What Is Customer Success?
Customer success is one of the most popular, emerging growth opportunities in business today, cross-industry. Customer success is any effort a business undertakes that’s aimed at helping their customers be more successful, both with their product and more generally. Customer success teams take a proactive, data-led approach to helping customers more effectively use a product.
The success of your business is inherently intertwined with the success of your customer. If customers succeed using your product, they’ll continue using your product, and thus, your business will succeed. At its core, that’s what Customer Success is all about: ensuring your customers achieve their desired outcome while using your product. To succeed with customer success, you should know your customer. After all, how can you help your customers succeed using your product if you don’t know when, why, and how they’re using it.
This approach helps your business to achieve:
- Increasing renewal sales and revenue: Businesses face renewal sales processes constantly. Each time a customer sees the monthly or quarterly or annual subscription payment, they wonder, should I be paying for this? Renewal conversations occur with much greater frequency than with perpetual software sales
- Driving Upsell Revenue: Most of the revenue from your relationship with a customer happens post-sale, since your customers’ needs and business goals are always evolving. For effective Customer Success, you constantly need to assess your customers’ needs so they can reach their objectives
- Reducing churn: The reality is that customers can leave you at any moment. The best way to keep customers from leaving is to anticipate it before it is too late. While customer success team is already building relationships to avoid churn altogether, they can also predict potential leave by analyzing user data that correlates to a customer leaving. In this scenario, Customer Success can get in early to address any issues and steer the customer back on track
Customer success is anticipating customer challenges or questions and proactively providing solutions and answers. It helps you boost customer happiness and retention, thus increasing your revenue and customer loyalty.
Customer Success vs. Customer Support
Customer success aligns closely with customer support to take customer satisfaction to the next level. Customer Success is about a business being proactive, while customer support is about being reactive — It’s focused on the case-by-case and the here-and-now. Customer success works to proactively eliminate customer problems before they rise to the level of a customer support touchpoint.
Great customer support is still extremely important and contributes to overall success, but it is not enough to prevent churn and drive new revenue. If customers are not happy with the product, it is unlikely Customer Support will ever get a call. Instead, customers will just leave without explanation.
By being proactive from the start, Customer Success knows what goals the customer wants to achieve and helps them get there. A good Customer Success program will anticipate concerns and roadblocks, keep the customer experience positive, and help them set a path for continuous improvement.
To summarize, Customer success is an approach through which a company tries to anticipate potential issues that a customer may experience, and work to find a solution before a problem arises. The ultimate goal is to deliver exceptional customer service and provide a positive customer experience that can contribute to a customer’s success. The core of customer success is a proactive approach to customer satisfaction. Being successful customer success team means that you predict and resolve customer issues before they happen.
