Scaling a business is hard. Growing a business is harder. This is because success in business depends on multiple aspects and a lot of them are unpredictable. Some of these aspects that contribute to growth in business include marketing, employee training, sales, and most importantly customer success. Customer success involves enabling customers to get the most value from a product or service. As customers gain more value out of your product — over time, it dramatically impacts metrics like NPS, Retention, etc. positively, helping you grow predictably.
Customer-led business growth has been pivotal in building sustainable businesses. It also helps Sales and Marketing teams realize the most value out of their customer acquisition efforts.
Now that we’ve realized the importance of customer success in business, let’s explore the strategies that’ll help you streamline your operations to focus on customers.
1. Focus on your customer experience
Customer perceptions can be crucial to success. If you deliver quality products and experiences, higher the chances of them retaining, promoting, and mentioning on social media. Ensure that you provide customers the experience you would want. The best way to understand what customers want is by listening to them. With that information, it is possible to personalize the customer experience and improve customer engagement.
2. Be Flexible
Companies should offer flexibility in the way they serve their customers’ needs. You should be ready to pivot and adopt new models or products, and tailor it to generate the same outcomes for them. By being flexible and offering your customers better options, you can then drive great results.
For example: To adapt to customers during and after the Coronavirus, companies have come up with a lot of flexible solutions. United Airlines decided to waive off the fees for changing flights pre-booked in March. This helped many customers trust the brand as it lowered their financial strain during challenging times.
3. Always Preplan and Analyze
It is important to plan and analyze your entire customer success strategy. There should be a customer success strategy in place based on demographic details. Analyzing customer perceptions and planning according to that will help increase customer satisfaction. This is pivotal to customer success. Planning the content, communication, and process for customers in advance will help them reach their value efficiently. On the other side, it also helps companies build capabilities to reinvent their processes, revise their goals, and generate better value.
4. Boost Customer Service
A great way of growing business is through high-end customer service. When you offer great customer service, customers find your product better. When you cross your customer’s expectations, they are likely to recommend it to others. With better customer service, you can improve the chances of client satisfaction and experience.
5. Zero in on Social Channels
Creating brand pages will help provide faster support to existing customers & also attract new customers with your customer’s success as well as feedback. You can interact with customers, improve engagement, understand customer pulse, grow an influence, and better market your products and services.
You can build a community on social media where customers can showcase the products to their friends. You can also be a part of networking events which will help provide unique insights and perspectives. This will help improve business connections and embrace wider recognition. Members of a brand community can come together and share experiences that will bind them together. Create engaging popups and forms for your website with Poptin.
6. Research Your Competitors
To scale a business, you need to research competitors. With competitive intelligence, it is easier to access more information on what customers prefer. This will be beneficial in chalking strategies for customer success. You can uncover competitor’s strategies, their products, pricing, and more. This makes it easier to learn from them. You can also choose to not repeat some of the mistakes they may have made. If something works for your competitors, the chances they will work for you are huge.
7. Create a Loyalty Program
Loyalty programs are great. They can increase sales in a fruitful way. Customer retention happens based on loyalty. Loyalty programs will help foster that. It costs more to acquire customers than retain customers, as per research by Bain & Co. However, it is through this customer retention that we see business growth. Customer loyalty programs will help you keep customers, and sometimes even attract new ones. An attractive loyalty program can improve sales and make customers stick around. A loyalty program can also help customers feel valued, improve engagement, and build lasting personal relationships.
Starbucks, for instance, has its famous Starbucks reward program where a customer can get loyalty stars on purchase of food or coffee. With more loyalty points, you can get free drinks. This makes customers want to stick to a brand, not only for the quality.
To make your business customer-centric, empower customers in the best way possible. Making customers successful with your products or services will ensure their growth and also your company’s growth.
Let us see three strategies to make customers successful.
3 Ways to Make Customers Successful
1. Start a Customer Service Program
Investing time, resources, and energy in a customer service program can fuel customer growth. This means investing in technology that works on customer service as the core. Investing in customer success software like SmartKarrot will help customers be more successful. With access to customer intelligence information and health scores, it is possible to offer the best to customers. With a good program, you can offer proactive support, resolve customer issues, reduce issues, and achieve goals faster. This can be aided by the creation of a nexus of case studies, testimonials, and more that will be useful in the social proof aspect.
2. Make Customer Success a team sport
Customer success should be in the company ethos. There is a need to develop a customer-centric culture to make sure there is growth. Every team and employee must contribute to the customer experience. From the initial interaction via blogs, social media or e-books to the talks with sales representatives, the process has to be unified, similar, and cohesive. There should be a seamless connection between them to ensure that customers are not put off by the varying levels of response.
This means customer success has to have everyone on board. Everyone involved in the company needs to function as a team to provide a good customer experience.
3. Make training crucial
For any company, employees are at the core of any decisions. For a customer service program to work well, the skilled talent at its core must be trained well. There is a need to ensure employees are well trained and educated to help them grow. Keeping a focus on training for CSMs and customer-facing reps is important. Companies have made it simpler for CS teams to understand customers with tools and insights. These tools will help offer advanced analytics that improves customer-success initiatives.
Bottom Line
Companies must be accountable, and customer-success driven. There is a need to look at various metrics to reach desired customer success outcomes. Improving customer experience will help deliver value to customers while also furthering loyalty. With the right leadership and core values in place, customers can reach their desired goals. When this happens, they are retained leading to better prospects for company growth. This makes it true for the case that customers are truly the building blocks of a company.
Satisfied and happy customers will reward companies with more sales, referrals, customers, and increased loyalty which improves the value of the company in the long run.
About the Author
Niyathi Roa is an experienced content marketer with a love for SaaS tech products. She reads a lot (mostly fiction) and is a huge news junkie. Niyathi loves exploring different forms of inbound marketing and taking on challenges.