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.

With the power of an enterprise CRM, you can carefully examine each link in this chain.

How do you know if your customer interactions are as healthy as they could be?

What are customer interactions?

Customer interactions come in many shapes and sizes.

For example, service and support teams connect one-on-one with customers via phone, email, and chat. Chatbots act as first responders and direct customers to web resources. Social media teams respond to questions and concerns on public forums. Sales teams reach out for upsell opportunities.

Customer interactions aren’t easy; they require product/service expertise plus exceptional listening skills.

Why are customer interactions important?

Solid customer experiences define brand relationships after the initial sale. A single interaction can make or break a customer’s perception of your company. Your customer service/support teams are the face of your brand.

Every company should measure customer interactions by tracking important KPIs. Different KPIs need to be checked at different intervals; some are hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, etc. Once you establish a baseline and a plan, your team can set goals for improvement. Below are practical ideas to help your team move the needle.

6 Ways To Make Every Customer Interaction Matter

Healthy customer interactions and speedy complaint resolutions create better outcomes for all stakeholders. Positive customer interactions increase revenues and improve brand reputations. They also contribute to healthy corporate cultures.

When employees make customers happy, their morale increases. Good customer service and support create a positive feedback loop that can spread across your entire organization.

1. Show empathy

Empathetic customer interactions build brand trust. This increases positive outcomes like return business and referrals.

In a 2021 study, researchers at Belgium’s Ghent University found employee empathy statements increased brand trust. When customers felt understood, they believed their complaints had been handled well.

University of Pennsylvania senior fellow Annie McKee recommends three tips for demonstrating empathy. First, listen carefully to the customer without getting defensive or accusing them of being wrong. Second, be present with the person you’re helping and their specific situation. Third, don’t multitask when dealing with customers. Make them feel heard, special, and understood.

Customer satisfaction begins with empathy.

2. Solve problems quickly and efficiently

Speedy customer support and help desk outcomes can dramatically impact brand trust. All interactions matter, but fast first responses and final resolutions have the most impact in showing that you respect your customers’ time and result in an increase in their satisfaction.

In a 2020 study, researchers used a machine-learning algorithm to predict response times. They anticipated the messaging rates of both customers and customer service teams. These experts pointed out the utility of this analysis for support staffing since adequate staffing has the biggest impact on appropriate response times.

3. Make it easy for your customers

Examine each step of your customer journey and eliminate all unnecessary obstacles. All customers want convenience; new customers need smooth user experiences most of all.

Provide frictionless brand interactions by fixing all the little things that can damage brand trust:

• Make your contact information visible on all customer-facing content. 
• Have your web and social media teams hunt down broken links.
• Provide clear and concise pricing options.
• Make sure your support ticket autoresponder functions properly, so customers know they’ve gotten through to you.
• Have a human being follow up as quickly as possible.
• After resolution, ask for quick customer feedback on their support experience.
• Follow up a few days later with a second feedback request.

4. Act on customer feedback

As you resolve individual support cases, collect customer feedback for analysis. Then, integrate this knowledge into your products/services.

According to these Swedish academics, organizations with supportive workplace cultures do a better job of sharing customer feedback. These researchers encourage organizations to value this knowledge base as much as they do their technical expertise.

Identify broad trends in your feedback data but don’t neglect individual experiences. 

Remember, your customer base is your knowledge base.

5. Be where your customers are

All of your departments have a stake in your social media presence. 

For example, your tech team needs to see comments from people griping about bugs, glitches, and inefficiencies. You don’t just need to identify and fix your faults; you need to interact with users, acknowledge their frustrations, and let them see you addressing their issues in a timely fashion.

Your social media team can encourage people to interact both with your brand and each other. Help your loyal fans connect over their common interest in your product/service. And make sure to track your customer-to-customer interaction metrics.

A recent outage by the Slack app played out in social media with frequent communication, plus humility and empathy. Rather than stale, programmed status updates, Slack chose to communicate with messages like these: 

We’re digging into the problem with the highest priority. Thank you for your patience as we work on this.

Sorry for the panic. We’re working towards a resolution asap and will provide another update as soon as we can here: https://status.slack.com.

So sorry for making your morning harder. We’re doing everything we can to get everything back to normal as quickly as possible.

