“Sustainable business” is a buzzword that’s thrown around in business circles. For any company to build a sustainable business, they must focus on how their customers achieve success with their products and services. And this is where customer success comes into play.
What is customer success?
Customer success is a customer-centric approach to the sales process. It’s a process that helps customers achieve their goals and objectives, which in turn helps your company achieve its mission and vision.
Customer success is all about ensuring that your customers get what they paid for, with high-quality service and support throughout their lifetime with you. It’s not just about making the sale; it’s about keeping the relationship strong at every step of the way by focusing on their needs instead of yours (or your company).
How is customer success different from customer service?
Customer success is not the same as customer service. It’s often thought of as the opposite of customer service. Customer success is about making your customers successful enough to become advocates for you and your business—and keeping them loyal to you long-term by helping them achieve their goals.
Customer service is about fixing problems that arise during a customer’s experience with your product or service, which may be related to information or support, but does not necessarily focus on helping the customer reach his or her end goal.
How to set up your customer success team
The first step to building a customer success team is setting up the right structure. Customer success is not a one-person job, and it can’t be handled by one person alone. You need to build an entire team that shares a shared vision, has the same goals, and is empowered to act on behalf of your customers.
Each member of your team should have their expertise and strengths—and they should also know what they don’t know (so you can hire someone who does). The key here is making sure everyone knows their role in the company: what their responsibilities are, how they contribute to helping customers succeed with your product or service, and how much support they can expect from other members of their group as well as from other departments within your company.
Measuring customer success metrics
The first thing to measure is your customers’ satisfaction with your product or service. This metric is typically measured by asking customers how satisfied they are with the product, service, and/or brand on a scale of 1-10.
Next is your customer retention rate measures how many customers stay with you after some time (usually 3-12 months). How do you determine this? It’s pretty simple: take the number of new customers in a given period and divide it by the total number of active accounts then.
And lastly is your customer referral/advocacy. This metric measures whether or not your business has happy customers who will recommend other potential clients to use your services as well. You can achieve this by tracking referrals that come from existing clients or bootstrapping techniques like asking for reviews on Yelp and Google Businesses listings; if more people come back because their friend referred them, then it means that all those hours spent building relationships are paying off.
Conclusion
Customer success is not something you can just throw together. It takes time, resources, and collaboration between different departments within your organization to make it work. However, if you are willing to invest in this strategy then it will pay off in the long run by increasing the lifetime value of each customer and reducing churn rates at the same time.
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