Understanding Customer Success

Customer success is a business effort to help your customers achieve their goals.

What does customer success mean?

As the name suggests, customer success involves working with your customer to discover how your products and/or services can best enable them to achieve their goals and objectives.

Often, this means anticipating your customers' needs and wants, and taking proactive steps to exceed their expectations.

“Your business can expect less customer churn, more upsell opportunities, higher loyalty, and lower acquisition costs”

Unsurprisingly, this benefits all parties: your customers receive assistance in achieving their goals; in turn, your business can expect less customer churn, more upsell opportunities, greater loyalty, and lower acquisition costs as your customers become brand advocates long term.

Understanding Customer Success

In a customer success scenario, a company is not only reactive to customer needs, but takes a proactive approach, finding and offering a solution to customer problems before they seek help.< /p>

A committed and successful sales representative knows and understands their customers. They listen and research pain points and inefficiencies that affect their customers, then find ways their product can help them. This is a customer success story.

Why is customer success important?

Customer success is important because it adds value to the brand-customer relationship. If you let your customer walk away after they purchase and don't reach out to them until they reach out to you for help, that customer might be inclined to move on to your competition. On the other hand, customers are more likely to stay with a company that is engaged throughout the customer journey. In other words, customer success breeds loyalty.

Customer Success vs Customer Service

While customer success is about being proactive and supporting desired business outcomes, customer service is about being reactive to customer issues to maintain positive experiences.

In these cases, customers serve themselves, submit tickets, email, or chat with a support representative who, ideally, takes care of the issues. It's customer service.

Customer Success vs Account Management

Like customer service, account management teams offer responsive help to customers who contact and request it.

"Customer Success Managers and Account Managers have similar goals, i.e. to get renewals, up-sell, cross-sell and generally continue to generate revenue for business »

Customer success managers and account managers have similar goals, ie. to gain renewals, up-sells, cross-sells and generally continue to generate revenue in the business. However, account managers handle customer issues after they arise for a particular set of dedicated customers. Typically, these can be high value accounts or accounts that are likely to grow and grow as the business grows.

Customer Success Metrics

A customer success strategy is your blueprint for successful customer engagement and support at every stage of the lifecycle. But how can you be sure of having an effective strategy? Here are five metrics that will give you an indication.

Churn rate

This is perhaps the most important indicator of your strategy's performance. The happier your customers are with your offering and their experience, the more likely they are to stay with you. There are two types of churn to measure: the number of customers who leave and the revenue they lose. So keep tweaking and adjusting your strategy until retention and revenue start to grow.

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

NPS measures the overall customer lifecycle experience, specifically the likelihood that your customers will recommend your business to someone else. The score is collected via a short survey that can tell you a lot about how your customer success strategy is performing and where you need to improve.

Based on the answers, you can classify customers into three groups on a scale of 1 to 10. For example, respondents who select 0 to 5 are classified as detractors. Respondents who select 6-8 are classified as passive, and anyone who selects 9 or 10 may be classified as a promoter (but you can read more about how we conduct NPS surveys here.)