7 Tactics You can Adopt Right Now to Increase Customer Success

⏱ Reading Time: 9 minutes

I’ll begin this article with a Lincoln Murphy quote: 

“Customer Success is where 90% of the revenue is.”

Now, I’ll dare make a claim as well:

“Customer Success’ is one of the biggest buzzwords in the B2B sector, and it is going to be in the limelight for the time unknown.”

Now, why am I making such a claim?

Because every good entrepreneur knows that the success of their business is directly proportional to the success of their customer. 

🚀Read Customer Service: A Guide for Successful Business Growth🚀

If a customer succeeds by using a product or service, they’ll continue using it and referring it to others – indirectly promoting the brand and making it a huge success. That’s why a good sales prospecting and customer success strategy should not be underestimated. When done properly, these strategies can provide great results and help businesses make huge profits by creating meaningful relationships with their customers. 

However, when it comes to planning and implementing customer success solutions, things get complex. 

So, we’ve put together proven tactics to help you with the same. But before I begin, allow me to elaborate on the concept of CS.

What is Customer Success?

Customer Success is one of the most important methods for businesses to ensure customers achieve their desired outcomes while they’re using the service or product. 

In simpler words, it is the relationship-focused client management methodology that aligns vendor and client goals for mutually beneficial outcomes. The goal of this concept is to reduce customer churn and increase upsell opportunities.  

Customer success strategy helps companies better understand the customer experience and ensure that the customers can achieve what they’re aiming for. 

It’s all about understanding what customers want, how your product can help them, and what you can do to ensure your customer does everything better. 

Now, that you’ve got a good understanding of customer success and sales prospecting, let’s walk into the ‘how-tos’ of CS solutions.

Read Happy Customer Guidelines

Top 7 Strategies to Increase Customer Success

1. Easy Onboarding: Product/Service Education 

One mistake businesses often make is they assume customers will be impressed with the lengthy guides, list of features, and technical specifications that show them the value of your product.

But the truth is, customers, don’t care about that. What they want is an ‘easy solution to their problems.’ They don’t care about the details and all the rich features your app has got. 

So, focus on solving their problem in the shortest time possible. This can be done by easy onboarding through:

• Blogs
• Newsletter 
• Video Tutorials 
• Short guides 
• Infographics
  

Few Tips To Keep In Mind

• Different users have different needs. So, create onboarding material for both basic and technical users. 
• Make use of visual and focus more on graphic learning instead of long text. 
• Avoid over-actionable onboarding; make it as simple as possible. 
• Pay attention to user feedback and improve the onboarding process accordingly. 

Key Takeaway: By educating your customers and potential leads, your business will be able to minimize potential roadblocks and create a user-friendly customer experience, which will eventually result in customer success.  

Read Guide to Customer Onboarding Strategy for Amazing Brand Experience

2. Customer Support

This is something no business should neglect – no matter small or big. While you cannot be with your customer at every step, you sure can provide them with reliable customer support to help them whenever they’re in a fix. 

Your customer support team should be available to help the customers whenever they face a problem. You and your team should be able to solve their issues without unnecessary delay. 

Here’s a fact that will tell you why: 67% of customer churn can be reduced if support teams can fulfil customer’s problems during the first interaction.

Few Tips To Keep In Mind

• Respond to your customers in the shortest time possible.
• Personalize your customer support service by providing human interaction instead of automated voice. 
• Offer easy self-service options. 
• Pay attention to customer feedback.  

Key Takeaway: How you help your customers with overcoming problems they face with your service or product will play a significant role in customer success. Remember that customers want to be treated like people, not machines. So, humanize your approach to solving their problems.

Picture 1. Customer support

3. Watch Out For Problems

No sales prospecting is complete without KPIs or setting performance metrics. If you want to be successful with your customer success solution, you cannot neglect this step. 

Set your key performance indicators and see what’s working and what’s failing – you should always track which problem your customers are running into. There are quite a few customer success platforms that help you see how customers are using your product, and when they are dropping out of the onboarding process. 

So, start utilizing those platforms. Whenever the user performance drops, make sure to extend a helping hand to the users and adopt proactive outreach (explained in the next step). 

Key Takeaway: The problems your customers will come across mainly depend on the product you have, your service, your goals, and your customers’ tools. Training manuals are a good place to start. And, whenever you find performances dropping, act on time. 

Read Effective Problem Management Techniques

4. Adopt a Proactive Outreach 

Proactive outreach is all about identifying, understanding, and reaching out proactively to customers as soon as they run into a problem. It’s about thinking about your product from your customer’s perspective. 

Businesses who practice this approach don’t wait for customers to call them or reach out to them after a problem. Instead, they reach out to customers before they have a chance to complain. 