6. Be transparent and communicate often and effectively

Of all customer service outcomes, a positive feedback loop is the most desirable. It’s far easier to maintain healthy customer relationships than to repair your reputation.

By providing operational transparency, you can create a workplace culture that keeps getting better and better.

In a 2016 study of food service workers, researchers observed operational transparency benefits for both customers and employees. Customers who could see workers making their meals reported higher perceptions of employee effort. They were 22% more likely to rate their experience as high quality.

Workers in this study who experienced customer transparency felt their efforts impacted others. Researchers reported a 19% reduction in throughput times from employees who felt seen and appreciated. They pointed out the power of transparency to create reciprocal value for all stakeholders.

Not every business can make its operations publicly visible, but every company can communicate more often, own its mistakes, and share milestones. Demonstrate honesty and transparency to create loyal customers, and take care to track this customer communication.

Get creative: How can you provide genuine, transparent interactions between your customers and your employees?

Improve your customer interactions with Insightly

Use Insightly Service to foster customer relationships. Analyze feedback on centralized customer interactions dashboards. Close tickets and share mission-critical information across your organization faster than ever. Get a timely read on current and historical customer status and spark more engaging, relevant conversations. Empower internal teams with the data they need to perform their roles effectively. 

When you use Insightly CRM and Insightly Marketing with Insightly Service, you align your teams and provide unified help desk, marketing, and sales experiences. Your team is empowered to identify, meet, and exceed customer needs, in real time.

Get your free trial of Insightly today.

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Top brands like Apple, Amazon, Trader Joe’s, and Costco (just to name a few) hyper-focus on customer experience. 

Shouldn’t you?

How do you get this competitive advantage?

It’s time to change your perspective. Put customer satisfaction first. Examine your products/services from the customer’s viewpoint. Take a few steps on your own customer journey.

Don’t just learn to address customer needs. Learn what it feels like to have those needs met by your company. Show you truly “get it” and exceed customer expectations. Satisfied customers mean more referrals, a better brand reputation, and repeat sales.

5-steps for a customer-focused strategy

1. Collect and unify your customer feedback

Most companies have plenty of customer information. However, problems can arise if your customer data is siloed across multiple teams and systems. Before you can create a customer-focused organization, you need to get your entire frontline staff on the same page (e.g. the same CRM).

For smooth customer journeys, choose a unified CRM that eliminates departmental data silos. For example, would your sales team benefit from the customer data and feedback stored on your marketing team’s email campaign platform? Would integrating all your customer information help these salespeople personalize their efforts and manage common objections?

Most of all, you need to spend time with your customer feedback. such as the ratio of positive to negative terms in reviews and comments. Be sure to read customer feedback in context. Purchases are emotional decisions. Learn how it feels to go on your company’s customer journey, and share these perspectives with your teams.

2. Study and streamline your touch points

Spend time to scrutinize customer feedback at each step of the customer journey. Use a single-customer-view approach and watch how customers develop individual relationships with your brand. Identify your most popular and productive routes to brand trust. Invest in those proven paths to decrease conversion costs and increase sales.

When compiling a comprehensive list of touch points, organize them in phases. Many touch points occur before the prospect is identified. You probably generate traffic with SEO blogs, social media ads, and search engine ads. Your company may also run print and outdoor ad campaigns. And don’t forget other touch points like events, gift cards, and customer referrals. 

During the sales process, customers consume reviews of your product/service in various forums. Point-of-sale blurbs/brochures can also count as touch points. Of course, your sales process, whether in person or online, must be frictionless and frustration-free.

After the sale, your touch points probably include satisfaction surveys, email lists, reviews, and comments. Of course, many people will continue to touch base with your brand via your social media communities. And remember, billing and shipping touch points matter to customers, as well.

Develop a business model that nurtures customer loyalty after the sale. Asking for feedback builds engagement and allows you to compute important metrics like stickiness, CSAT, Net Promoter Score (NPS) and more. Reduce churn and increase customer retention by showing you care about customer success, even after you’ve scored a sale.

3. Analyze and visualize your customer journey

Study your touchpoint data to anticipate customer needs and eliminate frustrations.

