to establish benchmarks for accurate goal tracking

Let’s assume that customers routinely complain about how long it takes your company to get back to them. Using workflow automation to reduce first response time seems like a logical use case. Just be sure to use reliable data as a benchmark for measuring progress. If you use a third-party ticketing system to track customer inquiries, check to see what types of reports are available. With a few clicks, you may be able to establish a baseline for your team’s existing responsiveness. This will serve as a key data point as you implement automated workflows that close the gap.

2. Go for quick, high-impact workflow automation victories

Goals in hand, it’s time to get to work. What’s the one thing that you can easily automate to make the biggest impact on the customer experience? If your primary goal involves increasing engagement through enhanced communication, then enabling an automated confirmation email might be a good place to start. Simply telling customers that you’ve received their request could make a noticeable impact. Keep it simple and gain momentum toward achieving your ultimate goal. Resist the temptation to tackle the most complicated workflow on day one.

3. Avoid automating broken processes

Automated workflows are not a fix-all for every service-related problem. Trying to automate convoluted systems is a recipe for failure, and doing so will likely cause stakeholders to lose confidence in your automation strategy. Fix the underlying process first, then automate part or all of it. Workflow automation, when properly implemented, should make efficient CS-related systems run even more efficiently. Don’t waste time automating broken processes.

4. Plan, test, launch, test, repeat

You need a scalable system to ensure your automated workflows are actually working and are not in conflict with other automations. To do that, follow these action steps: plan, test, launch, test, and repeat.

Start by planning what you want to automate in the context of your existing automations. Does this project actually require a new workflow, or could it be added to an existing workflow? Will the automation require additional training for staff? Think through questions like these and develop a game plan. Once you’ve got your plan, build and test the workflow in a limited environment (if possible). Do you have the flexibility to apply the workflow to a segment of records rather than your entire database? Taking a measured approach could reduce the risk of business interruption. When the automated workflow is performing as expected in a limited capacity, you can consider expanding its reach to a larger use case. After fully enabling it, be sure to test for and resolve any unexpected issues. Repeat this process as needed.

5. Use data to measure progress

Check to see if your customer service platforms offer any built-in reports and dashboards to support the ongoing monitoring of your automated workflows. For example, if you’re automating CS-related tasks with Insightly, check out Insightly’s Guide to Dashboards to learn how you can visualize real-time data, measure progress, and share reports with your team.

Examples of customer service and support automation

Automated customer service workflows can vary greatly depending on your goals, business model, industry, ICP, and personas. Not sure what to automate? Here are a few ideas to get your creative juices flowing:

Prospective customers

• Send an automated email after a prospect submits a form
• Assign a task for the sales rep to follow up within a predefined number of days
• Remind your sales manager to personally check in on any deals greater than $5,000

New customers

• Auto-convert closed deals into projects for your operations team to work on
• Add new customers into a welcome email series that provides helpful training links
• Set a task for accounting staff to ensure that new customer payment details are obtained

Existing customers

• Send customers an automated satisfaction survey within five minutes of a logged call
• Prompt customers to schedule account reviews within 3 months of contract renewal
• Remind sales reps to send out swag two weeks after a contract is renewed

Use automation to provide better service to customers

Excellent customer service can be a competitive advantage in an increasingly crowded marketplace. Strategically leveraging automated workflows for CS can help your organization deliver better service, engage customers more effectively, and, ultimately, develop healthier, lasting customer relationships.

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Customers want—and expect—a great product or service, amazing support, and a price that beats the competition. And, in an age of “cancel any time” and “no long-term commitments,” customers know that they have the upper hand. When companies fail to deliver, customers cancel and take their business elsewhere.

So, what should companies do to reduce cancellations and encourage long-term relationships? Let’s take a closer look at customer churn, how to calculate it, and what to do about it.

What is customer churn?

In business, the term “churn” typically refers to the act of customers cancelling, unsubscribing, or otherwise leaving. Adding up the number of customers that were lost during a specific period provides a company with its total churn metric. Churn is often tracked on an annual, quarterly, and/or monthly basis. Companies that have unusually high amounts of churn may choose to report on a weekly or daily basis, especially as they implement systems and programs aimed at reducing it.

