What are the benefits of a customer success investment?
If you invest in customer success, your company will be prepared to offer what is most favorable for the clients in terms of business growth and development.
An important part of that is the way you handle your customers and how you deploy a well-asserted relationship that is able to cope with the main issues they face.
Moreover, your approach has to go beyond specific solutions to build a holistic view of what needs to be done to achieve the greatest outcomes.
Obviously, to reach out to this matured sight of your business you will have to pay attention to certain methods. We outlined some of them below. Check it out:
- develop interactive experiences and focus on real-time interaction with your clients (do not wait for problems to come in);
- invest in technology as automation processes in order to act quicker and more assertively;
- trust in facts and numbers to do the proper follow-up of the outcomes of your actions.
If you guide your performance by consistent patterns, the results can be way more significant for your business and your customers as well. Keep reading to learn more about it.
How to leverage customer success numbers?
As we anticipated in the previous topic, the best way to leverage your customer success numbers is to follow-up on the results of actions through metrics and data.
Only facts and numbers can lead you to a rational approach capable to identify what is really working and what needs to be improved to help out your client.
If you dismiss that, it is going to be quite difficult to exactly know what to do to reach out to better outcomes. However, there are more things that you need to be aware of this process. We explored each of them below.
Check it out to discover the best approaches!
1. Integrate with other departments
Do not isolate departments in your business — rather integrate them to build a 360º view of your client’s reality and what you can do to develop the best service or product delivery.
Moreover, this holistic approach allows different professionals and teams to share knowledge, data, and analysis that can improve customer success as a whole.
Such a well-carried work will not only satisfy your client but also educate them better about the points that need to be improved for their success.
After all, it is always important to remember that customer success is not about making your client momentaneously happy but rather raise awareness on them about the current situation of their business and what needs to be done to enhance its development.
2. Keep your talents
If customers churn is a problem, it is no different for the talents that you lose in your own business.
Therefore, try to develop a culture in your company that recognizes the value of your workers through open and transparent dialogue.
This will improve the workflow and productivity of your company through the feedbacks and suggestions you receive from them.
It is also your role to align their expectations with the company’s core values to maintain a well-guided work capable to reach the goals and aims previously established.
If your business is internally strong, it will be easier to handle with clients (and they will notice it!). So, keep your talents engaged and motivated by what they are doing!
3. Use social selling principles
Do you remember when we said that today’s marketing is based on the client and the quality of the relationship you establish with them?
There is a concept behind it called “social selling”. It means that if you focus only on specific results but do not care about listening to the issues of your customers and understanding their broader goals and challenges, you are probably going to fail in the long-run.
Avoid short-hand views when customer success is the matter so you will be ready to help your clients out and realize their real development.
Nowadays, the value of a product is not on its price but rather on the meaning it has for those who buy it. This is one of the main reasons why social selling became so important. People who excessively focus on sales without understanding the concepts underlining it tends to face difficulties in consistently keeping good results.
If you humanize your relationship with the customer and comprehend the complexity of their business, you can offer the best solutions and achieve more favorable results. Do not underestimate that!
4. Find a good metric
With the development of the internet and its algorithms, the amount of tracking data available today became countless.
Therefore, you do need to find a good metric rather than coping with a wide range of options in the analysis of your actions and results.
Some of the key metrics to have in mind are:
- business metrics: this involves solution finders for sales enablement , the business growing in a timeline, and the prospects for the near future that could be reached out through landing page;
- support metrics: it includes details such as the time you take to answer to a client, the customer satisfaction with your service, and help center article rating;
- product usage metrics: you need to know how much a product has been used, for how long and for who, to tackle your strategies properly and roundly.
As you can see, customer success is no divinatory process. You need a rational and reasonable approach to make sure you are on the right path and the only way to do so is by trusting facts and numbers.
However, metrics will not tell you anything if you do not know what to look for. That is why we told you to find a good metric that copes the reality of your business and the way you offer solutions to your clients.
5. Understand your customer’s journey
There are many ways to understand your customer’s journey. All of them tell more about your customers’ companies than your own business and it is really important to have it be really clear.
Most businesses fail in comprehending this concept because they are more worried about raising their own results than helping their clients out — and this is the biggest contradiction possible.
So, stick to your customer’s views and try to understand them as best as you can. Even if you need to educate them in a second moment, it is still fundamental to perceive first what is their situation and how they see it. For this reason, we underlined some key points you need to be attentive to in this process.
Check it below to accurately map your customer journey:
- your starting point needs to be the customer’s view on their own enterprise, not yours initially;
- know their perceptions and expectations of their goals in order to be easier to educate them consequently;
- identify multiple issues and tasks to sort it out to develop the right approach when it is time to take into action properly;
- incorporate performance indicators to make sure you are in the right path — if not, take the necessary actions to adjust it;
- register everything you and your customers have gone through in this journey to raise their awareness about the achieved results and why they worked well or not.
Methods lead to more secure outcomes. Avoid improvisation and dialogue with your customer in a consistent manner to lower any misunderstanding during the journey. With the directions previously outlined, you will know what to do.
6. Put customer’s needs first
As we anticipated in the prior topic. you really need to put the customer’s needs first. That is why it is so important to understand their view on their own work first. Never believe you have all the answers before talking to someone.
Instead, try to know your customers first, and just after making sure you coped with the main issues you start to offer solutions for them.
If not, you will sound not only arrogant but greedy, and also they might feel you are only interested in scoring more clients for your account.
That is why social selling and companies that have been humanizing their relationship with customers have grown more than those acting in the old paradigm of only focusing on sales at any cost.
In this setting, content marketing assessments have flourished and brought great results for businesses and customers. The current moment requires innovative approaches and appropriate techniques in accordance with contemporary needs.
How to balance investment in customer success?
Ok, let’s consider you did everything right to achieve customer success but you are unsure if it brought the financial outcomes you were expecting. After all, your company also needs money to survive, isn’t that right? Well, again, the best way to be clear about it is by trusting numbers and knowing how to analyze them.
The handier manner to do it is by calculating the Return on Investment of your business. It means that you will calculate the difference between what you invested with what you got in return.
You can use the formula ROI = (Current Value of Investment – Cost of Investment) / Cost of Investment to have the final percentage of it.
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