In this popular case study, a Norwegian research team analyzed customer journey touch points. They identified four common problems:

• Timing Errors – Your customer journey needs to make logical sense. This could look like a sales page link that happens too early in an email campaign, making people think you’re going to the hard sell rather than a micro-yes (e.g. download an eBook, check out a blog post). Worse yet, it could be a gaff like asking customers to log into a product before providing a code or registering their credentials.
• Ad Hoc Touch Points – Sometimes, unexpected and unplanned customer interactions happen. For example, when timing errors occur, customers (we hope!) will contact your support team. This can be an opportunity to build trust or further weaken customer relationships. Ad hoc touch points also include customer interactions with your accounting and logistics teams while untangling paperwork snafus.
• Failed Touch Points – Broken links, of course, diminish brand trust and increase bounce rates. Failed integrations between your ad platform, your website, and your point-of-sale software do the same. However, humans make mistakes, too. Late follow-ups, redundant/spammy sales calls, and other gaffs also lead to walk-aways.
• Missing Touch Points – A missing touch point could be as simple as a missing link or an incomplete email series. However, customers may be even more offended by missed meetings and ignored deadlines. These mistakes might be rare, but they can destroy brand trust. Demonstrate professionalism and due diligence to “walk the walk” of your customer-focused strategy across your entire organization.

Unify your data onto a platform with a comprehensive analysis suite. Visualizations matter, especially when sharing customer interaction and behavior insights with stakeholders. Use custom dashboards, graphs, and charts to tell customer stories and extract more value from your data. For example, you could track customer-focused KPIs like satisfaction scores to set team targets.

With the right CRM, it’s easier than ever to watch your customer relationships grow and mature.

4. Foster a customer-focused culture

Provide and track high-quality customer experiences across your entire organization.

To get started, define your vision of customer focus and share it with all stakeholders. It can help to follow Gulati and Oldroid’s four stages of the customer focus journey:

1. Create a centralized customer data repository, such as a unified CRM. Standardize this touchpoint information and organize it by customer, not by product/service, sale, account, location, etc.
2. Select a leader to own this project. This person will oversee the handoff of information from analysts to managers to marketers, to salespeople, etc. (A unified CRM makes this task simpler and easier than ever.)
3. Experiment with interventions. Use your unified data system to analyze and predict behaviors. Test possible improvements to your customer journey with customers (and against a control group).
4. Coordinate your efforts. With a good user experience system in place, let your teams care for your customers. For example, when a logistics team lead might notice a late shipment, she could identify the salesperson with the best relationship with this customer. Who else could best smooth over this mistake on your company’s behalf?

5. Resolve issues quickly

Customer focus means quick issue resolution. 

The logistic team leader from the previous example could use a unified CRM to update delivery schedules. She could reach out to your billing department for a revised quote. Her sales colleague could access this real-time customer relationship data and send out relevant customer service messages.

Of course, a solid software platform will help you catch your mistakes. Employ automated messaging and issue escalation features to alert stakeholders when teams take too long to resolve cases.

Align your teams with Insightly 

Insightly’s unified CRM gives you the tools you need to adopt a customer-focused approach.

It unites Marketing, Sales and Service teams into one tool. Then, you can easily integrate your other apps in your business with Insightly via AppConnect. You can quickly streamline your processes without writing a single line of code.  

Let Insightly’s unified approach give you the insights you need to improve customer focus and build stronger relationships.

 Get your free Insightly trial today.

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Single customer view (SCV), also called a unified customer view, is the process of presenting a single, accurate record for each customer. SCVs allow cross-functional teams and organizations to use aggregated data to drive higher value business outcomes and provide high-quality customer experiences.

Single customer views are imperative for organizations looking to maintain a competitive edge and provide superior customer experiences. In many organizations today, customer data is stored across several different platforms, accessible by individual teams and access is limited or non-existent for many others. This decentralization and inaccessibility leads to missed opportunities, poor customer satisfaction, and lower value business outcomes. 

A 360-degree unified customer view often includes the following data:  

• CRM and customer data
• Behavioral data
• Marketing channel interactions
• Sales representatives’ interactions
• Support tickets
• Project status

Next, we’ll discuss what types of data you’ll want in your single customer view, and the six core benefits you’ll experience once you put yours in place.

