You need to always make sure your organization has everything it takes to enable customer success. Customer success is more than just making sure your customers have everything they need to have a positive experience with your product or service.
When this is done successfully, it reduces churn, increases retention, and improves customer loyalty. With the many trends ongoing in customer success, there are also obstacles you need to overcome.
In this article, we’ll dive deeper into learning more about the emerging trends in customer success and how to overcome the obstacles.
5 customer success trends that are shaping the future
Customer success is the key driver of growth by aligning your company’s goals with the customer’s. Taking a strategic and thoughtful approach is the key to growing your customer’s portfolio over time. Let’s take a look at the trends that are shaping customer’s success.
1. Making the customer experience good during the onboarding process
It’s always important to leave a good first impression and this can be done during the onboarding process. Did you know that 89 percent of customers are more likely to make a second purchase after they have a good first experience with a business?
The best way to make the onboarding process smooth is to personalize the experience. This can be done by learning more about the customer by asking for feedback.
Customer feedback helps you personalize your outreach to your customers who might be struggling with your product or service, and this data can help you learn more about the customers’ pain points and how you can solve them.
2. Customer journey maps
Creating a customer journey map is the process of forming a representation of the customer’s processes, needs, and perceptions through their relationship and interactions with your business. A customer journey map allows you to see all the steps your customers take, the ones you see and the ones you don’t.
Once you visualize the customer journey map, you are assessing:
- Your customers’ behavior
- The customers’ attitudes
- Their on-stage experience: Who the customer is interacting with?
- Their off-stage experience: What your customer isn’t aware of?
If you are wondering how you can set up the customer journey mapping process, here are a few tips to follow:
- Create a customer persona for testing: You need to understand the customer if you want to create an effective customer journey—and this is where creating a persona helps you out. Your persona should include the following: name, age, job role, family status, professional goals, and personal goals.
- Choose a customer journey for mapping: Choose a customer journey map that you want to construct and build a behavior line across it.
- Work through the mapping process: There are many questions to ask and they include: Who are the people that are involved in this journey? What moments matter? What kind of attitudes are the customers showing? What are the customers’ needs? Are you effectively addressing the customer’s needs?
- Measure the results: Your customer journey map can decide your measurement framework. What are you measuring? When on the journey are you measuring it? What KPIs need to be measured?
In other words, customer journey mapping acts like a strategic planner around your customer lifecycle for improving customer retention and growth.
3. Ethical public relations
An ethics-based approach in PR is more important than it has ever been and significantly impacts your relationship with your clients. Here are some of the main ways that effective PR strategies are contributing to CS:
- Builds long-term trust: Ethics-based PR improves your company’s reputation and helps build a foundation of trust.
- Proactive communication: Includes regularly updating customers on product news, new features, and other important information about your business. This helps increase customer satisfaction by making the customer involved.
- Helps manage customer feedback: Both positive and negative feedback need to be taken into consideration. By addressing the customer’s concerns, PR can turn negative experiences into positive ones and show the customers that their opinions are valued.
A recent study showed that 66 percent of customers are willing to pay more for a product or service that comes from companies that are committed to leaving a positive social impact.
4. Customer success software
Customer success software is used by businesses to make sure that customers are achieving the desired outcome whenever they use their product or service. These platforms are used for tracking customer behavior, preferences, usage patterns, and this helps you and your team coordinate better on how well you measure CS.
The software assesses the CS by using a ‘’Health Score” to predict the customer’s future satisfaction. This helps you identify any red flags, increase customer retention, grow your customer base, and more.
These products are mostly used by sales teams in order to strengthen their customer relationships. Customer success initiatives are important for increasing your revenue, boosting customer advocacy, and improving your corporate profitability growth.
In order for a product to qualify in the customer success category, it needs to have the following:
- Build your customers’ profile
- Gather customer data, history, feedback, including survey results, invoicing, renewals, and team interactions
- Predict any red flags, customer growth, and use graphs that show customer interactions, inquiries, and payments
- Automate the workflow process like alerts, analysis, reporting, and success planning
CS software can definitely enlighten the process for you and save you lots of time while you focus on making your product qualify in the CS category.
5. Cloud-based business phone systems
Businesses need a reliable communication system. Many customer success (CS) teams find this by using a cloud-based phone system that works via the Internet. Cloud-based phone systems offer lots of flexibility and scalability for businesses of all sizes.
However, when choosing a cloud-based phone solution, it’s important to compare service providers and see which one best fits your team. A common choice amongst many businesses is Nextiva, which offers a great experience through phone, chat, email, and SMS. However, it all depends on which solution you see as best for your business.
If you think there’s a better solution for you, your best bet is to look for a Nextiva alternative that you can use for your online business. When looking for one, it’s important to pay attention to the following factors:
- Reliability: When you are dealing with a large number of calls, you need a cloud-based business phone system that won’t be dropping your calls. Downtime is the enemy of a business.
- Reduces time consumption: Every second counts when it comes to customer success and increasing call outputs.
- Automation: The proper integrations will allow your business to overcome time-consuming tasks. Processes that are automatically taken care of allows your team to focus on more important things.
- Easy onboarding: An easy-to-use interface will help you spend much less time on tasks that don’t matter and focus on those that do. One-click setups are probably the best setups to consider for you.
Your best option is to also focus on trying out free trials and see which cloud-based phone system is helping you increase your customer success.
4 obstacles you face in customer success
While there are trends in CS, keep in mind that you’ll also encounter obstacles that you need to face like the following:
1. Not having enough product expertise
Effective customer success management (CSM) means having an in-depth understanding of your product and the best of your technical abilities. CSM is the product expert who teaches them the best practices, educating them about the platform’s capabilities, solving problems on specific use cases, and providing training. Many don’t understand the software enough, but the more you do, the more credible you’ll be as a CS manager.
Becoming a product expert does take some time, but it will usually take around 3-4 months. Therefore, it’s important to build good relationships with your product managers and technical team since they’ll be your key to becoming the master of your company’s product.
2. Not entirely understanding your customer’s needs
You’d be surprised that many companies fail in understanding the customers’ needs. According to a study, 70 percent of businesses failed to take action from Customer Satisfaction surveys. Setting up a customer buyer persona is a fundamental part of knowledge that customers should possess.
Understanding your customers needs all starts with collecting accurate and relevant information. The better you understand the framework, the faster you can build strong relationships with your customers.
3. Failing to use the proper metrics
What can’t be measured can’t be managed, and what can’t be managed, can’t be improved. If you want a successful CSM, you need to have a better understanding of your KPIs and metrics. Metrics will help you deliver better work and improve your customer relationships and connection with your company’s goals and daily tasks.
It’s always important to clarify which key metrics your CS team needs to use. The most common ones include customer satisfaction, NPS, expansion, retention, and churn.
4. Not having subject expertise
An essential part of the CS role is to give your customers strategic advice. Customers expect to not only receive benefits from your product, but also to get expert advice that is related to their industry.
It’s not possible for a CSM to provide value to your customers without having in-depth understanding of their industry. Therefore, you need to become an expert in the industry your customer is in. Having subject expertise allows you to speak the same language your customer does and when you do this, you are one step ahead of your competitors.
Customer success is something worth investing in
Customer success is something important to invest in, and as more companies invest in it, the demand for CS professionals will keep on growing over time. It’s undoubtedly one of the most promising jobs in the world, and going to be even more popular in the future.
While more companies are strongly focusing on addressing the needs and wants of their customers, hiring CS managers to do the job for you is important in doing so.
