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.

As technology converges and start-ups grow, businesses and consumers have more choices than ever. Smart executives know that the customer experience is what is going to win in today’s crowded marketplace. 

But you’ve got this, right? You’ve mapped the customer journey and you’ve analyzed the customer experience (CX). Customer support is the pride and joy of your company. Your execs think that customers are thrilled with your service. 

But are they?

According to a recent survey commissioned by Insightly and conducted by Zogby Analytics, there is a disconnect between what consumers say and what companies believe. 

Only 6% of consumers say a company’s customer support always exceeds expectations but 35% of business decision makers believe that their company always exceeds customers’ expectations.

Ouch.

There’s a CX disconnect  

Maybe your CX team isn’t killing it? Check out these stats:

About a third of Americans (31%) would rather wait in line at the DMV than try to resolve an issue with a company or service. They would also learn a TikTok dance with their kid (18%), get a tooth pulled (14%), or stay with their in-laws for a month (10%).

Why would anyone choose these awful alternatives to simply placing a call with customer service? According to the study, they say they fear being ignored (30%), having to repeat oneself to multiple departments (30%) and length of time to get the issue identified (27%).

How does your customer support process work? Would your customers ever feel ignored during the process, get stuck in ‘a phone tree of frustration,’ or spend an unreasonable amount of time on the phone? 

When was the last time you tested it? Listened to calls? Sent in a social media message to see the response?

It’s always a good time to examine your processes and look for incremental improvements. 

Appreciating your customer support team

Don’t ever underestimate what it takes to answer support calls. You need a deep understanding of your product and your customers, plus a whole lot of empathy. These team members start each day knowing that every time they pick up a call, they may be dealing with an irate person. 

Business decision makers on the same Insightly survey don’t seem to have the personality to perform the functions that their support teams do. 

For example, 44 percent of business decision makers surveyed said they’d rather enter data in a spreadsheet than deal with a call from an angry customer, while three in 10 said they would do almost anything other than take an angry call, like sit on an 8-hour Zoom call (13%) or sit next to a crying baby on a cross-country flight (15%).

How do we show this team how awesome they truly are? First off, put National Customer Service Week on your calendar. It’s typically the first week in October. Use this as an opportunity to recognize your team’s hard work. But don’t wait for a special occasion; check in on the team and ensure they have the leadership, tools, and bandwidth to make every engagement a successful one. 

CX shows up on the bottom line

There is good news here, too. Unlike the external threats to your business like emerging competitors, market forces, economic downturns and the like, customer experience is something you fully control.

Data from the same study reveals just how powerful this can be.

When customers are unhappy, businesses worry that they will complain to customer service (23%), complain on social media (56%) or, even worse, choose a different provider (21%).

However, when happy, American consumers are most likely to tell all their friends (27%), tell the company (25%), write a comment on review sites (23%) and post about it on social media (15%).

These actions should sound familiar since they are all characteristics of brand advocates. According to Entrepreneur.com, brand advocates are super fans and brand loyalists who engage with the brand because they truly love it and will take action if asked.

If you reframe calls and outreach to customer service as an opportunity to create brand advocates, you start a cycle that fills the top of your funnel with new leads. 

Feed the top of the funnel with successful CX

After seeing these statistics, what are some action steps that leaders like you can take today? 

• Examine closed tickets. Don’t just read them. Look at the time stamps. Look at the length of the calls. Listen to the calls if possible. How can each interaction be studied and improved the next time?
• Reframe your mindset on support. Every time the phone rings or an email is submitted is an opportunity to create a positive experience and produce a brand advocate. Think about the things that people said they would rather do than talk to you (e.g. learning a TikTok dance), and then elevate their experience by delighting them.
• Some people will never be happy. Ensure you have ‘no blame culture’ from the top. Frame those negative customer interactions as learning experiences for the team without blaming team members, product, sales, etc.
• Encourage leadership to personally call random customers regularly and check-in to see how they are doing. They could potentially intercept a problem before it snowballs, but they will also gain an understanding of what’s going on daily on the front lines.

Manage relationships with Insightly Service

Your customer service team needs a powerful tool to meet the needs of your customer base. Wouldn’t it be ideal if your tool for customer service was part of the same suite of products as your CRM and marketing automation platform? So the sales, marketing and customer service teams are aligned on a single, powerful platform?