What types of data should be in your SCV?

The single customer view is crucial for business success. Data can no longer be stored piecemeal in one platform or another and isolated from the rest of the organization. Instead, data must be shared and instantly accessible across your organization. Single customer views allow you to make critical business decisions with a full picture. The types of data that make the biggest impact are listed below.

Behavioral Data 

Single customer views aggregate a customer’s behavioral data, including website interactions, form submissions, and time on site data (among many other metrics) to allow marketers to make split-second decisions on their audiences’ preferences and buyer’s journey. This data is typically isolated to marketing. With a SCV, sales reps benefit when they know what content piece or pages a prospective customer viewed that prompted them to talk to sales. 

Sales Representatives’ Interactions

SCVs include the most important driver of revenue in a business: sales representatives’ interactions. Pre-sales follow-up and high-quality interactions with customers (driven by background information and superior customer intelligence) are some of the major reasons customers choose one brand over another.   

While most organizations believe they win or lose on price, it’s often service that is the bigger factor, according to recent research from DoubleCheck. In one of DoubleCheck’s recent new win/loss program client onboarding sessions with a midsize enterprise software vendor, the CMO stated, “We felt like the pre-sales support we received wasn’t great, so we didn’t think the solution was worth the extra price.” 

Flaws in pre-sales support can be a major reason C-suite execs or Product Managers often pass on one particular solution in favor of another. SCVs expose this interaction data to your entire organization to create a complete picture of how all teams share in the sales process. For instance, marketing and customer service can get better insight into the sales process when they see phone call frequency/notes, email chains, or in-person interactions (events or quick meetings) that the sales team conducts. Perhaps a customer success rep can better serve a client with a support question if he or she knows that the client is in talks with a sales rep about upselling to the next level of service on your platform.

Customer Service Representatives Interactions

The support tickets that customers submit give insight into how they are using your product or service.  Your technical support team can field hundreds of support tickets per day. Having customer service interaction data at the ready for all teams helps improve understanding across the organization when all teams can see the most common concerns coming in. 

For instance, if a sales team member is on an upsell call with a customer, it’s helpful for that person to know that the client has three open support tickets. Engineering may be interested in seeing what’s causing concern within the user base in real time. Marketing, the team most likely to be monitoring social channels, can benefit from knowing if there are issues with a feature that may come up in social posts.

Marketing Channel Interactions

The number of MarTech applications has risen astronomically in recent years. Chances are, your marketing team has a sizable MarTech stack with tons of valuable information on various platforms. 

Single customer views allow your organization to consolidate fragmented marketing channel interactions into actionable data. It is essential for marketers to clearly understand what is happening across social platforms, SEO tools, ad platforms, SMS tools, marketing automation platforms, and more.

With single customer views, marketers in your organization will no longer be required to waste time and effort logging into multiple platforms to monitor campaign data and conversions. SCVs simplify the work for data analysts by providing a holistic, easy-to-customize view of a customer’s journey across channels, providing a window into the customer’s behavior – tracking their journey from search, to clicks, and ultimately helping you better understand how, when, and why they purchase your product. Better yet, this data is shared across teams like sales and customer success for better communication.

6 Single Customer View Benefits

1. No more data duplication

SCVs eliminate the widespread issue of data duplication across your organization. When data is duplicated, there is a strong likelihood of errors.

2. A better understanding of every single customer

SCVs combine all of the random decentralized fragments of data collected across your organization and then build a true roadmap that clearly presents a holistic view of how your customers interact with your brand, make purchases, and interact with your customer service teams. SCVs allow you to:

• Instantly view each customer interaction and get up to speed on ticket statuses to avoid going into a conversation unprepared or ill-informed. 
• Avoid the frustration of working in standalone service applications.
• Access multiple data points in a single platform – communicate faster, deliver better experiences, and resolve customer issues faster.

3. Improved personalization opportunities

A 360-degree view allows customer service agents and marketers the ability to custom-tailor solutions and interactions as they track each and every touchpoint your customer has with your brand. 

• Understanding your customer’s behaviors allows your organization to build 1:1 relationships and rich, personalized experiences.
• Improved personalization increases brand credibility and enhanced authenticity.
• Better customer experience and more opportunities for customer engagement result from a deeper understanding of customer intent.