How do you calculate customer churn rate?

Reducing customer churn is a top priority for businesses of all types—particularly those that offer monthly or annual subscription models, such as software as a service companies, no-contract wireless providers, consulting businesses on monthly retainers, and streaming media platforms. Unfortunately, improving churn is not as simple as it may seem. Customer journeys are complex and diverse. Seasonal buying patterns create artificial peaks and valleys for signups and cancellations. Just knowing what to focus on first can be a point of contention for many companies.

That’s why you need to normalize your churn data into a metric that accounts for the fluctuations in your business. That’s where customer churn rate comes in handy. Customer churn rate is usually calculated like this:

For a simple example, let’s assume that your company calculates churn rate on a monthly basis. On March 1, you had 1,000 total customers. By the end of March, your company lost 200 customers. This means that your monthly churn rate was 20%. Given a 20% churn rate, you could theoretically expect all of your customers to churn within a five month window. Or, stated slightly differently, your average retention period for a typical customer is five months.

5 tips for lowering churn

Maintaining a high churn rate is a recipe for disaster. There’s only so much demand generation that your sales and marketing teams can deliver. Here are five tips to consider as you develop a strategy for reducing churn.

1. Know your customers (better)

Keeping pace with customer orders and support requests can seem like an insurmountable job that leaves no time for strategic planning. However, it’s only by zooming out and seeing the big picture that your organization can identify issues that lead to cancellations. Invest more time in understanding your customers’ goals, objectives, and needs. Customer journey mapping is an excellent place to start.

2. Surround yourself with great people, systems, & processes

Does your company have the expertise and capacity to build a first-class customer success program? Perhaps you already have a qualified CS leader onboard, but he or she is in the wrong seat. Or, perhaps you need to go and recruit someone who has the right mix of experience and know-how. Start by surrounding yourself with people who are invested in the customer experience. Then, empower them to recommend and implement systems, processes, and technology that align with both your company’s and customers’ goals.

3. Focus on delivering great service & being customer-centric

An essential component of customer success is, of course, providing stellar customer service. Achieving and maintaining a one-hour response time on support tickets does not go far enough. Customers expect an amazing experience at every step of the journey—from interacting with chatbots to accessing thorough information on your support site to receiving helpful responses from your live agents.

Revisit your customer journey map and identify unnecessary points of friction. What adjustments can (and should) be made to provide a customer-centric experience? Strive to be more empathetic as a company and develop training programs that show staff how to walk in the customer’s shoes. Implement processes and metrics that hold front-line staff—particularly support agents—accountable for providing great service.

4. Collect actionable data to understand why customers leave

Customer data is more readily available now than ever before. Each customer interaction with your website, emails, and support team is another datapoint that can help you improve customer satisfaction and, hopefully, reduce churn.

If customer data management is not a strength for your company, here are a few data sources that are worth cultivating:

• Customer interviews: When a customer cancels, ask if he or she would be willing to have a 15-minute conversation. Expect a low participation rate, but also expect tremendously useful information from those who do.
• Built-in prompts: If you have a customer-facing user interface (UI), build in prompts to ask each customer why he or she is cancelling or downgrading. Sync this data directly to the contact or organization record in your CRM.
• Automated surveys: Use marketing automation technology to measure customer satisfaction throughout the entire customer journey.

These are just a few ideas to get your creative juices flowing. Collaborate with team members from support, marketing, sales, and operations and continuously look for ways to securely collect more data and improve churn.

5. Use your data to identify trends & correct course

Simply collecting large amounts of customer data is a fruitless endeavor unless you have a reliable way to track and manage it. Using an easy-to-integrate and customizable CRM, such as Insightly, makes life easier on staff when trying to make sense of customer churn data. Custom objects and fields provide flexibility for organizing data in a way that aligns with your unique business model and customer journey.

In addition, look for ways to harness data that already exists in your CRM. For example, your sales team probably tracks their lost deals and cancellations. Use your CRM’s built-in dashboards and reports to visualize this data, identify churn-related trends, anticipate problems that lead to churn, and develop new strategies for lowering it.

