In tech and business, the term “customer success” is gaining in popularity. But customer success is more than just a buzzword: it’s a real concept that, when used effectively, will grow your company by ensuring mutually beneficial relationships between you and your clients.
What does the term “customer success” mean?
Customer success has its roots in the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) world. At its core, it is the function at a company responsible for managing vendor-client relationships. If that company can make its customers as successful as possible, it will encourage them to stay on board, benefiting the company in return.
There is a strong focus on customer success in SaaS because these vendors’ entire business model is to help customers. To that effect, software companies will compete to have the best UI, implementation, accessibility, customer service, and so forth. To make a customer successful, the vendor will try to make a product that is as easy and helpful to use as possible.
Why is customer success important?
Simply trying to sign up as many new customers as possible is not enough: for a company to succeed, it actively needs to retain these clients. This gives the company credibility that its product is worthwhile and valuable. It also elevates the company’s reputation and leads to more customers signing up.
For companies with recurring clients, most revenue is derived not from the initial sale of the product, but from everything that comes after, like renewals and upsell. This is why it is critical to focus on customer success, and keep customers happy every step along the way.
How to achieve customer success
It’s not enough to just rename a team within your company “customer success,” or to think of customer success as simply tech support. Though tech support can be an important component of customer success, a company’s focus on its customers should extend beyond that.
The companies that are best for customer success understand that they must focus on the lifecycle of the relationship from beginning to end. This starts with signups and onboarding of new clients, when the company has to persuade potential customers of the value it can provide them. Once these customers are on board and shifted from any trial models to paying models, customer success-oriented vendors do everything possible to ensure that the customer is happy and benefits from the service provided. It also means preventing churn by addressing problems as soon as or before they arise, identifying at-risk accounts to prevent these issues early on.
Customer success through the entire lifecycle
For a company to show its commitment to customer success, it must help customers at every stage of the relationship. Customer success starts with marketing to draw in new clients and persuade them that the product is worthwhile. From there, the company makes the initial sale, which leads to user adoption. The next step is measuring ROI and proving that the product has added value to the company.
If all of these are taken care of, the company can expand due to advocacy from its customers, leading to renewal and new customer business. Through this entire process, customer success-focused companies have a robust sense of their clients’ interests, needs, and concerns, and respond actively to problems.
Mistakes in customer success
A common mistake that customer success teams make is not developing an active, thoughtful response process to customer concerns. In other words, a company with a strong customer success model will not only take in feedback and respond to that particular client’s issue, but also incorporate that feedback to improve its service and use it for future product development. The company also takes feedback from one client and uses it to identify other accounts that may be facing similar problems, addressing those even before they arise.
Another error is conflating customer success and customer support. Though it is a part of overall customer success, customer support stays more surface-level in that the support team simply reacts to questions and problems in the moment. A customer success-focused business not only responds to problems, but also uses this data to improve its product and client relationships in the long run.
Focusing on customer success is key to your business’s well-being. A good consulting company will guide you in establishing and maintaining your customer relationships and reducing churn, so that you and your customers both help each other grow and succeed.