4. More efficient marketing campaigns

SCVs allow your team to improve targeting and reach customers at their decision point rather than dragging out marketing campaigns due to poor understanding of each segment’s customer journey. 

• Single customer views ensure better audience segmentation and improve campaign performance.
• Enriched data allows you to improve your ad spend and laser-target your marketing messages to ensure they reach the right audience at the right time.

5. Faster customer service inquiry resolutions

A 360-view of each customer enables you to empower your teams to quickly solve customer challenges.

• Mission-critical customer data is available to all your teams, in real time, empowering them to have more relevant conversations that drive customer satisfaction and success.
• Your team can close tickets and share information across your organization faster than ever.
• Understanding churn rates and churn risk tells you where and when to intervene, re-engaging customers throughout the renewal cycle.

6. A better user experience

Rich user experiences increase the likelihood of future purchases and ensure customer delight across all segments. Delivering world-class experiences will set you apart, drive growth, and improve your brand’s positioning as a leader in your industry. 

Get a 360 degree Unified Customer View in a Unified CRM

Your SCV can be a reality; choosing the right CRM is a first step. Insightly’s Account Plan feature is a great way to set the vision for your SCV. If you’re ready to choose your first CRM switch from your current platform, it’s time to check out Insightly, a unified CRM that combines sales, marketing, project management, and service into one platform to unify your teams. Plus, with Insightly AppConnect, you can build low-code or no-code integrations to connect Insightly with all of the other tools you use throughout your organization. 

Know your customers. Build stronger relationships and unify your fractured data with Insightly’s unified CRM. Schedule a free needs assessment and a demo today.

The post Single Customer View: What it is and why you need it appeared first on Insightly.

Engagement is a predictor of whether or not that customer will stay with you, and possibly even refer you, so it can be a leading metric for future revenue and growth.

So here’s how to use your CRM to track customer engagement and the appropriate Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for your business size.

What is customer engagement?

Though a sale or a subscription is a landmark in a customer’s relationship with your company, it’s just the beginning. Engaged customers create emotional bonds with your brand, and can create a valuable feedback loop for product improvements. 

You can elect to add engaged customers to customer or member councils who can get early access to new products or services and provide candid feedback in both one-on-one and focus-group style programs. If you’re in software, your engaged customers can be the ultimate beta testing group. 

In the positive cases, engaged customers become brand champions who are willing to provide referrals, testimonials, and enthusiastic reviews. In the best cases, they become brand evangelists who regularly engage in a positive manner with your brand on social media, and may even speak on your behalf at events, effectively functioning as an extension of your marketing team. 

Why measure customer engagement?

While engagement is a major revenue predictor in recurring revenue businesses, all businesses can benefit from surfacing these metrics. No one will argue that engaged customers create lasting value for your company. Knowing you can count on positive references and referrals from clients will help you compete for more and bigger deals. While some of this will likely be qualitative in nature, there are tools and metrics available today that can quantify engagement and track it over time, giving you insights into past, present, and future performance.

Five customer engagement metrics and KPIs that matter

There are five top customer engagement metrics that matter to nearly all companies. Each is described below. If you are wondering which matters the most to your company in particular, read on. At the end of each KPI summary, you’ll see a list of which kinds of companies typically prioritize it.

Start-ups defining and implementing their Unique Selling Points (USPs) will track different KPIs than mid-market companies working to scale up, gain traction, and win market share. Massive corporations typically focus on metrics that reflect their dependence on established brand reputations. That said, these metrics surface at the top for nearly all organizations.

1. First-week engagement

Engagement is often at its peak at the start of a contract. Make the most of your customer’s initial enthusiasm with streamlined setups, progress tracking, and solid support.

In a 2021 study, Linköping University’s Gustav Fridell examined SaaS best practices. He found that reducing friction and monitoring progress increased first-week retention.

Consider guiding, tracking, and displaying your new user’s progress through the onboarding process. They are more likely to stick with your solution if they can visualize a successful customer journey, especially during their first crucial steps.