Built on Insightly’s platform, Insightly Service is a customer service and support ticketing product designed to work seamlessly across the business applications that companies are already using. With Insightly Service, critical data is shared across departments and in real-time, so that all customer-facing teams are aligned and empowered to have more relevant conversations that drive customer satisfaction and success.  

Insightly Service can be bundled with the entire Insightly suite of customer relationship management applications and is also available for purchase as a standalone customer service and support product. 

Get a demo of Insightly Service today.

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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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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.

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.

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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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Travis Kalanick and Garrett Camp couldn’t get a ride on a cold winter evening in Paris, so they came up with a ride-sharing app and called it Uber. Jessica Alba didn’t feel safe using childcare products from popular brands, so she launched The Honest Company to make baby and beauty products without synthetic ingredients. These are stories of entrepreneurs building products they wanted to use. They became their own customers and found enough demand to turn ideas into business opportunities. It’s a familiar theme in many inventions and company origin stories.

There is another familiar theme. According to Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen, more than 30,000 new products are introduced to market every year, but only 5% of them succeed.

So what sets apart successful entrepreneurs from all those whose stories we don’t know or remember? Part of the answer is their sustained focus on the customer. Here are a few basic steps in building products you want to use and becoming a customer-centric company.

1. Know your audience

This may seem pretty obvious, but so often entrepreneurs get distracted by shiny objects and start building products or features that don’t add value for customers. Once you have established there is a demand for your product, stay focused on your customers’ needs. Consider what your customers can afford and are willing to pay for. This is true whether you are building a productivity app or a toothbrush.

In the software industry, for example, there is a big difference between building products for large enterprises versus mid-market companies or small businesses. Large companies can afford expensive platforms that come with lots of bells and whistles, while smaller companies can’t. Yet, every business owner, no matter the size of his/her company, wants technology that can help them to save time, become more productive, and increase revenue. They just don’t want to pay a steep price for implementation and the time and effort it takes to set up complex systems. The trick here is to scrutinize every new idea to make sure it creates more value for customers and at a price they are willing to pay.

2. Collect customer feedback

Talk to your customers on a regular basis. Find your own way to reach out and connect. Send brief surveys, ask for individual feedback, when possible, and/or organize groups of 10-15 customers to test a few specific ideas.

For example, if you are developing an app or software, you may get a wide range of requests and ideas. So, it’ll be up to you and your team to come up with product features or solutions that are generic enough to solve most of what your customers want, while leaving some room for future adjustments. Deciding on which features or products to prioritize is one of the most difficult tasks in product development.

Sometimes, after the initial feedback, you still may not have a clear idea of what you are going to build. Use these first conversations to gain more clarity on what you want to do and prepare for more informed conversations with the next group of customers.

As you review customer requests, you might change your mind or rearrange the order in which you will deliver different features. Set clear priorities and timelines, so that both your team and your customers know what to expect.

When you listen to your customers and follow up on their feedback, you’re not just gaining valuable information and improving your product, you’re also strengthening your customer relationships.

3. Make it easy to use & buy

This is as true for consumer products as it is in the B2B space. Time is our most valuable asset. And with so much continuous information and distractions, our attention span is getting shorter and harder to keep. The only way your customers are going to buy from you is if you make it easy to find and use your products.

Here again, you must know your customers at a granular level. Learn where your target customers get their information and how they consume content. If you sell clothing or decorate homes, Instagram might be a perfect tool to find new customers and keep them engaged.

In the software industry, a product’s ease-of-use is one of the top factors in user adoption. If customers don’t quickly adopt and use the software on a regular basis or as-intended, they’ll never be able to realize its full value. Forget about upsell or cross-sell. It’s as simple as that.

Don’t get too comfortable with your product or marketing success. Consumer behavior, including buying habits and preferences, is constantly changing. The expectations for personalized interactions, stellar customer service, and convenience are only growing. If you don’t make it easy for customers to buy and use your products, someone else will and your customers will flock to them pretty quickly.

