As a business, your policies and processes are aimed at helping you succeed. However, when you are buried in metrics and reviewing KPIs, it is easy to lose focus on what makes your business successful – customers. Customers drive every metric in your business, and they’re the main reason your business will succeed (or fail). B2B companies are adopting a Customer Success methodology, weaving the concept into marketing or even dedicating whole teams to customer success.
What is Customer Success?
Customer Success is a business strategy, a marketing tactic, and even an ideology popular with B2B businesses, especially B2B SaaS companies. Customer Success means approaching your business with a focus on empowering customers to use your solutions to the best possible effect. Why? This is the best, and most obvious, way to reduce churn. The ideal churn rate for a B2B company is 5% – the truth is, many companies come nowhere close to this target.
A common misconception is assuming Customer Success and Customer Satisfaction are the same things. Customer Satisfaction is a customer saying they were “satisfied” when they talked to one of your support representatives about an issue. It may provide a good feeling and look good on a report. Who doesn’t want to shout, “Our customer satisfaction rate is 97%!”
However, it is a metric that doesn’t provide any value because it doesn’t tell you anything about the customer’s relationship with your product.
Launching a Customer Success campaign is an effective way to measure how well your customers are learning, and using your solutions. In this article, we are going to share five ideas/tactics you can implement to start a Customer Success campaign.
How to Build a Customer Success Program
Let’s discuss how to build an effective Customer Success program, no matter who your customers are.
Chart your Customer’s Experience
It is important to try to make your business as efficient as possible, but that efficiency cannot come at the expense of the customer’s experience. Before you start measuring Customer Success, you have to understand what your customer goes through when they use your product.
- Do they know which button to push next?
- Do they know where to go if they have questions?
- Would they want to go through this process again and again?
These are the questions you must answer to see how your customer interacts with your product. This exercise may make you aware of defects in your products that help you but hurt the customer. Customer Journey is the starting point in understanding how to measure Customer Success.
Create a Scalable, Automated Customer Onboarding Program
First impressions are everything, and your customer’s first time using your product determines if they’ll use your product again. You need to develop a robust and easy-to-follow onboarding to ensure your customers know what to do and how to do it. We’re fans of automated email drip campaigns paired with microsites loaded with easy to use tutorials, examples, videos (if appropriate), and lots of links to further documentation. This is an effective way to gather data about customers in your onboarding program.
Examples of an effective onboarding program are:
- Automated email + microsite campaign that responds to customer behavior.
- Recurring calls with a Customer Success Onboarding Representative to review goals and resolve any issues.
- FAQ documents based on common questions/errors customers make with the new product.
- Microlearning videos showing ways to generate quick wins with your produce.
Measure Your Customers’ Perception of Your Value
Your business may have different types of customers, and those customers all have different goals and use cases for your product. You cannot rely only on how many customers you have to gauge success. The value you provide will be measured through their perception of your product. You may have 100 people “sign up” to use your product, but how many of them are using it daily? Are they reaching “milestones” through using your product?
If those answers are not good, then that tells you their perception of your product, and it isn’t good. If they felt your product was valuable, they would be using it every way they can. If this data shows your customers do not value your product, then the next step is to figure out why.
Create Multiple Feedback Systems
Whether your customers are using your products consistently or sparingly, you need to check in with them on their experience. Some examples:
- Monthly calls to review use cases with customers and their results.
- Focus Groups, done quarterly, with multiple customers targeting specific successes or opportunities they’ve experienced with your product.
- “Feedback” buttons on your product or an e-mail address they can send to.
Creating multiple ways for customers to give feedback makes it easier for them to give you valuable information. Compiling the responses through these multiple channels will give you insights into how customers are succeeding (or failing) to use your products.
Track Product Feature Requests
Your customers can not only give you feedback on the current product, they can also give ideas on how to improve your product. Involving customers in the design of your product ensures you are invested in their success more than anything else. Conversations from your meetings with them (see Step #3) can reveal product requests you had not considered. Once a request reaches a certain number, you can start building it and releasing it in your product. Customer Feedback is vital to Customer Success.
These steps are meant to be a guide in building and developing a Customer Success campaign for your business. You may spend more time/resources in one step vs. another, but all are connected for tactics to create success for your customers and your business.
Interested in learning more about how HUSL Digital could be your key to success? Drop us a line and let’s get started today!