The Ultimate Guide to Customer Success Jump to a Category The Ultimate Guide to Customer Success 1. What is Customer Success? What Customer Success is Not Customer Success vs. Customer Support Customer Success vs. Customer Service Customer Success vs. Customer Experience Customer Success vs. Account Management Customer Success vs. Sales 2. Why Should Businesses Care About Customer Success? 3. How Can I Get Started with Customer Success? A. Develop a Customer Success Strategy B. Build Customer Success Teams Recruitment Process Customer Success Leaders Chief Customer Officer (CCO) Vice President of Customer Success Director of Customer Success Customer Success Manager Customer Success Team Members Customer Success Operations C. Implement Customer Success Tools D. Develop Flexible Services and Practices E. Create a Culture Around Customer Value F. Measure and Improve 4. What Does a Customer Success Team Do? Manage Customer Data and Interactions Support and Engage with Customers Improve Retention and Increase Loyalty Manage Your Customer Success Team Support Other Departments Move Customers Through the Customer Success Stages 5. What Results Should I Expect from Implementing Customer Success? Benefits of Customer Success Reduced Churn (Improved Retention) Increased Upselling/Cross-selling Better Customer Relationships Better Onboarding Increased Adoption Better Team Productivity Enhanced Customer Experience Revenue Growth Better Profitability Higher Valuation Higher Customer Sentiment Metrics for Customer Success Churn Rate Upsell Rate Cross-sell Rate NPS ROI Revenue How to Achieve Positive Results Get a full view of your customers’ information Keep tabs on customer health Segment customers Drive adoption and usage Multi-channel customer touchpoints Customer surveys and feedback Automation Manage customer success tasks Alerts for changes, milestones, expirations, and more 6. Conclusion The Ultimate Guide to Customer Success In today’s competitive environment, numerous businesses have found customer success to be the difference between superior, sustainable growth and business failure. Although originating in SaaS organizations, it is essential for all types of businesses, particularly those with a recurring revenue model, even beyond software and technology. We’re not competitor-obsessed, we’re customer-obsessed. – Jeff Bezos, CEO, Amazon This practical guide is for both experienced customer success practitioners and newcomers to the field and will cover the following:1. What is customer success?2. Why should businesses care about customer success?3. How can I get started with customer success?4. What does a customer success team do? 5. What results should I expect from implementing customer success? 1. What is Customer Success? Customer success is a methodology focusing on long-term customer relationships and proactively determining solutions to potential issues to reduce churn and increase upsell opportunities. Customer and client success is about much more than just selling to potential customers. It’s about fostering customer relationships to ensure their needs will be met, which results in higher customer loyalty and increased revenue. A virtual win-win, customer success takes sales to the next level.One of the most cited definitions of customer success is from Lincoln Murphy: Customer Success is when your customers achieve their Desired Outcome through their interactions with your company. – Lincoln Murphy, Sixteen Ventures According to Murphy, desired outcomes are what the customer needs to achieve (outcome) and how they need to achieve it (experience).The Customer Success Association defines it as “a long-term, scientifically engineered, and professionally directed business strategy for maximizing customer and company sustainable proven profitability.”As defined above, two of the primary benefits of customer success are to reduce churn and to increase upselling opportunities. They are important factors in customer success because they are not only critical business metrics, but are also vital metrics to determine whether your customer success efforts are working. Low churn rates reflect your ability to retain your existing customers and high upsell rates mean your customers are not only willing to stay but are satisfied enough to upgrade their service with you.Customer success is a more holistic approach to sales and customer service that can have a much larger impact on an organization’s bottom line. What Customer Success is Not Now that we’ve defined what customer success is, let’s take a look at some of the things it is not in order to get a clearer picture in the grand scheme of customer success in business. Customer Success vs. Customer Support While customer support is a reactive approach to providing solutions to customers’ problems when they arise, customer success proactively mitigates potential problems with guidance throughout the customer journey to ensure goals are met. Customer Success vs. Customer Service Similar to customer support, customer service is reactive and focuses on what needs to be done to fix problems as they occur to maintain customer satisfaction. Customer success ensures satisfaction with consistent understanding and guidance to meet goals. Customer Success vs. Customer Experience Customer experience has to do with the perceptions and interactions customers have with a brand. Customer success, on the other hand, takes more control in the experience to ensure it is beneficial to the customer. Customer Success vs. Account Management Account management is revenue-centric, while customer success is a wider philosophy incorporating the entire customer journey with a focus on customer value. Customer Success vs. Sales Sales is responsible for any activities leading up to a sale. Customer success is responsible for post-sales activities from onboarding to upgrading and advocacy. 