For example, these tips can improve the new customer experience and lower abandonment and unsubscribe rates in the software industry:

• Make your platform or tool intuitive and easy to learn.
• Offer fast page load speeds.
• Prioritize addressing bugs and glitches that emerge during onboarding steps.
• Demonstrate ‘quick wins’ and value early on.

No user experience is perfect. Inevitably, people will have some trouble adopting your products or services. When they reach out, you need to offer reliable customer service to promote customer retention. Invest in robust support and show new customers you care about their success. 

Chatbots can be a great tool when implemented thoughtfully, but nothing is better than interacting with a deeply-knowledgeable support person. Short term churn can be avoided by quickly showing value to your customer in the onboarding phase. You have to get it right.  

Best for: Mid-market companies, especially startups, should hyper-focus on frictionless onboarding, user journey tracking, and responsive, knowledgeable support. At a small scale, individual customer success equals corporate viability.

Large brands with solid reputations enjoy more initial customer enthusiasm than smaller organizations. Their positive legacy marketing efforts mean users are less likely to jump ship when frustrated.

2. User Activity

SaaS companies, mainly social media platforms, eCommerce brands, and game manufacturers, pay close attention to their Daily Active Users (DAU) and Monthly Active Users (MAU) metrics. However, DAUs and MAUs aren’t just about competing for market share. Together they create an early-warning system. 

Think of MAUs as benchmarks and DAUs as indicators. If you see a significant difference between your daily numbers and your monthly averages, something unfavorable is happening. DAU valleys or spikes could be your first signal of a major problem or win.

Best for: Companies of all sizes should compare DAUs to MAUs to stay ahead of news events and emerging trends. Small and medium-sized companies can track this metric to acknowledge marketing strategy milestones. However, MAUs are crucial for large companies to maximize their market share for bottom-line profitability.

3. Stickiness

You can use DAUs and MAUs to measure “stickiness.” This metric represents how happy people are with your product or service based on how frequently they are returning. It’s an effective way to predict how likely users are to stick with your brand.

Typically, stickiness equals Daily Active Users divided by Monthly Active Users.

Stickiness = DAU / MAU

However, you may want to consider alternative formulas that account for unique users. Unique users represent the number of visitors to your site. An increase in this metric shows your company and website are growing. 

Businesses often look to churn rate as a measure of stickiness, but keep in mind that churn is a lagging indicator that doesn’t allow you to be as proactive as the formula above. 

Best for: Stickiness matters most for startups that need to build momentum and raise brand awareness. 

Mid-market and large businesses also want to limit turnover, but they are typically better positioned to tolerate variations in customer engagement and have more varied marketing campaigns.

4. Net Promoter Score (NPS)

You’ve likely seen NPS in action even if you’ve never heard the term. If you’ve ever been presented with a scale from 1-10 asking how likely you are to recommend a company, you’ve been NPS’d. The idea is that the most satisfied customers (those who rank you as a 9 or 10) will spread the word about your product or service. 

When you survey your customers, some will say they’ll probably promote you to their peers. Some will say they won’t. And some won’t feel inclined to share positive or negative information about you. The scale lists scores of 0-6 as “detractors”, 7-8 as “passives,” and 9-10 as “promoters.”

To calculate your NPS, subtract the percentage of survey respondents who would say negative things from those who would offer positive things about your brand.

NPS = Promoter % – Detractor %

For example, if 70% of people share positives and 20% share negatives, your NPS would equal 50. Many popular brands struggle with their NPS score. Apple, which is considered world-class when it comes to NPS, sits at around 50.

Best for: Large companies with massive ad budgets need to track brand health with the NPS metric carefully. Experts consider this a fundamental KPI for predicting near-term revenues, especially your target audience. Smaller and emerging businesses that rely less on brand recognition and more on networking and feature-driven ad campaigns rely less on this KPI.

5. Customer satisfaction (CSAT)

SaaS companies often measure CSAT by asking users for short one-to-five star or emoji ratings. You can use these quick check-ins to measure the customer experience with the features they use. 

This is different from NPS, which provides a more general satisfaction rating of your product, service, or brand. In short, CSAT tracks customer satisfaction, and NPS measures customer loyalty.