Build business relationships that last

At the end of the day, reducing churn is all about building business relationships that last. Companies that truly understand their customers, implement customer-centric systems and processes, and strategically use data are better positioned to build long-term, churn-resistant relationships.

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So, what steps can you take to make customer service a priority and, as a result, improve customer satisfaction? Here are five customer service tips.

1. Start with a clear understanding of the present

Improving any initiative is difficult without performing an honest evaluation of the status quo. Customer service is no exception. Start by forming a cross-functional team whose mission is to objectively audit customer service on a company-wide basis. Diving into existing metrics, such as your CSAT (Customer Satisfaction) score, may be a wise place to start—but it’s not the only indicator of service. Online review sites, social media comments, and surveys can provide additional context into customers’ perception of the service that they receive.

CRM reports, such as won and lost opportunities by reason, can be tremendously insightful, especially if you have a critical mass of data to analyze. Seek to understand why potential customers are opting for competing solutions instead of yours. Does a competitor offer premium support plans that you’re not currently equipped to provide? Or, are you competing against a company who is well known for providing excellent support at no extra charge? Either way, analyzing deal data can surface insights to identify gaps in your customer service strategy.

2. Align training with the ideal customer experience

For years, thought leaders in the customer service world have stressed the importance of empathy, active listening, clear and on-brand communication, and in-depth product (or service) knowledge. These skills, in most cases, must be learned and reinforced through training. Simply picking up the phone and fielding inbound calls from unhappy customers is not a winning strategy.

Top-performing companies align their training programs with a vision of the ideal customer experience. Emphasizing the importance of delivering great service—at every stage of the buyer journey—is key to realizing this goal.

Ask yourself these questions as you evaluate your training programs.

• What is your company’s definition of an ideal customer experience?
• Is customer service a focal point of your existing training programs?
• Do all team members receive customer service training, or just the support team?
• Could a series of service-focused workshops make an immediate impact?

Bonus tip: Don’t be afraid to think outside the box. Consider implementing a “customer service hero” award that spotlights one team member who goes above and beyond to provide amazing customer experiences. Point out how the “hero” took steps that align with desired behaviors that are emphasized in your training materials.

3. Eliminate points of friction in customer service

One bad interaction is all it takes for the customer to form a negative opinion of your company. The customer does not know—or care—when a support rep is at the end of a ten-hour shift and less patient than usual. The customer simply wants a positive experience, but human weakness sometimes stands in the way.

Customer-facing teams, in particular, must continuously find ways to eliminate points of friction from the customer experience. If lengthy shifts, for example, lead to negative interactions, leadership may need to reimagine the team’s structure, management, or processes. When a team cannot serve each customer’s unique needs—even at the end of a long shift—then change is necessary.

4. Respond quickly & effectively

No customer wants to be stuck on hold for twenty minutes only to find out that no solution is possible. That’s why time to resolution is arguably one of the most important service-related metrics that influence customer satisfaction. Customers want fast service, but they also want effective service that helps them achieve success.

Providing fast and effective service must extend beyond the walls of your customer support department. Prospective customers, for example, expect price quotes that are accurate, detailed, clear, and promptly delivered. Channel partners need timely and accurate sales collateral that help them create awareness for your brand. Your customers’ accounts payable teams expect invoices to be sent to the right inbox, on the right day, and for the right amount.

Here are a few strategies for accelerating your company’s time to resolution.

Document & share internal knowledge with customers

Certain customers may prefer self-help resources as opposed to interacting with human beings. How can you use customer-facing web portals and other online resources to enable immediate access to helpful information?

Ideas: Customer knowledge bases, online price quote generators, FAQ pages, email templates with helpful links.

Provide inter-team & cross-team support

Some questions are too complex for one person to solve in a timely manner. Look for ways to streamline and enhance your escalation process.

Example: A software company routinely receives product enhancement ideas from its customers. Support team collects the ideas in a shared document and occasionally shares a summarized report with the product team. By the time the product team reviews the report, there is usually not enough context to understand the original idea. A better approach may involve immediate escalation to an on-call product team member, which would help the company understand new feature requests and simultaneously make the customer feel valued.

