Customer Success remains a must-have strategy across all b2B SaaS companies. While it is no surprise that customer retention is key to survival in the Subscription economy and customer retention can only happen when a customer achieves success. With Covid- 19, companies have realized this bitter truth more than ever. Now we have dedicated resources and a team using various customer success platforms to enable more proactive collaboration and intervention to help the customers achieve success.
What is Customer Success?
Customer success is a business method to help customers become successful. It is to ensure that the customer achieves their desired goals and outcomes through using your product and service.
It helps the business to achieve a larger revenue, reduce the churn rate and increase customer advocacy. Customer Success is a more proactive, data-led, relationship-focused client management that ensures the client and the vendor goals are aligned for mutual success.
That approach helps businesses reach a number of top-level goals, including:
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- Increasing renewal sales and revenue
- Increased customer loyalty and customer retention.
- Increased Customer Advocacy
How does Customer Success help drive the renewal and overall revenue?
The key to a thriving business always relies upon renewals and upsells. In the customer-centered economy, most of the customer value is dependent upon the customer experience. A high amount of customer value is acquired throughout the lifetime of a customer relationship rather than at a single sales event. This means retaining and nurturing existing customers has become just as important as acquiring new ones.
Customer Success ROI (Return On Investment) Focuses on the Customer Experience.
Customer success leads to higher customer retention which, in turn, generates recurring revenue. With that, it opens the potential for expansion or cross-sells opportunities. As a business, your main goal should be to help customers towards their goals by identifying their extra need for resources or products.
What is the Role of Customer Success?
With time and technological breakthroughs, we have seen a shift in Software Business. A few decades ago, purchasing software was a large capital expense. Once the vendor and the purchaser had a sales deal closed, both parties walked away. Now, with technological advancements and changes in time, this has given rise to the Subscription economy. The customers no longer bound by lengthy contracts or tied up due to huge investments.
Things have basically changed on the vendor’s side. Now the vendor has to every time re-earn the renewal. This comes with the challenge at the vendor’s side as now the customer has a choice of switching to a different vendor. This is the part where customer Success comes into action.
The initial decision to buy a product is based on hope but the decision to renew the product is based on experience
Understanding the Customer Journey
Customer Success comes with understanding the entire customer journey. Monitoring the customer progress and product use over the customer lifetime. At each phase of the customer journey, the customer success team works to create a responsive customer experience that will ultimately deliver the recurring revenue.
This cycle continues across the four pillars of the customer journey:
| Onboarding | The crucial first impression and product introduction, onboarding is the customer success team’s chance to rapidly grow customer knowledge and ease the integration of the product into daily workflows. |
| Adoption | This is where the proverbial rubber meets the roads and the customer begins to use the product independently. During this phase, customer success teams carefully monitor customer metrics to make sure the product is being used often and effectively. |
| Escalation | Despite the most eagle-eyed customer management, things could go wrong. The key to managing escalations is to resolve matters quickly, listen and respond to Voice of Customer information, and see the situation as an opportunity to grow the customer relationship. |
| Renewal | Consider renewal as an outcome of the customer experience and the efforts of customer success engagements. Upsells aren’t dependent on timelines and are not even helpful for some customers. But if a customer is ready for expansion, customer success teams need to be there to help.
These four pillars of customer success are ways of managing the customer journey. |
What are the key components of Customer Success?
Customer Success comes with 5 core components. Onboarding success, product success, customer success, company success, and team success. These 5 key aspects to customer success need an ideal focus and attention to ensure your company’s present and future success.
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Onboarding Success
Onboarding success is the most crucial one. Successful onboarding is the first and the most important step for overall customer success. If the onboarding process of a customer goes well designed it will help customers to build trust in you right from the start. Hence you have to design your onboarding process in a way that helps the customer understand the basics of the software.
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Product Success
Once the onboarding process is successful, the next step is to make sure that your product is being adopted successfully. As a business,, you need to identify is your product is adopted or not. The correct way to measure your product adoption is done simply by identifying the needs and requirements of your customer.
Three Things that ensure product success:
- Narrow the scope of your Product
- Identify customer concerns
- Define boundaries for failure and success
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Customer Success
All the efforts that are put in to ensure successful onboarding and Product success will eventually lead to Customer Success. The main aim of a business is to provide customer success. This is where you analyze if your customer is being able to achieve the outcomes that your sales committed and promised them.
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Company Success
This is where you start measuring your own success associated with and leading from the first three pillars. Which is, have you started to get 130% MRR on retention, upsells, growth, renewals, less logo churn, or more retention. So that’s company success when you see all of these pieces translating into the core company and more success essentially falling on them.
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Team Success
The fifth is team success which is actually not being spoken a lot about, according to me is a key piece to all this. The team that makes all of this happen, team success. Are you able to give credit, attributes and recognize and reward the team members of the team who delivered on all these accessories?
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P.S. – The main image has been taken from pexels.com
