It would be much easier to build a car with the help of a trained mechanic who could guide you through each step, rather than trying to do it without any instructions. Your customers would agree.
When customers make a purchase, they are anxious because they want to make sure that they are making a good decision. They are relying on the product or service that they are buying to meet their needs, both in the short and long term. Because there is no instruction manual for making a good purchase, customers are depending on the company to help them succeed. If the customers are successful, the company will also be successful.
If you want to improve your customers’ chances of success, you can invest in a customer success program. Having a mechanic to help you build a car is an example of how this can be done.
What Is Customer Success?
Eva Klein, the vice president of customer success at HubSpot, defines customer success as “an organizational function that helps customers get maximum value out of a product or service while working closely with sales, marketing, and product to achieve that goal.” Customer success teams work to create relationships with customers that last beyond their initial purchase from the company. They focus on finding ways that the company can continue to provide excellent service to the customer.
The term “customer success” is relatively new, but the concept is not. The practice of customer success is proactively helping customers get desired outcomes from your product. The term “customer success” is relatively new, but the concept is not.
Businesses that offer software as a service (SaaS) can use Refiner to conduct customer feedback surveys. But besides, they’d want much more than just a feature that helps them get feedback ?— they’d want to:
- set up with the platform quickly,
- create the surveys fast and easily,
- send the surveys through multiple channels for a high response rate,
- send the surveys on different triggers,
- see results in the form of beautiful graphs,
- access survey results from another platform (for example a CRM), and more.
The aim of customer success is to help customers reach their goals, and beyond.
Customer Success vs. Customer Service
A customer success team is proactive rather than reactive. If a customer has a problem with a product, they’ll call customer service to fix it. Instead, customer success teams anticipate problems and reach out with solutions before they even occur. This provides long-term support rather than short-term fixes.
Why Do you Need a Customer Success Program?
Increase Revenue
HubSpot’s mission is to grow with their customers because research suggests that growing companies prioritize customer success. According to HubSpot research, companies with growing revenue are 70% more likely than those with stagnating revenue to view customer success as “very important.”
Additionally, the research found that 55% of companies who are expanding say that customer success programs are “very important”, while only 29% of companies who are not expanding say the same. This suggests that investing in customer success teams leads to an increase in revenue.
Upselling and Cross-Selling Opportunities
Customer success programs provide more opportunities to communicate with customers. A study found that companies that added a customer success program demonstrated twice as many customer interactions than before. This provides additional chances for your team to upsell and cross-sell. A customer success manager can anticipate roadblocks that a customer will experience, then reach out to explain how your premium offers can help.
Decrease Acquisition Cost
If you help customers achieve their goals, they will think of your company as being responsible for their success. This will make them more likely to stay with your company, rather than going to a competitor.
Additionally, customers who are happy with your product or service are likely to share their experiences with other potential customers. This increases the number of people who are familiar with your brand and product, which in turn reduces the amount of time and effort you need to spend attracting new customers.
Increases User Engagement
The goal of customer success is to help users get the most out of your software by teaching them about all its features and explaining how each one can benefit them. The more value users see in your software, the more likely they are to keep using it, which leads to more success for your business.
Reduce Churn
The following text discusses the benefits of adding a customer success program. This type of program can help companies reduce their churn rates. The program works by setting up customer playbooks and creating automated alerts. These alerts indicate when a customer is likely to churn. This allows companies to take action to prevent the customer from leaving.
If you haven’t started a customer success program at your company yet, follow these steps to create one.
Customer Success Powers Word-Of-Mouth
It is common knowledge that word-of-mouth marketing is more effective than ads or influencer campaigns. We are more likely to trust the recommendations of actual users than to believe an advertisement.If you do not believe me, consider the following example.
88% of consumers trust word-of-mouth recommendations from people they know more than any other type of marketing.
A satisfied customer will become a positive point of advertisement for your company, even if they do not do it actively. For example, a happy customer may write a positive review of your software on a platform where potential users go to make purchase decisions.
How to Build a Customer Success Program
Identify the customer’s end goal.
The first step is to find out what customers want your product for. For example, you wouldn’t buy a wrench just for the sake of it. But if you wanted to build a car, you would need one. Customers always have a specific goal in mind when they make a purchase, so you must work out where your product or service fits into that. Once you know that, you can use buyer persona tools to segment and organize customers by the outcomes they want.
To find the best customers for your customer service program, look for those who are most likely to succeed. This can be done by conducting a customer behavior analysis or by looking at metrics such as social media mentions, product usage reports, and NPS®.
Build a customer success team.
A customer success team shows customers that you’re dedicated to helping them reach their goals. As trust builds up over time, customers will be more likely to purchase additional products from you because of this relationship with your team.