4. Scale with your customers

This is probably more relevant for B2B than consumer products. Whether you offer consulting services or build software, you may start by building products for small companies. But, as your customers’ businesses grow, you’ll need to scale operations and products to meet their new needs. They may ask for more customizable tools that are easy to adopt and use. Some features that were “nice-to-have” will become “must-haves.” For example, when a business goes from 10 employees to 2,000, the “search bar” to look up an employee in the list (instead of endlessly scrolling) becomes pretty useful.

Growing businesses want tools that scale and adapt to their needs, so they don’t have to get a replacement, retrain staff, and reshape their tech stack every year. If you want to keep your customers and grow your own business, stay focused on your customers throughout their journey. Make your products scalable and scale your operations to serve bigger customers.

Just as Uber went on to add UberX and UberEats and The Honest Company launched a whole slew of baby and beauty products, successful companies adapt and scale with changing customer demands and preferences.

Read more from Anthony:

• Marketing’s role in building a customer-centric company
• How to approach digital transformation in the new normal
• Tips on introducing artificial intelligence in your business
• 4 steps to building a unified business approach in 2020

The post How to build products you want to use & people want to buy appeared first on Insightly.

• 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.

We cover important steps, like building the right team to drive your efforts, defining customers’ needs, and mapping your process and touchpoints to align with those needs. We then discuss the technology that drives customer success today.

We wrap up by walking you through creating predefined, repeatable practices to streamline each stage of your mapped process and the metrics used to measure your performance.

Preparation is the most important phase of kicking off a CS program. Let’s dig in.

1. Hire top talent to drive your efforts

The success and effectiveness of your CS efforts hinge on the team that drives it. They will be at the center of every CS process, so it’s important to invest in top talent.

However, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to attract and retain the best candidates available. Research indicates that employee turnover of those born between 1980 and 1996 is costing the U.S. economy $30.5 billion annually.(1) So, how do you prevent employee turnover?

Retaining top talent through employee engagement

The key to maintaining high levels of employee satisfaction and retaining top talent lies in engaging employees. Consider the following statistics from Gallup:

• Well engaged teams see a 41% drop in absenteeism and a 17% rise in productivity
• Those highly engaged teams experience 59% less employee turnover
• Highly-engaged business units generate 21% greater profitability for their organizations (2)

2. Understand & relate to customers’ needs

It’s easy to start a CS program with a strategy defined by your perception of what your customers need. However, this is a common mistake that can have serious impacts on your program’s outcomes. To truly drive lasting success, you need to understand what success means to your customers.

Market research helps. But the best way to gain this insight is by going directly to the source and asking customers and what they need to be successful. Customer surveys help you do this, particularly if you offer incentives for participation.

PRO TIP: Be sure to carefully select your survey participants. Customers without a vested interest in your objective will complete a survey to receive the incentive without thinking critically about the answers they provide.

3. Map the customer journey

With fresh, reliable insight into customers’ needs, you can more accurately map the customer journey. When creating your customer journey map, be sure to include the touchpoints and deliverables customers require at each stage. This will act as a roadmap to ensure you deliver a consistent customer experience.

PRO TIP: This is a vital step in preparing to launch your CS program. It will align teams around a central, documented process and define your CS playbooks (more on playbooks below).

4. Implement technology to drive your success

Much of the administration of your CS program should be streamlined with automation technology.

The role of CRMs

Customer relationship management (CRM) platforms play a major role in driving customer success. They capture the data needed to drive CS programs, track defined KPIs, and provide invaluable insight into customers’ needs, challenges, goals, etc.

Having a CRM solution in place is key to sustaining an effective customer success program. CRMs drive trusting customer relationships, which are at the core of customer success. They also facilitate better customer data management, which is vital to achieving CS objectives.

Customer success management platforms

Customer success management (CSM) software started to gain traction in the 2010s and is a rapidly growing industry today. Companies like Gainsight, ChurnZero, and Custify are moving the industry forward.

Many businesses implement CSM solutions, but these systems need the data captured by a CRM to deliver value. So, businesses invest in both systems then integrate them.

Instead of paying two vendors, many organizations simplify things by using one of the few CRMs that offer customer success programs. This lowers costs, reduces the size of your tech stack, and increases data accuracy as all data is stored in one central database.

PRO TIP: Automation technology is key to driving CS programs. However, always remember that certain processes require a human touch and are devalued when automated. Personal, telephone outreach to customers is a great example of the need for that human touch.