Invest in automation

Some things work better when automated. Take customer onboarding for example. Should every step in the process (emails, training sessions, etc.) require a manual action by your staff? Probably not. Check out Insightly’s workflow automation guide for ideas on how to use automation for sales, marketing, customer onboarding, and project delivery.

5. Value lifelong customer relationships

Companies that provide great service also tend to value lifelong customer relationships, which makes perfect sense. Providing great service makes customers more likely to stick with your company. Focusing on keeping customers for life, by its nature, forces your organization to continuously ask—and answer—important questions, such as:

• How can we provide even better service for customers?
• What gaps in service prevent some from becoming lifelong customers?
• Which service-related challenges have the biggest impact on churn?
• What positive interactions have led to long-standing customer relationships?

Spend time developing your customer journey map to begin the conversation.

It’s time to move beyond buzzwords & take action

Simply saying that you’re “customer-centric” has minimal benefit for your organization and customers. It’s time to take action. Start with a data-driven understanding of your customer service strategy. Align your training and programs around the customer experience, eliminate friction, find new ways to improve time to resolution, and value lifelong customer relationships.

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Internal opinions aside, what’s more important is understanding how the people you serve define “customer service.” Just because you think your company provides great service is no guarantee that customers agree.

So, how can your company be more responsive, provide better service, and elevate the overall customer experience? Let’s take a closer look.

Why is customer service important?

Customers are more likely to thrive when your company makes customer service a top priority. After all, most products and services have a learning curve that requires some amount of training, onboarding, continuous education, and ongoing support. Although customers do not spend every moment of their lives thinking about the solutions that you provide, they do expect things to work when they need them to. Customer service, therefore, fills an important gap between your solutions and each customer’s abilities, knowledge, and expectations.

Prioritizing customer service has many downstream benefits for your company, too. For starters, each customer service interaction is an opportunity to collect attitudinal data, which is particularly valuable in today’s era of “contactless” eCommerce transactions. Collecting the right data makes it easier to understand your personas, identify detractors to the customer experience, and develop strategies for increasing customer satisfaction. Customer satisfaction leads to better retention, more transactions, and a bounty of online and word-of-mouth referrals for your company.

In short, excellent customer service makes customers happy. Happy customers help you get even more happy customers. It’s a happy cycle.

Customer service vs. customer support

Although the terms customer service and customer support are closely related, they’re not exactly the same. Typically, “customer support” (or “customer success”) refers to an operational department that is responsible for helping customers when they have questions or issues. Customer support teams spend their days responding to emails, answering phone calls, and resolving tickets.

No doubt, support teams have a major influence on the quality of service that customers receive. That being said, customer service extends well beyond the walls (or virtual walls) of a support department.

To stay ahead of quota, for example, a company’s sales team must keep customer service at the forefront of what it does. Successful product development teams put the customer at the center of its engineering and design efforts. Even back-office departments, such as accounts payable teams, must align their conduct with solid customer service principles. Otherwise, customers may begin to look elsewhere for a more enjoyable buying experience.

Ensuring excellent customer service

If customer service is the responsibility of an entire organization (not just customer support), how can you begin building a customer service-focused culture? Here are three ideas.

1. Forget about your legacy systems & walk in the customer’s shoes

Many companies have already implemented a variety of business practices, technology, and processes to ensure that customers receive good service. Overly complex legacy systems, however, can make it difficult to see the bigger picture. As a result, some business leaders accept the status quo at the expense of the customer experience.

Legacy systems aside, it’s time to take a step back and see things through your customer’s eyes. Start by asking yourself this simple question:

If I were a customer, how would I rate the overall service that I receive?

Developing a customer journey map is one approach for objectively answering this question. Perhaps your support team is doing an excellent job of answering one-off questions, but your online documentation and training needs an upgrade. Or, perhaps customers consistently experience long and confusing delays during implementation, and you just need a better way to convert sales deals to projects. Study the customer journey holistically and identify the biggest gaps that require attention.

