Most businesses collect customer data to leverage it in their marketing efforts. Today, more leaders realize that the same client data can be used to create customer value and success. Understanding more about your customers’ goals and pain points empowers your team to centralize customer success into everything they do. Thus ensuring that your products and services solve a real need and provide real business impact to your customers.
Creating continuous and meaningful value for your customers will build trust and strengthen relationships. Paving the way for future growth and expansion for both parties. A simple concept on paper, but as you scale, becomes impossible to maintain without an intelligent customer success tool.
Read on to learn more about how customer success software can help you grow and retain your customers.
Tip #1: Customer Success Starts with a Deep Understanding of Your Customers
It is imperative that your entire organization knows and understands your customer; their business, their goals, and what problems keep them up at night. After all, some of the greatest services and products of our time came out of a need we didn’t even know we had.
Once you gain a clear understanding of your customer, make sure it permeates through every team in your organization. The product roadmap should be informed by how it best solves common customer problems. Your marketing material needs to target your ideal customer profile (ICP). This ensures you are onboarding customers you are confident you can make successful and not future churn. And your Customer Success team should be armed with everything needed to ensure they usher each client into success. Customer Success should be a company wide initiative, not limited to a single team.
Tip #2: Don’t Just Become a Product Expert, Study your Customer’s Industry
When customers reach out to you, it’s often because they need help with your product. They turn to you as the expert who can guide them to success. Your Customer Success team should meet those expectations and finish each interaction with a satisfied customer.
But more and more field experience points to the unparalleled value of your CS team as an extension of the customer’s team. To put it another way, your Customer Success team should be prepared to act as a strategic advisor. Not only helping your customer extract value from your product, but also offering insights and industry thought leadership around how they can do their job better and meet or exceed the goals they have set forth. Embedding your product and team as key players in both the strategic and tactical direction of your customer’s company is a surefire way to secure both retention and expansion. Did someone say, NRR!?
Tip #3: You Can’t Go It Alone
In the early days of a new SaaS product, it can be simple to manage your small customer base along with the day to day requirements of establishing and building a new business. Sure, it’s manual, but manageable. But as you achieve product market fit and begin to grow, it quickly becomes impossible to keep up with every customer relationship and account status. And while we love our team, it isn’t sustainable to hire new Customer Success Managers for every 10-20 accounts. We have to find a way to scale our program and relationships intelligently.
Luckily for us, we live in a time of increasingly advanced technology that allows us to maintain success at scale, without taking on too much overhead. Customer Success platforms powered by machine learning and AI will become a required arrow for any successful SaaS quiver. We can’t be everywhere all at once, but AI can. If we allow these technologies to bear the brunt of the load, we can eliminate the noise and focus on the actions and relationships that will yield the best outcomes. For our business and our customers.
Customer Success is Success for Everyone
If you focus on providing value, impacting business outcomes, and cultivating deep and meaningful relationships with your customers, everyone in your organization will benefit. Customers will have more confidence in your product and will champion it to their network. Simply put, customer success translates to success for your whole business.
But you can only succeed when you and your team know how best to communicate with customers. An intelligent customer success tool like Staircase can help. Schedule time with us and we will show you how to make sure every customer is happy and successful.
