Having a great track record of customer success doesn’t happen overnight, or by accident. You need to create a strategy for helping you and your customers achieve it.
In this article, we’ll go over some of the best strategies that work to encourage customer success. On their own, each strategy can help, however, it’s better to use them in tandem with others on this list.
This first strategy is arguably the most important and helpful from the business perspective of setting up customer success. Building a success journey map will help your team identify a “roadmap” of when and how to set up the customer for success.
We’ve already seen how this can work by looking at what the customer success journey can look like as an overview. However, you can think of the customer journey stages as the “travel plan” whereas there are also touch points along the way that matter.
These touch points are places where the customer interacts with your business along the customer journey. Some common touch points include (but are not limited to):
When you’ve figured out your customer touch points (be as thorough as you can), you can match them up to different stages of your customer journey—which when all put together functions as your customer success journey map.
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Another tactic you can add to your customer success toolkit is monitoring user engagement. After all, if the customer isn’t using your product or service, you wouldn’t consider them to be successful.
However, monitoring engagement is easier said than done. There are plenty of areas (especially for SaaS businesses) to track engagement metrics, including:
There are a few ways you can set up reliable measurements over time (so you can see if you’re improving or not), which include:
You can use these metrics to track the overall engagement levels with your product or service and adjust your customer success efforts from there.
Another helpful strategy for achieving customer success is personalization. When your customer feels like they personally matter to your business, or you’ve addressed them personally throughout their customer journey, they’re more likely to stick around.
Some of the more obvious areas ripe for personalization are within your email sequences—i.e., addressing your customer by name in your emails to them.
Another method of personalization is sending them content that’s personally relevant to them. For example, earlier we mentioned targeting “power users” for up-sell and cross-sell opportunities, which is a form of personalized offering.
Although you can also do this outside of emails (which would be considered the adoption/retention area of the customer journey) by using niche, targeted advertising before the “purchase” step of the journey. A common method of targeting is simply paying for Google ads when a potential customer searches for a competitor.
However, a generally cheaper method is using social media advertising or even newsletter sponsorships. For example, Foundation Labs (a marketing newsletter) includes sponsors in its newsletters that are relevant to its audience.
By targeting a newsletter service whose audience aligns with your business’s target audience, you can create a “personalized offering” to customers.
One of the few strategies that could work largely on its own is implementing enhanced customer support. According to research from a TCN consumer survey, nearly 7 in 10 (69%) U.S respondents said they preferred talking to a live agent over the phone, just over half (54%) said they preferred email, and nearly half (46%) suggested they preferred live chat.
On top of that, they also suggested they were willing to wait on hold for an average of six minutes (while actual average hold times are 17.4 minutes). The research also states:
“In the survey, consumers said they are likely to reward companies with good customer service with increased brand loyalty and positive online reviews.”
This happens to be the case for SiteGround, the web hosting service with a 24/7 customer support team (and a host of great reviews on G2.com).
It’s plain to see that great customer support leads to more successful outcomes for customers (when they get the help they need). Knowing these figures, you can build a customer support team that not only meets these basic demands but goes above and beyond them.
Some businesses might think sending a new customer a welcome email with a few basic how-to’s on using its product or service is enough to be considered “onboarding”, but this experience isn’t meaningful.
To encourage real customer success and engagement, you need to be calculated and purposeful in the way you onboard your customers. For example, Małgorzata Mikulska (Customer Success Director at GetResponse) said this about GetResponse’s onboarding process:
“We provide onboarding directly into the GetResponse platform so that the customer can familiarize themselves with the platform and test-click everything before using the platform.”
This method of practical onboarding is a great way to help the customer feel more comfortable using the platform right from the start. As a bonus, it also requires less specialized “onboarding staff” since the process is built into the software.
However, if you’re in the business of offering a personal touch, you can offer your customers live product demonstrations with a dedicated member of the team (which is the process we use here at Cloud Coach, though it’s not mandatory).
Each of these methods of customer onboarding is valid, and it can also depend on what your target audience is likely to prefer and how complex your product or service is to use. The more complicated it is, means it’s more likely to warrant a personalized walkthrough rather than a built-in, on-screen tutorial.
The last (but definitely not least) best strategy for achieving customer success on this list is to collect, analyze, and more importantly act on customer feedback. Customer feedback is the bread and butter of customer success teams—it’s real qualitative data your business can use to improve your products and services.
On this subject, Małgorzata Mikulska had plenty of insight from her experiences in GetResponse:
“Customer Success is not just about helping to solve a problem. It’s about finding an optimal solution and tailoring it to the customer’s needs. In this way, we focus on long-term cooperation, on the partnership between the customer and GetResponse. Understanding the customer’s needs is extremely important to everyone at GetResponse, not just the Customer Success team, because the customer’s success is our success. We’re committed to long-term partnerships, not to making a quick sale and leaving the customer’s needs in the dust.
We must remember that without the customer, there is no business, so the way of thinking and the right attitude of all employees is crucial, both to the process of creating the product itself and its support. Every piece of feedback from our customers is worth its weight in gold, and yet it is the Customer Success department that is on the first line.
In retrospect, GetResponse used to be “just” an email marketing tool. Now it’s much more than that – it’s a comprehensive platform for increasing your company’s online visibility and driving and increasing sales online. We owe it all to our customers, their trust, and their feedback.”
Without the ability or the mindset, to collect and act on customer feedback, you’re operating your customer success strategies without clear indications that what you’re doing is working and valuable to the customer. Using feedback in conjunction with other strategies on this list can help your business generate plenty of customer success experiences.
We’d be happy to provide a bespoke 1:1 demo on how Cloud Coach can benefit for your business.