2. Why Should Businesses Care About Customer Success? The short answer is that businesses should care about customer success because it will increase your retention rate, which is key to recurring revenue. Customer Success is where 90% of the revenue is. – Jason Lemkin The long answer has multiple layers. The first layer has to do with the impact of retention on valuation. According to SaaS Capital, for every 1% increase in retention, valuation increases by 12% in 5 years for the average SaaS company. This translates to a great deal of worth with only slight increases in retention.Customer success also impacts the entire customer journey and brand experience, which significantly impacts customer satisfaction and, ultimately, retention and advocacy. This will result in a healthy customer base. A healthy customer base, in turn, is a sign of a healthy business, which will attract customers as well.Plus, customer success is not only able to help many different organizations in many different industries, but also offers advantages no matter where you are in the customer success journey. For instance, consider the customer success journey as this basic framework: 1. Onboarding & Adoption 2. Retention 3. Expansion 4. Advocacy As customers go through each of these stages of the journey, you will be able to determine if there are any issues for your customers so you can mitigate them and move them to the next stage. During the onboarding and adoption stage, you can help your customers truly understand the value your product gives them. If they are faltering at this stage, you can emphasize that value and get them to the retention stage.At this stage, your customers will be regular users. Anything less, you’ll want to intervene to ensure they stay with you so that you can identify areas to upsell in the next stage, expansion. If your upselling strategy is not working, you will want to maximize touchpoints to determine the issue and get them to the next stage, advocacy.The ultimate goal in the customer success journey is to turn customers into advocates so they will be willing and able to refer you to others, increasing your business. Furthermore, as mentioned previously, there are many different types of businesses and industries that can benefit from implementing a customer success strategy. Really, any business that has customers can benefit from it. In particular, technology-based products and services that already tend to collect data on usage have been jumping on the customer success bandwagon.Software as a Service (SaaS) business-to-business (B2B) organizations tend to have the most immediate and noticeable impact when implementing customer success. One reason for this is that SaaS organizations have unique business models and sales cycles that have their own types of characteristics and challenges.SaaS products tend to be subscription-based, which often suffer a great deal of churn. Getting organizations to renew subscriptions and upgrade subscription levels are vital to their businesses. Trust, loyalty, and advocacy become invaluable to SaaS organizations to retain customers.Customer success is a solution for all of the challenges experienced by SaaS product sales. Since customer success focuses on nurturing a long-term relationship with customers with a full understanding of the customer experience, it ensures prospective customers understand the benefits of a specific offering, not just the features. Customer success teams sell the value of a product and an organization, not just the product itself. This can be a huge differentiation for SaaS organizations.Since customer success is instrumental in reducing churn and increasing upselling and cross-selling, SaaS businesses find it to be an extremely effective solution to retain and upgrade their existing customers. Highly satisfied and happy existing customers not only tend to stay, they tend to become advocates for your brand and your products.SaaS businesses also have the unique ability to make enhancements and fixes to products before they ever even become an issue for customers as long as they are able to get the information in time.Customer success teams can ensure the customer is able to bring up an issue and will get it to the appropriate teams to get fixed. This will not only help new customers get a nearly flawless experience, but will also ensure much higher rates of customer satisfaction. Another reason SaaS businesses tend to employ customer success into their organizations is its ability to help define success for these types of organizations. Without tangible and consistent metrics to determine if your product is successful, customer success teams can glean deep insight from their customers to determine how well they are doing. Without those long-term relationships, there isn’t going to be much you’ll be able to use to measure your overall success.Customer success is a customer-centric approach that helps drive post-sales activities, which ultimately drives revenue more cost-effectively and efficiently than pre-sales activities. Retaining customers is much more cost-effective than building new business, after all. In fact, McKinsey found that existing customers account for between a third to half of total revenue growth. Plus, with the higher rates of customer satisfaction, you’ll have happier customers and happy customers are excellent advocates. 