How does customer success keep up with fast-moving and changing trends? How does your customer success team evolve with the changing landscape?
What does customer success do for a business? – Everything.
Nothing kills subscription-based businesses like customer churn. If you want to continue retaining your customers while creating repeatable sales, you should consider customer success. The goal of customer success is to turn your customers into advocates and reduce the customer acquisition cost. Through customer success, you can also increase your Customer Lifetime Value (CLV).
But for some businesses, navigating customer success isn’t exactly a walk in the park.
In today’s competitive market of subscription-based businesses, marketing and customer service alone won’t suffice to grow your business. After all, the majority of the revenue of your business comes from your customers. According to an article from Forbes.com, 90% of your sales come from your existing customers.
So, what can you do as an organisation to adapt your customer success approach to the ever-changing market?
Align your teams to reflect the customer’s voice throughout your organisation.
Everyone in your team has a role to play to guarantee that your business can achieve customer success. Sales, marketing, operations, product – these teams work with customer success to understand and provide value to each customer.
Establish customer success at the core of your organisation and up to the executive level and decision-makers. By making sure that your organisation hears your customer’s voice, you create a culture of relationship and connection between the customers and your organisation. Your customers need to feel that someone from your team is listening to their feedback. Otherwise, they’ll find someone else who will.
If your organisation understands what the customer’s desired outcome is – and value it to their core – they will make customer success part of everything they do.
The biggest misconception about customer success is that it’s similar to customer support, customer service, or account management. Some organisations rename their account managers to customer success managers.
To adapt to the changes, you have to change your approach to handling and retaining customers. Customer success is beyond giving solutions to the customers’ growing needs.
If you think of customer success as similar to account management, your approach will be transactional. If you think of it as similar to customer service or support, you will become reactive.
Simply put, customer success is ALWAYS customer success.
You have to understand that customer success is more than just customer retention or churn mitigation. It is about consistently providing value to your customers.
When you can understand what success means to your customers and adapt to their cues, you will have the ability to support them in achieving their goals. After all, that is what customer success is – providing value right from the start of the interaction to following them through their journey.
Define what “desired outcome” means to them by asking questions about your product and soliciting feedback. “What do you like the most about our product?” “What motivates you to use our product?” “How do you measure your success?”
Because success differs from each of your customers, there isn’t any one-off approach to customer success that could cater for all of them. With that, you have to segment their needs and consider their differences to provide long-term value. Understand that different customers in different segments have different desired outcomes, and they will evolve.
The term customer success may seem like a new terminology for other non-SaaS businesses. But to SaaS, customer success can be the make or break between failure and growth. Losing customers at the back door will drag your growth, and you need to move with the market. That’s where customer success comes into the picture.
Most of your revenue from a customer happens post-sale. If you don’t recognise that the customer’s desired outcome is essential and evolving, they will take their business elsewhere.
After all, your business success also depends on the success of your customers.
Ellivate is the expert partner helping organisations and their go-to-market team 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 we ensure to embed every solution within your business.