5. Create customer success playbooks

CS playbooks are process documents that outline the internal and external actions that should occur at each stage of the customer journey. They define how your desired customer experience looks and the key performance benchmarks you expect to hit at each stage.

CS playbook basics

Playbooks need to align with overall business objectives to drive the results and business growth you seek. Moreover, each playbook outlines various paths your team can take at each respective stage based on individual customer context. In other words, a single playbook can outline 10 different scenarios to ensure you’re prepared for the unexpected.

For example, product adoption playbooks are incredibly important, but there’s no cookie-cutter approach. A CS team might need an adoption playbook version for customers who aren’t using their product, another for customers with low usage rates, and a third for those with high usage rates.

Customer success playbook examples

Common playbook examples include:

• Pre-sales playbooks
• Customer onboarding and training playbooks
• Product adoption playbooks
• Executive change management playbooks (e.g. actions to take if your customer hires a new CEO)
• Playbooks for routine customer check-ins
• Playbooks that define how you’ll address at-risk customers
• Contract renewal playbooks
• Customer churn playbooks

Ultimately, the playbooks that you need depend on your internal operating processes. There’s no repeatable template that applies across the board.

6. Define KPIs & CS metrics

Before kicking off your initiative, you need to define the metrics you’ll track to measure performance. There is currently no metric specifically designed for customer success teams, but some of the best minds in the space are pooling expertise to define a CS-specific metric.

Until that happens, CS teams use a constellation of metrics designed for other teams to triangulate their CS performance. Commonly used metrics used in combination include:

• Customer churn and retention rates
• Customer health score
• Net promoter score (NPS)
• 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

As you can see, this can become overly convoluted and confusing. That’s why the CS community is working on defining its own metric rather than piecing together a somewhat accurate measurement of their performance with metrics not intended to measure CS.

In part three of this three-part series on customer success, we’ll cover those steps and provide guidance around how to kickstart a CS program.

Stay tuned for part three. If you missed part one, bring yourself up to speed by reading our recent post, What is customer success?

Read more like this:

• What is customer success?
• 5 trends impacting customer engagement
• How to improve customer experiences using data analytics
• Rethinking customer retention

Sources:

1. “Millennials: The Job-Hopping Generation,” Gallup, Updated 2019

2. “The Right Culture: Not Just About Employee Satisfaction,” Gallup, Updated 2020

The post Customer success program prep: a six-point checklist appeared first on Insightly.

To put it simply, customer success is the accumulated success achieved by a customer, made possible through a mutually-beneficial relationship and collaboration between a software provider and its customers. But this definition doesn’t do the concept justice.

Below, we clear up the confusion around what CS is. We also explain how CS is dependent on, and interconnected with, an entire organization, both from a revenue and a collaboration perspective.

What does customer success mean today?

To understand what CS truly is at its core, it’s beneficial to first understand the evolution of CS, and why it has become so important today. Customer success is almost entirely contained within the realm of B2B SaaS businesses.

The idea of your customer being successful using your product is simple to grasp. To conceptualize it in the way it’s being used today, we must look at the birth of modern-day cloud computing.

Cloud computing becomes mainstream

Until 1999, computer software was sold on floppy, then compact discs, that were installed on a local computer.(1) When the software provider released an update, you received a new disc and installed the update yourself.

Then, something revolutionary took place. A sales executive from Oracle founded Salesforce, with a vision that in order to make powerful B2B software available to the masses, it had to be accessible through the internet.

An unexpected challenge

When B2B SaaS products became popular in the early 2000s, vendors began to face a problem. They’d invested significantly in acquiring new customers and growing brand awareness but hadn’t invested in customer training, nor thought about retaining these new customers and renewing their subscription-based contracts.

This frustrated customers as they were using complicated software but not receiving sufficient guidance on how to use it properly. High customer churn rates became rampant and this new method of delivering software was in jeopardy.

Customer success is born

At that point, customer success arrived on the scene. It was the tool early B2B SaaS companies discovered and implemented to resolve these issues and slow customer churn. They realized customers had to be successful using their products, otherwise their recurring revenue business model might not survive.

This planted the seeds that would grow into modern customer success and continue to define its evolution.

