Customer Success: Why every company should look beyond Customer Support/Service
Hello there! You must be thinking Customer Support, Customer Service & Customer Success are interchangeable, right? Well sometimes they are used that way, but they really mean different things. At the end of this post, you would learn why every company should adopt customer success.
Customer Support, as defined by Techopedia, is service efforts from technology vendors and providers that focus on helping customers to use products and services correctly, efficiently and effectively.
In this system, the Support Agent’s duties are to assist the customer only when issues arise through phone calls, emails and probably physically at Support Centers.
Customer service, according to Study.com, is the act of taking care of the customer’s needs by providing and delivering professional, helpful, high quality service and assistance before, during, and after the customer’s requirements are met.
Here, the Customer Service Representative’s goal is to ensure customer satisfaction with the product or service — going beyond Customer Support. The main difference being that the Customer Service cares about the Customer’s satisfaction.
Everything that Customer Support and Customer service have to offer is really great, however there’s a lot more to be done to achieve customer success.
Customer Success is the business methodology of ensuring customers achieve their desired outcomes while using your product or service. Customer Success is relationship-focused client management, that aligns client and vendor goals for mutually beneficial outcomes. — Gainsight.com
You are probably wondering ‘Why Customer Success?’. Lucky for you, you are about to find out. Regardless of business type i.e. B2B or B2C, Customer Success can be divided into four parts:
Customer Support: This refers to On-boarding the customers/clients as well. Customers don’t want to have to learn how to use a new product or service. If they must learn, it must be in a totally fun and engaging way.
Something very important to note is that customers who decide to contact support definitely felt like they needed to do so. One way to improve customer support is to enable customers access to reach out to support through various channels such as email, phone calls, physical support centers and social media.
However, a small business would need to harvest certain data about her customers’ demographic to decide what support channels to invest in. There are some wonderful Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools you can use such as Intercom, Zendesk, Salesforce, Zoho, etc.
Customer Retention: The role of Customer Service cannot be overemphasized when analyzing Customer Retention. Statistics show that 3 in 4 customers remain loyal to a brand because of good Customer Service. You can check out the Power & Cost of customer service in a blog post by Hubspot.
Customer Adoption for products such as mobile or desktop applications can be greatly influenced by support proactively engaging customers through Push Notifications, Newsletters, Emails, Phone Calls and other kinds of prompts. Remember not to overdo it, so that it does not becoming a nuisance or treated as spam.
At this stage, beyond reporting 100% of SLAs being met with respect to case resolution statistics, the team should be analyzing Customer Data in order to predict customer behavior. That way it becomes easy to increase customer engagement with your product or service and also helps to reduce and intercept customer churn.
Customer Feedback: There is a new term called Customer Health, which Team Support defines as monitoring the customer relationship to ensure it remains in a vibrant state.
There are different metrics for measuring customer health but Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) and Net Promoter Score (NPS) are the most profound. CSAT basically measures Customer Satisfaction as the name implies, while NPS measures Customer Loyalty to the Organization. You can measure Customer Health using tools like Survicate or Customer Thermometer.
You might be wondering how often you should take surveys. Measuring NPS can be done daily via integration with your CRM platform with every email reply, you can also measure CSAT after every call received by Customer Support, or you could simply schedule periodic email surveys either monthly or quarterly using Survey Monkey or Google Forms.
Product/Service Feedback: What do you do with all the feedback you have gotten from customer support interactions, customer service engagements & through surveys from customers? One simple answer; Share them with the Product/Project Manager and the Organization’s Management.
Providing the product/project team and the organization with feedback is very essential in guiding the journey of a product or service. It helps the company recuperate, prioritize, engage, disengage or invest in a particular feature as the case is.
Most importantly, the product/service is tailored to suit the customer’s needs as well as generate more income (and profit) for the Organization.
Customer success. It’s not just a rebranding of “customer service.” It’s a new mindset, strategy, and team aimed at delivering maximum value to your customers. -TypeForm
Customer Success enables you learn about your customers, learn about how your customers relate with your product/service and help create value for both the customer and the business.
I hope after reading this you have decided to get a customer success team and put all this into practice. All the best!
