
Unfortunately, not every customer is going to experience success with your product or service. Some customers will inevitably have trouble working out how to use it, run into technical issues, or simply dislike a few elements of your business.
By focusing as much as you can on customer success strategies, you’ll be able to minimize the amount of customer “failures” your business experiences—but it doesn’t hurt to prepare for those eventualities. So in this section, we’ll show you what to do in these instances of customer failures.
Having great customer support is part of an overall customer success strategy, however, it’s also the first line of defense when customers experience failure.
Other than having customer support available whenever the customer needs it, there are a few other ways to give the customer an experience above and beyond what they expect, including:
“Speaking the same language as our customers is crucial for clear communication. We provide support in eight languages. What is essential, English language support is available 24/7.” — Małgorzata Mikulska, Customer Success Director at GetResponse
“We often use tools such as Cleanshot to record short video guides for our customers if it helps solve their problems. Using videos has been pretty effective so far, and it makes it very easy for us to explain the steps needed to solve the reported issue. The customer can reuse the video instruction as many times as needed.” — Małgorzata Mikulska
“Response time is critical: when someone is inspired to set up their email automation, we don’t want that inspiration to fizzle out.” — Jane Portman, Founder of Userlist
These “in the front line” responses can help turn a customer failure into a customer success story in the first instance. However, over the long term, your business may want to consider the remaining tips below.
ADDITIONAL LINKS
A more long-term preventative measure against customer failure is improving internal communication.
In her book “The Silo Effect” Gillian Tett uncovers how “silo’s”—a term used to describe how a person or business departments that are “trapped inside their little specialist departments, social groups, teams, or pockets of knowledge”—hinders workplace communication and increases risks of organizational failure.
To overcome this “silo effect”, which can cause customer failures from lack of proper interdepartmental communication, your business should embrace better internal communication tools and strategies.
Reflecting on this, Małgorzata says:
“Every employee coming to GetResponse is aware of the importance of customer feedback. We have established special Slack channels for communication between the customer success team and other departments.
Suppose a client mentions that they are missing a feature or that one of the features is not working properly. In that case, the Customer Success Advisor immediately passes this information via the appropriate communication channel. If it’s something that we can fix quickly, we do it.
If it’s something that can’t be fixed here and now, we take their feedback and think about how we can improve our customers’ experience, so this failure doesn’t happen again. Our tool keeps constantly evolving thanks to our customers’ feedback.”
Making sure that different departments can communicate with each other effectively means customers can get the most appropriate response to their failures. Whether that be bug fixes, discounts, or a product feature suggestions page/forum.
If your business is suffering from consistent complaints or overall customer failure, especially if it’s not centered around a specific part of the product or service, you might want to review your customer success strategy from the ground up.
There are a few common mistakes businesses make when building their customer success strategy, including:
If your business has fallen into any of the above common mistakes, the root fault likely lies within your customer success strategy and is worth reviewing to adjust or correct these mistakes.
Once upon a time, businesses would have had to create some form of customer success strategy, monitor, and maintain it manually. At least in current times, there are digital tools around that help you not only get the job done, they boost your efforts too.
Throughout this guide, we’ve mentioned several different tools and services that can help you achieve your customer success goals, including:
Adopting each of these tools can help, but your business runs the risk of not having these tools “talk” to each other to gain better or more helpful insights and results. You would have to resort to using more third-party tools such as Zapier to integrate some of these tools (if the integrations are available in the first place).
But there are better solutions—an all-in-one project management tool such as Cloud Coach can help keep everything “under one roof”. With an all-in-one tool, you won’t need to worry about getting tools to communicate with each other, or porting data over to different tools to gain the insights your business needs.
Cloud Coach offers customer success teams several benefits, such as:
While Cloud Coach offers great customer onboarding, that’s just the beginning of your customer success journey. Cloud Coach can help you manage the success of your customers throughout their customer journey.
Want to maximize the efficiency of your customer success team with intuitive project management software?
Reach out to our team to schedule your own personalized demo today.
We’d be happy to provide a bespoke 1:1 demo on how Cloud Coach can benefit for your business.