What can you do when you decide that you want to enhance customers’ experience with your business? If nothing is coming to your mind, here’s a suggestion – customer success strategies. An effective customer success program can drive customer retention and attract more leads.
Customer success is a program worth investing in, but applying the wrong strategies can reflect negatively. Improve your customer experience and therefore, contribute to customer success with proven strategies.
But first, let’s make sure that you completely understand what customer success stands for.
What is Customer Success?
Customer success focuses on customer’s productiveness when it comes to your products and/or services. Additionally, by using customer success strategies the business should sell more products to existing customers and increase the business’s profitability long-term.
Keep in mind that there is a difference between customer success and satisfied customers. You’ll have a satisfied customer when your product meets his or her expectations. On the other hand, customer success is when the customer achieves the desired result with your business.
Or as the Customer Success Consultant Lincoln Murphy explains:
“Customer success is when your customers achieve their desired outcome through their interactions with your company. Therefore, a customer that has not yet achieved their desired outcome with your product can technically still be classified as a satisfied customer.”
The importance of customer success is highly prioritized nowadays. Actually, according to Forester Research, 72% of businesses say that improving customer success is their top priority.
The crucial element is to implement powerful strategies that will make your customer success program effective. The following strategies will show you which steps will lead you to achieve customer success.
1. Offer Free Educational Content
Stay one step ahead by providing your customers with useful information that they can access at any time.
Publishing free content will give customers a chance to get informed even before they buy the product.
Educating the customers before you make a sale will increase the chance of success.
Take HootSuite as an example. This social media marketing and management company offers free online courses in social media marketing as a part of their HootSuite Academy.
2. Personalize the Onboarding Experience
If you know your customers’ goals upfront, you can start working on customer success from the very beginning.
Ellie Wilkinson, a Customer Success Manager at Moz explains how they work on the onboarding experience:
“My team offers getting started webinars and 1:1 personalized walkthroughs to introduce customers to Moz and show them how to accomplish their individual goals with the product. The walkthroughs and webinars we deliver to help customers get started with Moz contribute to lowering churn rates and increasing customer lifetime value. We also build in-app tours and messaging campaigns to proactively educate customers.”
To save you some trouble and time, you can automate the personalization of onboarding experience. Set a trigger that will provide potential customers with a survey. The survey will direct them to content that is fit for their needs and goals.
3. Provide Social Proof
Prove yourself as a trustworthy company through a powerful motivator – social proof.
When customers see that others have success with your service or products, they will feel encouraged to make a purchase.
Marie Fincher, a head of content at TrustMyPaper and writer for BestEssayEducation, offer the following advice:
“What you can do is to purchase case studies about your customers or display testimonials. Make sure that they are well-written and that they present your company in the best light. Both of these methods are very effective. If you opt for testimonials, keep in mind that video testimonials perform best.”
4. Identify Loyal Customers
In order to provide social proof, you first need to know who your loyal customers are. Once you identify your loyal customers you can present them with this request.
But how can you know who is ready to become a member of your loyalty club?
Gather your marketing, customer service, and sales team and think of a criterion that best suits your business in identifying loyal customers. After that, you can create an email template for reaching out to the customers.
5. Bring in the Right Customers
Distinguish your ideal customers from those who are not and make a selection. The goal is not to sell to everyone but only to those who can truly get some use out of your products.
In case when a sales team works on commission, they can attract all types of customers. Such a sales process will make it difficult for your business to achieve customer success.
Work with your salespeople and develop a method that will improve the classification process for new customers.
Customers can also qualify themselves and choose the right product with the dedicated guidance of salespeople.
6. Work on Brand Awareness
Customers’ experience starts way before they buy the products. Achieving customer success starts from the very beginning – the customers’ impression of your business.
A positive and consistent experience is crucial for customer success. For that reason, working on brand awareness is a highly advised strategy for nurturing potential customers.
Focus on your content, design, imagery, representation of your products, etc. These are all elements that can make or break your brand awareness.
7. Have a Reliable Customer Support
How you assist your customers with their questions about your products will bring you either closer or farther away from customer success.
It is inevitable that some customers have issues or dilemmas while using your products or services. Customer Support should be there to offer a valuable solution.
Take into consideration that 67% of customer churn can be avoided if your support team is able to fulfill the customer’s needs during the first interaction.
Sometimes your support team can struggle with providing all the answers so you can turn to customer service tools. Such tools can help the team organize incoming requests.
All that you know and have learned about customer success won’t have any purpose if you don’t start working on it as soon as possible. Don’t forget that achieving customer success is not a one-time thing. It is an ongoing process. That is why these strategies should be implemented in the core of your business and applied consistently.
About the Author:
Diana Nadim is a writer and editor who has a Master degree in Marketing. She combines her passion for writing with her interest in research and creates thought-provoking content in various fields. Besides working as a contributor writer for Studicus and WOWGrade, Diana also runs her own 3to5Marketing blog. What inspires her the most in her writing is traveling and meeting new people. Follow her on Twitter.