Best for: Because they focus almost exclusively on new solutions and USPs, startups must measure CSATs. Small SaaS businesses need to know specific user preferences when offering suites of new tools. Larger companies need CSAT data when adding features but depend more on NPS scores for predictions.

Track user engagement and much more with Insightly Service and unified CRM

There are other metrics out there, but this list represents a good batch to focus on first.  

With Insightly Service, mission-critical customer data is available to all your teams, in real time, empowering them to have more relevant conversations that drive customer satisfaction and success. A dashboard view gives you rolled-up access to the data that’s important across the organization and to measure the KPIs that are vital to your team. 

Break down silos with a robust view of the customer. Empower your support teams to solve tickets quickly, listen with empathy, and create sales opportunities right in the application. See the features that matter to you with a free demo of Insightly today.

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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.

The post How to use workflow automation in customer service appeared first on Insightly.

But for us marketers, that’s easier said than done. Marketers rarely ever speak directly to a lead, prospect, or customer. Instead, we rely on customer data collected throughout the company.

How can you better access, understand, and use customer data? Start by working closely with your customer success team.

Why you should align customer success with marketing

We talk quite a bit about marketing and sales team alignment. Marketing efforts should be in-step with the sales cycle. Yet, we rarely talk about what happens after the sale is closed. At this point, the account moves to a dedicated account or customer success manager.

It is in marketers’ best interest to build relationships with customer success managers. Their close customer communication provides unique insights that lead to better marketing.

Some of the valuable insights that customer success can provide include:

Increased visibility into customers

Customer data can show you trends and patterns, but sometimes you need to know more. Customer success managers can answer qualitative questions about customers to enhance your data. Customer success managers have conversations that provide insight into the user’s behavior and changes over time. These details about the customer relationship can help marketers tell a more complete customer story.

Share customer reactions

Robust customer data is great, but it’s only historical. We don’t know what the customer experience is at a particular moment. Customer success managers can tell you how your customers are feeling about a product feature, a pricing change, or even a world event in near real-time.

Create a stronger customer profile

You can enhance your customer profiles with this qualitative and real-time information. Customer success managers can also provide feedback on these profiles to make them more accurate.

Measuring marketing programs using customer success data

Typically, we measure marketing against revenue. If marketing programs are successful, they lead to increased monthly or annual recurring revenue, or MRR and ARR, respectively.

Customer success is measured similarly. If customer success is thriving, MRR and ARR increases because of the lack of customer churn.

Consider measuring your marketing programs against which you can drive growth for customer success key performance indicators (KPIs). For example, perhaps customers who come in through a webinar are less likely to churn. By investing in more webinars, you’ll improve customer long-term value.

Using customer success documentation for content marketing

Customer success managers are content marketers. They develop resources for customers to better use your product. Usually these are ‘help’ or ‘support’ articles, but sometimes they are videos, walkthroughs, or webinars. They also have access to great customer profiles and stories.

The problem? Rarely do these pieces live on a company’s main marketing site. At best, they are on a help or support subdomain. At worst, they are PDFs that are shared privately with customers.

Why should these valuable pieces of content be hidden under a bushel basket? They provide a resource to customers and they often have high SEO value.

Consider repurposing this content on the blog or marketing site. If the content doesn’t meet your marketing guidelines, rework and rewrite.

How customer success can improve customer marketing

Most marketing efforts drive toward acquiring customers. Yet, once you achieve team alignment with your customer success and marketing teams, you may shift some focus to customer marketing.

What is customer marketing?

Customer marketing is marketing that’s focused on retention, not acquisition. This means that you create marketing programs for current customers, not future customers. It includes decreasing churn, but also upgrading and upselling.

For successful customer marketing, the marketing, sales, account management, and customer success teams must be in lockstep.

If there’s a dedicated role, i.e. a customer marketing manager, that person will report into both marketing and customer success.

3 ways customer success can amplify customer marketing

They can uncover new ideas

If a customer needs a resource, they’re likely to ask their dedicated success manager. Customers might request a new tutorial, video, or support document. If marketers have a close relationship with customer success, they will have a direct pipeline to useful content ideas.

They can collect qualitative feedback about customer experience

Was your new email campaign helpful or annoying? A customer success manager can get a customer on the phone and ask about the customer experience right away. Marketers don’t have to work in a black box or wait for survey results to understand the impact of their efforts.