When hiring a customer success manager you should look for an employee that is a good team player and has excellent communication skills. A good place to start is by looking at your customer service department as the customer service employees will have a strong knowledge of your product and will have experience in dealing with customer roadblocks. Customer service employees are geared towards achieving customer success so it should not be a difficult transition for them to focus their efforts on long-term solutions.
Prioritize customer success
The vast majority of SaaS companies are unaware of the numerous things they do that contribute to customer success, often taking inspiration from other successful SaaS products. As a result, you likely have many of the key components of customer success already in place.
Even if you think you know what your customers want, you might be missing some key elements that are unique to them. The only way to truly understand your customer base is to prioritize their success. This means taking the time to run customer surveys and figure out what success looks like to them.
Optimize your onboarding process
The onboarding process is perhaps the most crucial to SaaS success. These statistics are proof:
- 8 in 10 users say they’ve deleted an app because they didn’t know how to use it.
- 86% of people say they’d be more likely to stay loyal to a business that invests in onboarding content that welcomes and educates them after they’ve bought.
在通过你的SaaS成功时，用户需要知道如何在其中导航并使用它。此外，他们需要看到他们支付的价格的明确价值。并且一个适当的登录过程有助于所有这些 – 向用户展示同时传达你提供的价值。 In order for your SaaS to be successful, users need to be able to navigate through it and use it. They also need to see clear value for what they are paying. A proper onboarding process can help with all of this by showing users around and communicating the value you provide.
Be proactive with customer education
Often, when people talk about “educating customers”, they think only in terms of product demos and user manuals. “Educating customers” in the context of customer success refers to proactive efforts to help customers achieve their goals. This might include product demos and user manuals, but also encompasses a wide range of activities such as providing best practices, troubleshooting tips, or even just being available to answer questions.
I already discussed the importance of educating your customers during the onboarding process to ensure they are using your SaaS properly. However, there are additional areas where your customers may need assistance. Creating a blog, knowledge base, or FAQs can help address these needs.
Optimize your offboarding process
It is critical for customer success to allow customers to leave your platform and to know why they are leaving.
Here are a few best practices for offboarding customers effectively:
- Don’t be pushy. A company like Amazon can get away with “dark patterns” that prevent users from leaving their platform. However, not allowing users to leave your SaaS will lead to negative word-of-mouth more often than not.
- Yet, don’t just let them leave with a click. You can ask users to downgrade, send surveys to know why they’re leaving, ask them to chat with a support executive if they need help, remind them of why they chose your SaaS in the first place, and send a coupon code after they leave to re-engage, etc.
Track the key metrics
Your customer success team can only know where they need to focus and how customer success efforts are impacting if you track these metrics:
- Customer LTV
- Customer retention rate
- Customer retention cost
- Repeat purchase rate
- Trial to paid user conversion rate
- Churn rate
- Total usage time
- Frequently-accessed features
- Net Promoter Score (NPS)
- Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)
- Customer Effort Score (CES)
Use proper customer success tools
For almost all customer success efforts, you’ll need a customer success tool. Ideally, you want a tool that includes functionalities for:
- User onboarding,
- Customer feedback,
- Customer support (live chat, phone support, help tickets, video chat),
- Customer health monitoring,
- Analytics,
- Churn-reduction,
- Customer relationships management, and more.
Different tools will be needed in order to support all of it.
Customer Success Tools Your SaaS Needs
A customer feedback tool
If your software-as-a-service (SaaS) product isn’t new and you already have active customers, the first tool you should get is a customer feedback tool. Why? Because the people who are using your software are the ones who know best what customer success means for your SaaS product.
The best way to understand customer needs and sentiments is to send CSAT, NPS, or CES surveys.
You could send a CES survey to users after they go through the onboarding process in order to get feedback about how easy it was to navigate the app. This would give you a better understanding of what a successful onboarding process looks like from the users’ perspective.
A user onboarding tool
A user onboarding software can help you keep new customers informed about the various features of your product and how to use them. It can also help you provide a quick tutorial on using your SaaS product.
There is no one right way to onboard a new user. The approach that you take should be dictated by your product and what will work best for your users. Some common techniques include using tooltips, product tours, a setup wizard, or a video on the homepage. Another option is to send a series of educational emails to new users.
An email tool can help with more than just onboarding, for example.
Userlist helps simplify Sahm email automation by providing a platform that includes features for onboarding and other Sahm email marketing needs.
The tool allows you to send onboarding sequences via email or in-app messages. It also allows you to send emails based on how the user initially interacts with your SaaS.
A customer service software
If you want to provide great customer service, you need customer service software that offers features like a knowledge base, FAQs, and a chatbox, as well as reactive customer support features like live chat and email tickets.
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