Whether you have an existing customer success team or are thinking of starting one, technology should be a critical part of your customer retention strategy.
If you are not leveraging the latest in automation technology to build and maintain relationships with your clients and valued customers, you could be missing the mark. Your “customer success team” could end up being nothing more than a glorified customer cleanup crew, scrambling to try to placate dissatisfied buyers.
Why Customer Success Is So Important These Days
The concept of “customer success” may sound like just another hyped up buzzword, but it is not. It is all about helping your customers actually succeed in using your product.
Customer Service: Reactive Problem Solving
Customer success is not the same thing as customer service. Customer service is reactive – it is about fixing problems, often critical ones after they are reported by customers.
You can categorize customer service is reactive, not proactive. Now, that doesn’t mean it is not important. It is.
But, depending on your product or service, customer success might be just as, if not more, important.
Customer service platforms, like LiveAgent, give support staff the tools they need. This includes live chat, file sharing, and email support. Without customer service being able to react quickly to a customer’s issues, you may find that the last taste a customer is left with is a sour one.
Customer Success: Proactive Customer Support
With customer success, your team is actively working with customers before a problem occurs. It could be that your customer success team is busy training your clients on how to use the product fully and effectively.
Customer success is more than just giving your customers tips on how to fit X widget into Y slot, however. It is about building long-lasting relationships that turn your best and happiest customers into full-fledged advocates for your product or brand.
Advocates are customers who are fully on board with the product, your brand, and its mission. They will not only buy more from your company but give back to it in the form of ideas, feedback, suggestions, and referrals.
These customers turned advocates are the lifeblood of many of the most successful companies on the planet. Brands like Toyota can go through recalls and tsunamis and come out on the other side just as strong. This is due to the massive customer loyalty they have cultivated over decades of providing amazing customer experiences.
Tips to Help Nurture Customer Success Using the Latest Technologies
Are you ready to start making more advocates out of your customers? Read on!
1. Use Technical Automation to Make Customers into Advocates
To help turn your best customers into advocates, you will need some creativity, a lot of passion, and some of the latest and greatest in automation technologies.
Now, just remember: automation is not about depersonalization and turning people into robots. It’s the opposite: Automation done right is about giving people a personalized experience that meets their needs and makes them feel valued. Your customers should feel part of a community, instead of just a number. Provide them with useful content that speaks to the problems they want to solve.
Automation can include anything from using a scheduling tool to book meetings from email, or creating new client templates to speed up team onboarding.
The main point of automation technology is to keep a strong engagement going with your customer.
(We will also cover two more specific automation strategies in a few of the tips mentioned below here.)
2. Personalize One to Many Communication
If you are a customer success manager or support person, you may need to reach a lot of people all at once. And even though you may be sending out an email to a ton of people at once, they don’t need to be treated like cattle. Using personalization in email software, for example, you can target emails based on a customer’s role, business objectives, or workflow.
Thus, personalization is more than just using an old-fashioned word processing macro to add “Dear [NAME]” at the beginning of an email. It’s about sending communications that speak directly to a client’s needs, such as adding the best resources based on their role.
Let’s say for instance that you are a customer success rep in charge of onboarding new clients’ teams to your company’s SaaS product. You need to train each employee on different features and functionality based on their role within that company. By leveraging technology, you can segment the company’s entire employee contact list by job role and create an automated education series specific to what they need to learn.
3. Get Actionable Feedback from Customers
The great part about getting feedback from your customers is that it is a total win/win: You get critical information to improve your product or service. They get to feel valued and like their voice counts.
Surveys and polls are great, but they are even better when the customer doesn’t have to work hard to fill them out. This is where email automation is very helpful. Automated customer engagement platforms, like Mixmax, allow you to both embed a survey or poll right into your customer emails and then keep track of all the responses on a centralized dashboard. This single view will keep your team on track and save time.
Let Technology Help Your Customer Success Team Grow Your Business
With the help of the latest in technology tools, your customer success team can truly build and nourish lasting business relationships.
From workflow automation to managing social media accounts, today’s technologies can not only improve productivity but support better relationships with new and existing customers. And that ultimately creates customers who are advocates, not just clients.