They can identify customer advocates

An advocate who goes to bat for you is a strong way to both acquire and retain customers. Customer success can identify and cultivate advocates so marketing can best position them to engage new and old customers.

Should you have a customer marketing team?

How do you know when it’s time to refocus your efforts on customer marketing? Consider this checklist when deciding if you should hire a customer marketing team.

• You have a complete acquisition marketing and customer success team
• You’ve reached your goals for new MRR or ARR
• Customer churn is a major problem
• There’s a lot of potential to upgrade and upsell

How to communicate & collaborate with customer success

When aligning teams, the biggest challenge is aligning communication and collaboration channels.

Marketing teams typically use project management tools focused on task completion. Often, customer success works on a ‘ticket’ system designed to address urgent issues.

To smoothly integrate your teams, consider the following collaboration tools and techniques:

Customer relationship management (CRM) tool

Your CRM should serve both customer success and marketing functions. A unified CRM should have project management functionality, organize and centralize customer data, and provide visibility into how marketing impacts customer metrics.

Slack or internal chat

Especially in remote or hybrid environments, chatting is crucial to developing team rapport. Start a dedicated marketing/CS channel to openly share thoughts and ideas. This will help your team members feel comfortable working with one another.

Integrated meetings

No one wants to add another Zoom to their calendar. Yet, weekly stand-ups or report-outs are how we understand what is happening at the company. Consider assigning an ‘ambassador’ from each team to sit in on the other’s weekly meeting. This will give the teams insight into one another without adding to meeting fatigue.

Conclusion

There is no downside to better collaboration and alignment between teams. As a marketer across industries, my relationships with customer success teams have both enhanced my personal knowledge, and led to better business outcomes. When customer success and marketing work closely together, customer retention and revenue is certain to grow.

Sources:

Want A Better Customer Experience – Align Customer Success And Marketing. Philipp Wolf. Custify.

Why Customer Success Should Own Customer Marketing. Will Robins. Gainsight.

The post Why you should align marketing and customer success teams appeared first on Insightly.

In order to thrive in a post COVID-19 world, you need to reassess the ways you connect with your customers.

Here are a few things to keep in mind before you do so.

Get rid of silos

Make sure all your teams use data to create a complete picture of the clientele.

Sales, marketing and customer service teams are working in silos—which causes a number of problems. Namely, it creates a fragmented image of your consumers and their journey across too many places for your team to be serving them at peak efficiency.

Getting everyone on the same page is a first step and one that is essential to re-connecting with your people and understanding them in a more complete way.

Don’t ditch digital

Zoom fatigue is real and all of us are craving in-person connection. Though we’re on our way back to normalcy, don’t start planning for in-person conferences with customers for this year just yet.

Over the past year, you’ve (hopefully) spent time honing your digital communications and marketing strategy while recognizing the power of a well-crafted email campaign.

Your tone and candor in email is extremely important. You have to know your audience in order to be able to strike the right, personalized tone. Knowing your customers, and the needs and challenges they face, is essential to delivering appropriate communications.

Redefine “normal”

One of the good things to come out of 2020 is a more compassionate approach to workplace leadership.

If you weren’t taking a people-centered approach with your customers beforehand, you absolutely should be now. We’ve seen a big shift toward the “humanization” of marketing.

Sometimes it really is as simple as asking your clientele how you can help and voicing your support for whatever their current challenges are. Shift your thinking away from only achieving your own goals to supporting your followers in achieving their goals as well.

A customer-centric approach to marketing is essential to humanizing your marketing efforts and your brand. Make sure they feel heard and have an opportunity to discuss feedback with you. Use  satisfaction surveys, a closed online forum for customers, or direct outreach. Provide guides on using your products to navigate through a crisis, whether on continuing to manage remote work, or how to prepare for the post-pandemic world. Even if your services aren’t directly the most relevant, you can provide your people with curated content.

People are craving a return to normalcy, but it’s important to recognize that things may not be truly “normal” for some time and that may not always be a bad thing.

The post Reconnecting with customers in a post-pandemic world appeared first on Insightly.

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.

The post What is customer churn rate? 5 tips to lower it appeared first on Insightly.

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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