What is Customer Success
Customer Success is a growing field within the customer experience profession
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What is Customer Success?
Customer Success is a growing field within the customer experience profession. Customer Success professionals are those who ensure that customer relationships with an organization remain healthy and mutually beneficial. Their goal is to make sure customers have all the resources and help they need from an organization when using its products and services. This is achieved through interactions with customers, typically over video calls, in person, and by email.
Customer Success also involves developing targeted strategies to improve customer adoption (in case of a software or service), loyalty, and satisfaction, so that customers will continue to buy products or services from a company for years to come.
The business of Customer Success
Customer Success is a way to ensure that the customer’s needs and wants, as well as their satisfaction with your company, are met and maintained. Customer Success should be at the core of every business transaction. For this to be successful, there must be an understanding of what makes customers tick and how to make them keep coming back for more.
The most important part of becoming a successful customer-focused business is making sure you understand your clients’ needs and expectations of your product or service.
A framework for Customer Success
Customer Success is all about understanding the customer, their needs, and the environment. Every Customer Success Manager (CSM) should have a framework to help understand their customers, ranging from technical details like knowing their architecture and infrastructure, to organizational concerns like knowing what other groups or departments they interact with.
Your framework should include:
- The tech stack that your customers are using. This helps you stay informed and better understand how your tool integrates with other parts of your customer’s workflow.
- Customer goals – When you know what your customers want to achieve by working with you, you’ll be able to align their goals with yours and help them get there more quickly.
- Business metrics – Note any high-level business metrics that play into whether or not the customer succeeds in using your product (example: number of installations and usage metrics). Knowing these will give you context on where they need support most.
Achieving Customer Success
The CSM must be able to understand how the customer is using your product, what features they are utilizing, and which ones are not being used. By having this understanding of their usage, you can focus on how to optimize that user’s experience with the product (for example: by proposing a change management initiative to improve usage).
To achieve this level of familiarity with a customer, your team will need to utilize the data available through reporting tools or through accessing their account.
In addition to understanding your customers’ needs, you must also be able to communicate clearly and concisely regarding those needs. Your customers will have a much easier time navigating a helpful and clear process than they would have with one that is convoluted or opaque. Create processes that are as straightforward as possible for your customers so they can more easily troubleshoot problems rather than having them contact your team for every issue they face.
By understanding the fundamentals of Customer Success, you're better able to create a plan that works for you and your specific customers.
How to start
To create a strategic Customer Success plan, you first need to understand the fundamentals. Here are some of the things that should be top of mind as you start implementing your strategy:
- Know your customer and where they fit into your business model.
- Know your product and how it solves their needs.
- Set the right goals and metrics for what success looks like to them.
- Understand what your competition is doing and why this is important to your customers now more than ever.
- Be able to track all of these things so that you can make improvements over time.
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