What is Customer Success?
By establishing authentic relationships, customer success teams ensure that the products and services they provide play a part in meeting and exceeding their clients' organizational goals.
It is a combination of professional services, support services, marketing and sales techniques that ensure the products offered have a direct impact on long-term business growth. Customer success representatives in the SaaS industry have adopted proven customer success strategies in large part because they communicate care and authenticity to clients, which allows representatives to become a resource for finding solutions to multiple business challenges.
Customer Success vs. Customer Service
While both teams are focused on solving client challenges, there are a few key ways that customer success and customer service differ. Namely, customer success is a series of proactive measures taken to prevent issues before they happen, while customer service is more reactive and only deals with issues as they arise.
The customer success team's responsibilities include reducing bottlenecks and onboarding issues, allowing customers to successfully achieve goals. In contrast, customer service teams are largely limited to solving technical and usage issues. By focusing on customer success instead of customer support, companies can provide better care to customers both in the short and long term, which strengthens the value of their products.
WHY IS CUSTOMER SUCCESS IMPORTANT?
Creating and maintaining a successful customer success strategy is crucial to facilitating an agile, scalable organization. Customer success representatives who invest in long-term customer goals help create tangible reasons for their clients to stick with a product, even if the solutions provided take time to pay off. As a result, this can lead to a reduction in churn year over year and simplification of the renewal process for all customers.
ROLE OF A CUSTOMER SUCCESS MANAGER
CSMs are responsible for customer onboarding and product adoption, renewals, and periodic health checks to ensure customer satisfaction.
CUSTOMER SUCCESS KPIS
- Portfolio growth
- Account retention rate
- Churn rate
- Referrals
- Increase in product adoption
- Decrease in number of support tickets
- Maintain high account health percentage
By providing a process for account escalations, renewals, and upsells, this framework ensures that customers are given value while also making sure that team members are meeting their KPIs.
By making use of powerful automation tools and services, like Hubspot and Salesforce, as well as developing trust-building soft skills, CSMs can continuously boost their value proposition. This in turn increases account retention rate while lowering churn. Features to look for when choosing customer success software include:
- Can the product be used to create customer profiles for the purpose of simplifying identification and documentation?
- Is the platform able to team interactions, survey results and tickets logged?
- Can the software offer analytics and metrics on customer success rates and account history?
- Can CSMs use automation tools to free up time to focus on meeting client needs?
- How accurate are its predictive metrics for analyzing customer growth potential based on interactions, payments, products used and inquiries?
- What is the scalability of this product like?
There is no better source for meaningful business insights than clients who interact with products and services on a daily basis and have first-hand user experience. By having comfortable, authentic relationships with clients, CSMs are able to get quick and actionable feedback. They communicate this feedback to leadership, development, sales, and marketing, which leads to better customer experiences at scale.
Most importantly, customer service managers are advocates for their clients, assisting them in realizing their goals and desired outcomes.