3. How Can I Get Started with Customer Success? There are several things you can do within your organization to get started with customer success right away. The following list will run down the basics, but there are resources that can help, when you need it. A. Develop a Customer Success Strategy Unlike your basic sales or marketing plan that you can create from an online template because so many of the steps are somewhat standard, customer success strategies are more customized to meet the needs of SaaS and other technology-based businesses. Of course, the fact that it is customer-centric will also make it look a bit different than your run-of-the-mill sales and marketing strategies. Plus, this strategy will permeate most departments within an organization, which also makes a difference when putting it all together.Generally, a customer success strategy should include:Broad responsibility areasDetermine areas of responsibilityBy phaseBy OutcomeBy product lineBy geographyBy client segmentOperationsDetermine who does what and when and they KPIs to track and measure progressOther optional elements to your customer success strategy include:Segment and understand what your customers needDetermine what their definition of “success” is in their businessIdentify your success capabilitiesList all potential ways your offerings can help customers succeedDetermine where your capabilities can meet your customers’ needsDetermine where you see potential crossoverEstablish customer success objectivesDefine overall objectives for customer successDetermine metrics for each part of the customer journeyCreate a customer journey map and create metrics for each milestone on the mapEstablish lines of communication for feedbackCreate surveys, review requests, and contact forms for feedbackOutreach strategyDetermine how you will reach out to customers depending on their preferred methods of communicationContent strategyCreate valuable content that your customers will be able to use to help them reach their goalsRetention strategyDetermine how you will reduce churnUpsell strategyEstablish factors that will determine when to suggest new products and upgradesWhen and how you accomplish these steps is up to each organization, but they can be used as the basic building blocks to create a powerful and effective strategy to achieve your customer success initiatives. B. Build Customer Success Teams Once you know what you want to achieve with customer success and how, it’s time to build a team. There’s no one-size-fits-all solution to this either, but the flexibility will help you build a team that works specifically for you and your organization. Your customer success team members will need to be top-notch employees and can include management level, professional services providers, sales staff, and more, if desired. Recruitment Process When recruiting employees with specific skill sets that can be easily recognizable on a resume, a quick scan of a pile of resumes and an interview or two should do the trick. However, when you are looking to hire or contract someone with less measurable and teachable hard skills and more soft skills, such as a customer success team, you’ll want to put more emphasis on the recruitment process.Of course, depending on your industry, you’ll want to ensure your customer success team members have certain knowledge. For instance, they may need to have technical knowledge or compliance expertise, depending on your industry. Ironically, one of the skills you may not find on a resume is “customer success.” This is where you will want to look for soft skills that translate to customer success. Some perfect customer success candidates will have marketing, sales, engineering, or consulting backgrounds, among others. Then there should be an extensive interview and vetting process to understand how they fit culturally and emotionally within the role. Customer success teams need to have a great deal of empathy and emotional intelligence along with industry knowledge, which is a unique combination, though strong sales professionals often exhibit such characteristics. Of course, one of the best ways you can go about the recruitment process is to employ the services of a customer success service provider to help you hire the team that is right for your unique organization’s needs. Customer Success Leaders You may decide to have an executive-level customer success resource that will be responsible for ensuring customer success managers are helping customers realize their maximum business value. Leadership roles may include: Chief Customer Officer (CCO) Reporting to the Chief Executive Officer (CEO), the CCO oversees the entire customer success, marketing, and product teams to ensure all customer interactions meet the goals of the organization. Vice President of Customer Success Reporting to the CCO, the VP is in charge of all strategies and execution to align teams to scale operations, while keeping customer experience in mind. Director of Customer Success Directors manage the Customer Success Managers to ensure customer health is optimal and any issues are addressed immediately. Often reporting to the VP, directors oversee all aspects of customer success management. Customer Success Manager A Customer Success Manager, or Client Success Manager, is responsible for developing and managing relationships with customers to promote retention and loyalty. Customer Success Managers will continuously work with customers to facilitate adoption, align goals, and ensure satisfaction. They also partner with solutions engineers, sales, and marketing to ensure all operations are working together to achieve each customer’s goals. Customer Success Team Members How you structure your team depends heavily on what your needs are. Some possible team members include customer support team