The prosperity of organisations is heavily reliant on customer retention. The success of a customer’s experience will determine the outcome of the customers journey, either with your business or a competitor.
In an increasingly competitive market, a pro-active strategy is essential for customer retention. The idea of managing this concept classifies customer portfolio, retention and development and highlights the importance of retaining customers as long-term assets for generating a sustained income stream and providing greater sales opportunities. Poor management of customers can lead to customer dissatisfaction, consequently jeopardizing their commitment to your business and desire to use your products and services.
Here are customer success tips and tricks that will exceed expectations.
Onboarding Focus
Customer success is paramount for sustaining your client’s loyalty. Effective onboarding of new customers will build the foundations for a successful customer journey. This critical stage of onboarding creates the first impression on service quality and support your business will offer the customer. It acquaints customers with your product and services and facilitates their understanding of how they will apply this to their business requirements.
An effective onboarding process is invaluable and will forge those long-term relationships with customers. Inadequate support and inability to provide a quality service in these early stages of the customers experience will likely create confusion and neglect the customer from attaining the desired results from your product or service. Customer success reduces such risks and is therefore vital for customer retention.
A useful tip is to provide clear and simple tutorials which can significantly reduce the time and expense assigned to onboarding new customers.
Be careful not to be offhand or desultory when it comes to your customers initial experiences with your business, spend the time to support and nurture their induction. As time progresses and they become more familiar with your products and services, they will become more independent and won’t rely as much on your immediate support.
Whilst onboarding is key in customer success, it should be borne in mind that onboarding is only the first of many critical steps in the customer success journey.
Customer Success Strategy
An all-inclusive customer success strategy facilitates organisations to deliver a customer-focused approach, resulting in satisfied customers who drive long-term growth and profitability. Making the transition to this approach is often challenging and requires a strategic vision that creates synergy across the whole organization
A customer success strategy can be developed using several methods:
- Examination of the immediate business needs of your customers. Review the customer success stage that needs most attention and determine at which phase the bulk of your customers stand; expansion, advocacy, renewals or onboarding. You can re-assign investment and resources according to the findings
- Development of streamlined processes managed by dedicated teams of highly trained professionals.
- Analysis of customer success metrics to ensure they are aligned with overarching business objectives.
- Using data to determine proactive measures to prevent problems from occurring rather than scrambling desperately when problems ensue.
- Communicate with all teams daily to ensure the voice of the customer echoes throughout the organization
Deciphering customer data through a segmented approach is essential. Rather than viewing data as an entire case, divide data into smaller parts so it is easier to digest and can clearly depict unique insights that are not apparent from aggregated data.
Communication with Customers and Across the Organization
Foster better internal communications by holding regular meetings with all relevant team members. This an excellent way to collect the feedback and opinions of customers then determine an appropriate course of action to address.
All communications should be formed with the intended audience in mind. Using language that is concise and customers can comprehend is key. It must be easy, so customers aren’t expected to jump through hoops to use your product. It must be effective, demonstrating you know everything about your product, including its limitations and it must be authentic, so customers believe what you are saying.
Avoid the impulse to be excessively professional or corporate with templated responses. It might look reasonable to you, but the customer receiving the communication sees a cookie cutter response from someone who’s just going through the motions. Focus on providing personalized responses for a better customer response.
Gen Leads can help you demonstrate excellence in customer success. Call us today to find out how.