2. Analyze the right data & metrics

CSAT (customer satisfaction) score is the most widely used metric in customer service. Customer support software collects CSAT scores by automatically emailing the customer after a ticket is closed. Support teams use CSAT data to track high-level trends and identify potential issues that require correction.

CSAT might be a go-to metric for support departments, but it fails to provide meaningful context into a customer’s interaction with sales, operations, finance, and other customer-facing teams. For customer service insights that extend beyond CSAT, consider looking in your CRM. Depending on your CRM’s reports and dashboards, you may already have several useful metrics at your fingertips. How is customer service impacting your key business metrics, such as churn rate, conversion rate, and net new business? Is there a correlation? Drill down, explore your data, and get some answers.

3. Don’t try to scale too quickly

Customers want to be successful with the solutions that you provide. They want answers to their most difficult questions. And, perhaps more importantly, they want to feel valued and understood by you. Simply allocating more budget for new technology is not a long-term solution for improving customer service. Efficiency is important, but it’s not everything.

Focus on delivering an amazing experience throughout the entire customer journey. Routinely ask customers to share feedback about their interactions with support, sales, finance, accounting, and other teams. Use data to confirm that your customer service strategy is actually working.

Then, and only then, look for ways to scale.

Enhancing the customer experience with better service

Does your company need a fresh approach to customer service?

It’s time to take a break from the day-to-day operations and reimagine what customer service should be. Ask the difficult questions. Find out what customers expect throughout the entire journey—not just from support agents. And, continuously look for ways to integrate a customer service mindset throughout your entire organization.

If you would like to learn how to use a CRM to provide a stellar customer service and overall customer experience, request a demo with an Insightly rep. No commitment required.

Request a demo

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• Part 1: What is customer success?
• Part 2: Customer success program prep: a six-point checklist

Quick recap

What is customer success?

In our first installment, we discussed customer success as a concept, why it’s an important functional area to focus on today, how CS teams operate, and the need to streamline your CS efforts with a unified CRM.

Preparing to launch your customer success program

In the second piece, we discussed customer success planning. We provided a six-point checklist to help you put all the pieces in place to launch and run your own program. We covered building the perfect customer success team, measurable KPIs, using a unified CRM to support your efforts and general customer success strategy.

Now let’s dive into launching your efforts and customer success program management. Below are three tips to get started.

Launching your program in three steps

With your team in place, your strategy defined, and a solid understanding of what customer success is, you’re ready to launch your inaugural CS program. Here are three vital steps to take when introducing your program to your customers and the market.

1. Create buzz & awareness

Treat the launch of your CS program like a new service or product launch. Develop a go-to-market campaign to spread the word. Use multiple channels to raise awareness.

Leverage your CRM’s marketing automation capabilities to run a program awareness email campaign for existing customers. Run a separate campaign to introduce prospects to your new offering. Maximize exposure via social media marketing. Use every appropriate marketing channel to spread the word.

2. Generate internal excitement

To launch and drive an outstanding customer success program, it’s important that your entire business adopts a customer-centric mindset. Hold all-hands meetings to walk all teams through your new program and how they will be involved.

Be sure to communicate to employees the importance of their involvement. Give them the opportunity to ask questions so everyone is aligned around your customer success objectives. Finally, let your Director of Customer Success or a Customer Success Manager (CSM) drive this effort.

PRO TIP: Once your program is up and running, give employees feedback channels to suggest improvements or provide general feedback. This will help them feel more involved in your program’s success.

3. Start reaching out to existing customers

Start speaking to existing customers to get the ball rolling. Explain the program to them, how they will benefit from it, and discuss steps to start incorporating them into your program.

Managing your CS program in seven steps

Once you’ve launched, it’s time to roll up your sleeves and get to work managing your CS program. Here are seven customer success best practices to help you get started.

1. Activate your customer success playbooks

In part two of this series, we covered customer success playbooks—process documents that summarize the activities that should take place at each stage of the customer journey. Now is the time to put them into action.

Customer success playbooks involve various customer touchpoints that should be automated by your CRM solution. A few examples of automated actions include reminders, notifications, automated communications, etc. These are key to fomenting stronger customer relationships as you go.

