To most, scaling a company means more. Finding more customers, hiring more employees, all with the goal of earning more revenue. The issue, companies find out, is that there is always a limit to more. A workday only lasts so long, and people can only accomplish so much within those hours.
Companies focused on long-term growth know that scaling requires efficiency rather than volume. For customer success organizations, specifically, executives must figure out how to balance the revenue-driving actions like expansion or churn reduction, while still addressing daily customer questions and training.
The answer is digital self-service for your customers. By empowering them to take control of their success, you make space for your CSMs to take meaningful actions for the business. Let’s talk about how to get started:
Start with Universal Customer Experiences
Digital self-service is not a replacement for customer success functions. Those personalized engagements are still best done by your CSMs. But there are universal customer experiences that can be optimized for efficiency with digital self-service. The best place to start include:
- On-Demand Training: Customers often want to figure out the answers to their questions on their own. Not only does it mean going at their own pace, but it also helps them avoid breaks in their own workflow. Because of this, on-demand training provides an efficient way to empower customers to create their own success.
- Customer Communities: Users of your product provide a wealth of knowledge, troubleshooting, and support to each other that can happen at any hour of the day. Creating a space for users to talk, celebrate, and help each other can help improve time-to-value and feature adoption without taking time from CSMs. In terms of essential self-service strategies, this is among the top.
- In-App Guidance: With enough customer engagements, your team should start to learn which parts of your product are confusing for new users. Take the opportunity to create in-app engagements to walk customers through those processes until they are confident they know what to do.
There will likely be other instances that your company can implement digital self-service strategies, but building a foundation of these three will ensure success for you and your customers.
Engage Customers in Your Product
Today’s customer needs a proactive partner. Companies build more trust and loyalty when they anticipate their customers’ needs, both as a new and experienced user. As such, companies can improve their customer relationships by integrating workflows and communications in the platform.
Engagements that show users how to complete a new workflow, remind them of tasks, or improve their daily workload show that you’re thoughtful, proactive, and always around to help customers reach their goals.
What’s more, you can use the conversations on your community pages to inform which workflows need in-product communications most urgently. They are telling you what’s most important to them, and they want to know you’re listening. In fact, some Gainsight customers see a 40x increase in NPS responses after just six months of in-app engagements!
Maintain Your Identity in All Engagements
Another key element for effective self-service is consistency. Of course, this means keeping your voice the same across all engagements. Companies should ensure that everything from their product to their community pages and website look the same.
More importantly, though, customers want to feel like their customer journey is one experience. When they log in to your platform, they don’t want to see communications they’ve already acknowledged in their email inbox. They expect that they won’t have to repeat information during customer calls that they’ve already submitted via email. They’re having one customer experience of your company, and they expect you to create that for them.
To build successful self-service solutions for your customers, ensure that they all reflect your brand identity and that the data from each engagement is shared across your organization.
Build for the Future
The last step is, of course, to build a sustainable strategy for future growth. Each time you add a new self-service solution, there will be learnings for your customer success team. Collect as much data as possible to look for ways to optimize your operations. Funnel all that information into a central location so that when it’s time to find efficiencies, everyone is working from the most recent, and comprehensive data.
Remember that each engagement is an opportunity to learn more about what your customer values, what they struggle with, and what they rave about to their community. Taken together, this is the data that will allow you to grow consistently year after year.
Get the Strategies in Our New Guide
To learn exactly how to put these strategies into action, download our newest guide Empowering Customers to Take Success Into Their Own Hands: How to Scale Customer Success Through Digital Self-Service Strategies.
You’ll learn how each step improves your business, and get real-world examples from other companies who implemented them.