Once you’ve been in business for a while, you’ll know the kinds of problems your customer might run into. So, a proactive approach here would be:

• Creating FAQ’s for General Queries 
• YouTube Video Tutorials 
• Helpful Blog Posts 
• Product Training Tutorials 

Apart from that, you can also practice proactive outreach to inform customers about any technical problem your website or product runs into. Here, you can use email outreach to send out emails proactively to customers and inform them about server outages.

Key Takeaway: Traditional customer service was all about waiting for users to reach out to the helpdesk. But now, businesses are making a great difference by reaching out to users in advance. So, instead of waiting for them to struggle and then ask for help, reach out long before they have a chance to complain.

5. Get Feedback and Improvise

Your customers, without a doubt, are the most valuable source of information. Through them, you can learn about your strengths, weaknesses, and much more. 

Feedbacks help businesses improve their service and achieve customer success. Hence, start with putting a system in place for tracking customer experience, collecting feedback, and ensuring effective implementation. 

Just that timing is important for almost everything in the world, timing is crucial when asking for customer feedback. So, reach out to them accordingly – most probably at moments of high engagement. 

For feedback collection, you can utilize a pre-set email or template that reminds them to share feedback. Benchmarks worthy customer feedback collection may include:

• Post-Training Session 
• Post Moment Of Improvement 
• Feedback After The Moments Of Achievement 
• Monthly Check-Ins 
• Feedback After A Customer-Related Event 

It is also advisable to create a multi-channel network for collecting customer feedback. For example, if customers prefer emails, you should share an email template. The easier you make it for them to complete the feedback, the more likely they are to respond to them. 

Key Takeaway: Listen to your users more enough to understand what they expect and need. Hence, collect feedback – which is your most trusted report. And once you’ve collected them, make sure to make improvements in your products and services accordingly and reach out to them again to see if they respond positively or not.

6. Publish Free Content (Blogs)

Customer Success for any technology-related product begins with educating customers about how to make the most of the product or service. That is why a lot of businesses today focus on publishing free content or blog about their product. 

So, if you’re interested in ensuring customer success, start publishing helpful and free content. When done strategically, free content can ensure engagement and awareness about your product and also get your customer’s queries solved. 

I’ll add Jeanne Bliss’s quote to help you understand this better:

“We need to understand customer goals to achieve our goals. At the beginning of a relationship, customers are trying to educate themselves, get smarter and make the best decisions. Companies that are getting a bigger piece of the pie are focusing on delivering value, not “selling” – and earning consideration by helping customers to achieve their goals.”

Key Takeaway: When you educate your prospective clients or customers about ways of using the product, getting rid of any problem the product runs into, utilizing it to the full extent – it all increases both the trust factor and brand recognition. 

Read 5 Steps to Success in Content Marketing For SaaS

Picture 2. Why offer free content?

7. Identify Milestones in Customer Journey

One of the secrets I recently learned about sales prospecting and customer success is ‘identifying milestones in the customer journey.’ As a product owner or service provider, you’ll be able to make a great difference to customer success if you’re able to identify milestones. 

It’s important to actively think about your customer’s entire journey and map it. Identify and articulate all these steps to your customer’s product lifecycle and provide them with a clear and actionable pathway for achieving success. 

Few questions to ask yourself at each stage:

• How Will Prospective Customers Find You? 
• Which Solutions Can You Provide With Your Content?
• What Will The Users Expect From Your Content?
• What Types Of Keywords Will They Use To Find You?

I’ll also recommend creating content for each of these milestones. These content and tutorials will help them tackle each stage with ease, without running into trouble. 

Examples of content you can produce for each stage:

• Blog posts
• Checklists
• Guides
• Lead magnets
• Whitepapers
• eBooks
• Infographics
• Quiz
• Introductory scripted videos

Key Takeaway: Remember that identifying milestones and creating content for each step will help you convert more customers. So, ensure your team and website has content for each phase – for that will help you move forward with customer success.

Do I Need Customer Success for My Business?

Of course, you do, why else would you be reading this article till the end? If you’re a business, if you have customers, and if you want them to succeed – you need customer success. 

That being said, Customer Success works for any business that offers technology-based services or products. So, if you’re offering any of that, make sure to consider CS solutions from today! 

The key takeaway of this whole article is that customer success begins with one small step – staying committed to customer success. Once you’re sure of that, start implementing the seven strategies mentioned in this blog post. 

And once you’ve done that, come back here, and let us know if it made any difference for you. 

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Vyshnavi Basuthkar is a SaaS Marketing Analyst (who specializes in paid social strategy, social media management, content strategy, and email marketing) at piHappiness, top customer feedback software designed to collect customer feedback on Web, iPad & Android tablets.