2. Focus on onboarding

When you win a new customer, your CS team should start planning their personalized onboarding program. One of your customer support managers will own this process.

Ideally, you should have a series of meetings with your new customer to fully understand their use case, needs, challenges, pain points, etc. This allows them to tailor onboarding to meet each customer’s unique needs and increases the probability of their success using your product.

3. Deliver robust training

Training is essential to customer success. If customers don’t understand how to fully maximize the use of your product, they won’t use it. Nor will they realize the value it delivers.

Training should also be tailored to each customer’s unique needs. Training new customers is critically important. But you should also offer free product training to new users joining existing customer accounts.

PRO TIP: Make a point to record training sessions and make them available to each customer. The customer can then return and reference these training recordings when they need to refresh their knowledge around a particular topic.

4. Always be available

You can’t just onboard and train customers and leave them to fend for themselves. Ongoing support and guidance are key to customer success.

Dedicated customer support managers

Each customer should have a dedicated CSM who is always available to offer guidance when needed. Offering reliable guidance and teaching customers to drive their own success is key, so be sure each customer has its own CSM to turn to when guidance is needed.

Multiple support channels

Give customers various ways to reach customer support when they have a technical issue with your product. You can offer live phone support, as well as email support, chatbots, and even receive support queries via social media.

5. Give customers a voice & listen

It’s smart to open channels for customer feedback and product enhancement ideas. When you implement product changes based on customer feedback be sure to let customers know so they feel their voices are being heard.

A few effective ways you can provide your customers with a voice include:

• Sending routine surveys to gain key insight into your program’s performance
• Putting in place a cadence for regular, one-on-one check-ins between your customers and their CSMs
• Creating a customer advisory board
• Automating surveys after closing each customer support case
• Developing a closed customer community and forum to give customers a way to interact with one another and propose feature enhancement “ideas.”

PRO TIP: Whensoliciting feature enhancement requests from customers, refer to them “feature ideas” rather than “requests.” This will lower the expectation that every request will become a new feature.

6. Upselling & cross-selling

Your CS team’s role is not to upsell or cross-sell products or enhancements. However, by teaching customers the ins and outs of the system, your CSMs will explain additional product features that customers might not have.

When learning what might be possible if they added a specific add-on module or upgraded their plan to access more features, your CS team inadvertently engages in cross- and upselling. This is OK, just make sure it’s not at the center of their strategy.

Customer success reps are there to help the customer achieve success, not to push a sales pitch. This can have negative impacts on their performance because it’s crucial that customers see CSMs as their advocates, not salesmen in disguise.

7. Contract renewal management

Customer retention and churn rates are key metrics for customer success teams. When a customer’s renewal date nears, your CRM’s workflow automation features should send your CSMs an alert.

This is their queue to activate their customer success renewal playbook. At this point, they will schedule meetings with the customer to see how things are going and how they can improve their service to their customers.

If they can reassure each customer that the problems that they encountered in the past year are being addressed or have already been resolved, they increase the probability of customer contract renewal.

Performance Measurement

Routine reporting and metrics analysis are key to increasing program success. During the preparation stage, you will have defined the customer success metrics you want to track. You’ll have also collected baseline data around those metrics, so you’ll know how far you’ve progressed over time.

We recommend monthly reporting and analysis meetings within your CS team. This lets the team identify areas for improvement.

We also recommend holding a quarterly meeting with other team leaders to share results and open the floor for suggestions about how to improve cross-functional collaboration as it relates to your CS program.

Here are commonly-used CS metrics to track:

• Customer churn and retention rates
• Customer health score
• Net promoter score
• Customer lifetime value
• Product adoption and usage rates
• Product upsell and cross-sell rates
• Contract renewal rates
• Customer satisfaction levels
• Customer support ticket volume per user
• Expansion revenue

Ready to start your own CS program?

Kickstart your program with more knowledge and preparation, and you’ll increase customer success, as well as customer satisfaction, loyalty, and revenue growth.

Read more like this:

• Part One: What is customer success?
• Part Two: Preparing to launch your program
• Lead generation vs. customer retention
• Rethinking customer retention

The post Customer success: How to launch & manage your CS program appeared first on Insightly.