Defining customer success today

With that background in mind, here is a more nuanced definition of customer success:

Customer success is the end result of a multi-faceted, organization-wide effort to understand customer needs, challenges, and goals, then work directly with customers to meet and surpass those objectives.

This requires vendors to provide all the tools and education needed to ensure that customers: 1) understand the purpose of the product they’re using, and 2) know how to use it effectively to drive their own business success and revenue growth.

Customer success in 2020: Who needs it & why?

B2B SaaS companies need an internal customer success function. Today, many B2B SaaS companies have their own CS teams focused entirely on educating customers on how to successfully use their software as it relates to each customer’s specific use case.

Teams of customer success managers (CSMs) support customers on a one-on-one basis with the end goal of driving their business success. Each customer has a dedicated CSM that understands their needs, challenges, and goals. CSMs support and help each individual customer achieve their unique goals and in a way that aligns with their operating practices.

This is necessary given increasing competition in B2B SaaS. The companies leveraging success programs are pulling ahead of those that don’t. Customer expectations now obligate B2B SaaS companies to do so.

Why is customer success so important?

CS impacts the rest of your business in many ways. It provides numerous benefits and involves many moving parts. In short, it’s all interconnected and it starts with a vendor’s employee satisfaction rates.

Let’s unpack this web of interconnectedness.

Employee satisfaction

Satisfied employees are more motivated to produce a high-quality work product. They pay more attention to customers’ needs, leading to a better customer experience.

Customer experience

When your company delivers a positive customer experience, it generates satisfied customers. They advocate for your brand and are loyal to it. They help expand your brand awareness through word of mouth advertising. This creates market trust and attracts new customers.

Organizations can deliver a better experience by leveraging the personal and historical customer data captured and stored in a unified CRM. A unified CRM provides many benefits, including the ability to drive customer success.

Customers benefit when a company uses a unified CRM through the increased quality of support and attention they receive from their vendor. Vendors benefit through higher rates of customer retention and lower rates of customer churn.

Customer churn and retention

The happier and more loyal customers are, the more likely they are to stick with your company over the long term. This reduces customer churn rates and consequently increases customer retention rates. Those two factors lead to further benefits for the vendor.

Increased revenue & business growth

When customer churn is low and retention is high, your company has a reliable source of recurring revenue. This is important to note because, on average, 83% of SaaS revenue comes from customer contract renewals.(2)

This sounds like an easy-to-navigate process, but it’s more complicated than it appears on the surface.

How does customer success work?

Customer success teams take the baton from sales once a new customer is acquired. CSMs’ first task is to conduct comprehensive customer onboarding programs, complete with extensive product training.

CS teams then continue to work directly with customers to ensure that success is achievable, scalable, and sustainable.

This requires customer check-ins, routine health checks, and a deep understanding of how successful customers are at any given point in time. It also requires CSMs to initiate additional touchpoints to ensure customers always have the tools they need and receive additional education when needed.

Customer success doesn’t start and end with onboarding, but rather it continues through a customers’ entire lifetime and relationship with the vendor.

What do CS teams do?

Ensuring long-term customer success requires CS teams to have customer success playbooks that define actions that should take place at given points in the customer journey. For example, each CS team should have a customer renewal playbook that is put into action when a customer’s renewal date approaches.

How a unified CRM facilitates success

A unified CRM facilitates customer success through automated notifications and trigger-based actions that are prompted by customer behavior.

At each touchpoint, CS teams step in—often in collaboration with other internal teams—to apply CS playbooks at each pre-defined point along the customer journey.

They collaborate with sales, marketing, customer support, account management, and more. In this way, customer success is a company-wide initiative that wouldn’t be possible without participation from other teams.

Continuing the discussion

You now understand what customer success is and have a high level of understanding of how it works.

Stay tuned for part two where we dive deeper into what you need to prepare for and launch your customer success initiatives.

Read more like this:

• 3 ways a CRM success plan can help you maximize ROI
• Restarting the customer journey
• Lead generation vs. customer retention
• Rethinking customer retention

Sources

1. “Introducing customer success 2.0: The new growth engine”, McKinsey and Company, 2018

2. “Customer success accelerates user adoption by rapidly creating product experts,” Mindbody, 2018

The post What is customer success? appeared first on Insightly.