Customers are the lifeblood of every business – we can’t argue about it.
That is why the Customer Success (CS) team is critical in today’s customer-centric economy as they serve as a compass for a company’s most valuable customers throughout the lifecycle.
The Customer Success team’s primary goal is to strengthen client relationships to ensure that the client gets the most out of the products or services they offer at every stage of the buyer’s journey, resulting in high customer satisfaction.
However, as a company grows and its client base expands, the Customer Success team may find it challenging to keep up due to various causes, resulting in poor customer satisfaction, increased churn, and lower renewal rates.
That’s the time when you need to level up.
Re-evaluating your Customer Success team is needed to strengthen their core, to understand better what processes are failing and what parts of the plan need improvements.
We’ve listed below the 5 best practices to level up your Customer Success team:
1. Build a customer-centric culture
The significance of providing a positive customer experience is supported by research.
However, given the plethora of evidence of how beneficial customer service is to improve business outcomes, it is still apparent that building a customer-centric team is complicated to achieve right across an organisation.
Excellent customer service is more than just answering phone calls or queries or tracking sales. It’s about building a cultural identity that motivates your company to provide the best possible products or services to your customers and allows them to realise their true value along the way.
It isn’t always that straightforward. But if you succeed, it will have an immediate and beneficial influence on your Customer Success team.
According to SurveyMonkey research, 74% of people who consider their jobs customer-centric find their jobs meaningful. This implies that more than half of employees are happier within a customer-centric environment.
While creating a customer-centric culture isn’t easy, it is possible if you follow these strategies:
· Prioritise Customer Satisfaction
· Remove silos within your organisation
· Encourage active listening
· Align your core values
· Invest in customer success and support technology
2. Establish Faster Feedback Loops
As Elon Musk said, “I think it’s very important to have a feedback loop, where you’re constantly thinking about what you’ve done and how you could be doing it better.”
What is a Feedback Loop, and how does it work?
Feedback loops are techniques for responding to consumers who provided feedback about your products or services. The idea is to collect positive and negative feedback that can be built into the process to evaluate continuous product improvement.
Feedback loops are typically composed of these step-by-step processes: planning, collecting data, analysing, communicating, and correcting.
Customers should always feel confident that their concerns will be heard and resolved.
Additionally, Customer Success should send customer feedback to the appropriate team (such as engineering or product – depending on the type of feedback), who will work as quickly as possible to find a solution.
By building a faster feedback loop, your customer loyalty and brand advocacy will be strengthened by a more attentive and swift response to feedback, resulting in a lower churn rate.
3. Adopt Customer Success metrics that work
Does your Customer Success team still use the old metrics that you’ve utilised for the past 5 years or so?
If so, now is the time to try something new to boost your chances of achieving higher customer success.
There are a variety of success metrics that could drive customer success:
· Customer Lifetime Value
· Customer Retention Rate
· Customer Retention Cost
· Churn Rate
· Customer Health Score
· Customer Satisfaction or CSAT
· Net Promoter Score
· Repeat Purchase Rate
· Customer Effort Score or CES
These success metrics will provide your Customer Success team with the most comprehensive picture of your performance in the eyes of your customers.
4. Develop a Customer Success program that scales
It’s reasonable to think that when a company expands, there will be some growing pains.
And one of the pains of SaaS companies is that their Customer Success programs are not scalable. Customer success needs to be scalable to sustain revenue growth.
That’s why as a leader, you need to make sure that your Customer Success team is passionate enough about your customers. They should also manage the increasing complexity of your customers’ interactions.
Not only that, but you also need to establish a Customer Success program that scales as well.
But how?
It’s not easy to build an effective Customer Success team from the ground up. You need the appropriate mix of products, processes, and people to reach the mark.
Focus your Customer Success program on these critical components to increase revenue and to win the trust of your customers:
· Build processes, not patchwork.
· Create a Customer Success team with the right people on board.
· Utilise the appropriate technology
You can also read adapting your approach to customer success to know more about how Customer Success teams evolve with the changing landscape.
5. Make your processes repeatable
Customer Success teams are critical to the success of SaaS businesses.
That’s why it is vital to have consistent processes in any organisation because a successful process relies on repeatability.
While most managers may assume that they do not have time to develop repeatable processes, the fact is that businesses cannot afford to have non-repeatable processes.
If you implement repeatable processes, I guarantee you that you can expect a measurable result. Your Customer Success team then can figure out where problems can arise and take actions to solve and enhance the process.
According to a study, 14 top SaaS companies found certain commonalities when it comes to their processes:
· Topics to discuss on the kick-off call
· Scheduling follow-ups
· Providing webinars and training material
· Reviewing deliverables
· Formulating customer recommendations based on their needs
· Conducting a strategy call
· Preparation for the kick-off call
· Sending an NPS survey
Here are also some tips to create your processes in your company:
· Define your objectives
· Layout the logical order of operations
· Document each process
· Test these processes to ensure good results
· Measure the processes for evaluation
· Streamline and execute these repeatable processes
Most importantly of all, you should look to automate processes wherever possible!!
Ready to level up your Customer Success Team?
It all begins with our mission to take your business to the next level.
Take your Customer Success team to the next level by having a FREE 30-minute session with me to discuss how to take your business to the next level.
About Ellivate
Ellivate is the expert partner helping organisations and their go-to-market team’s scale.
Our powerhouse team of industry experts – with a combined 60 years of experience across the fintech, corporate and technology spaces – will work alongside your business to achieve your goals.
We have a shared passion for working with businesses to achieve rapid growth and apply an authentic, human layer of expertise that addresses the real challenges and concerns at the heart of your business.
We will work alongside you as a trusted and expert partner. We get in the trenches and ensure every solution is embedded within your business.
