Every business wants to be successful with their customers. The term “customer success” has become quite the buzzword in recent years, encompassing actions your business can take to help your customers enhance their lives through your products/services, and linking closely with optimizing your customer experience and creating a value realization strategy.
As important as all that sounds, though, many businesses have difficulty realizing their customer success efforts, and you may well find yourself in a situation where you can’t quite put it together. Don’t fret, though, what you (and many other businesses) are missing is just a single, secret ingredient to the formula, one that we’ll be explaining today. Read on to find out!
Enter The Customer Success Team
While many businesses understand that promoting customer success is important, they don’t dedicate a team to tackle the issue, and so their efforts falter. Where you can make the difference in your approach is by developing a customer success program, and staffing it with the invaluable customer success specialists who will help you realize your goals.
At the helm of this team should be your all-important customer success manager (CSM), and they’ll help you “set the tone” that will keep customers coming back for more. How, you might ask? Here are some of the ways in which your customer success manager adds value:
Providing a top-down view of your customer success operations
Your CSM gets to see all the stages of a customer’s journey and knows all about what’s going on. They understand not only the problems that one customer might be facing, but how all your customers are affected by your business process and what the customer base at large is thinking or asking for. This allows your CSMs to anticipate issues and help you generate solutions before they start to get out of control.
Bridging the gap between sales and support
Both sales and support staff play an important role in your business strategy, but it’s your CSMs who are able to better link the two. Since they operate in something of an intermediary capacity, they can focus on onboarding, and sustaining the customer relationship after your sales reps have done their job. They’ll get customers using your products and services successfully, and help them sort through potential issues so that they don’t lose trust in your brand.
Give customers a voice
In establishing close relationships with your customers, your CSMs will have a unique understanding of the challenges they face and the things they’d like to see from your brand in the future. Because of this, they can help advocate for your customers’ desires, and help you restructure your approaches so that
Make Customer Success Work For Your Brand
It’s clear that customer success, and by extension CSMs, are vital if you’re trying to add value to your brand and keep customers around long-term. Make sure you keep this in mind as you develop your own strategies, and take full advantage of these ways in which focusing on customer success and maximize retention for your business.