members, onboarding representatives, trainers, upselling and cross-selling representatives, and subject matter experts. Your team members can report directly to your customer success managers or to higher management in your organization, depending on the structure. Customer Success Operations Once you have your team in place, you can focus on how you will need to run your operations to ensure customer success is in the mix and that the systems that you have implemented to help with your customer success will be administered.Depending on the scale of your organization, you may need your operations department to ensure customer success is part of their daily routine or you may need a dedicated customer success operations department for larger enterprises. Hiring your customer success team may start from the bottom up or vice versa. You can start your team and seek executive oversight after the fact or you can hire the leader first allowing them to gather their own team. In the former, you will need someone who can scale what already exists and, on the other, you should seek entrepreneurial skills as a necessity. C. Implement Customer Success Tools In order to get your organization started with customer success, you’ll want to implement all of the tools your teams will need. This can include everything from basic tools like phones and email to start your outreach to chatbots, social media, and email automation to take your outreach to the next level.Perhaps the most powerful tool in your arsenal, however, will be a customer success platform that can help drive success through better user engagement and retention to much more effectively reduce churn and increase upselling opportunities. Advanced customer success software will help you combine all aspects of engagement, onboarding, customer success operations, adoption, customer experience, and more.Best-in-class customer success platforms come with features such as:Out of the box 360° customer views with:Configurable customer health scoringActionable account intelligenceSegmentationBest-practice customer success playbooksAutomated campaignsTouchpointsCustomer surveysPredictive and prescriptive capabilities with:Artificial intelligence (AI)Machine learning (ML)Easy, bi-directional integrations with:Customer relationship management (CRM) systemsTask management systemsCustomer supportTicket management tools D. Develop Flexible Services and Practices Because no two customers are alike, when getting started with customer success, you’ll want to make sure to develop flexible services and practices so that each of your customers will have an optimal experience with your brand. For instance, your outreach may differ greatly from one customer to the next. Some people prefer phone calls, while others may just want to hear from you via email, or even text. Your customer journey map should include some of these areas where you should have flexibility in services and practices. This will help make sure their journey is successful, no matter what their preferences are. The content that you create should reflect that flexibility as well, so that your prospects and customers know their solutions are going to be personalized and well worth their time and energy. E. Create a Culture Around Customer Value In order to ensure a customer-centric approach to your business, you’ll want to create a customer value culture. This can be achieved a number of ways from encouraging your employees to prioritize customer value to correlating compensation directly to customer outcomes. F. Measure and Improve Now that you have all of your tools and practices in place, you’ll want to make sure they are working as they should and make improvements if they are not. Of course, customer success metrics are going to be key in order to know how you’re doing. This should be initiated right at the beginning so you have a benchmark for your performance. This benchmark will help you determine if you are successfully reducing churn, onboarding effectively, and renewing and upgrading at an acceptable and, hopefully, increasing rate.Getting that benchmark and continually measuring your activities against it will help you understand what it is that you need to do to improve your results. 4. What Does a Customer Success Team Do? Depending on the tools you have for your customer success team, the amount of work needing to go into their day-to-day operations may vary, but the tasks are still worth noting. Here are some of the main daily tasks: Manage Customer Data and Interactions In order to have all of the information you need, when you need it, your team will need to record the customer account information and interactions into your CMS or customer success platform. Any help desk tickets or support center interactions should also be documented and tracked to ensure they will get the support they need and to track potential ongoing product issues and mitigate them if necessary.While managing this data, it will be an opportune time to determine what types of proactive outreach you should consider. For instance, they may want to know that you are tracking their help desk tickets. Or perhaps you’ll be able to determine that they could benefit from some upgraded features.With all of this data in front of you, it’ll also be the time to look at your customers’ behaviors to understand their interactions and figure out how that can be helpful to you.Customer success platforms can help make this daily management easier with enhanced features to give you comprehensive customer views, health scoring, touchpoint management, notifications, and much more. Support and Engage with Customers A big part of a customer success representative’s responsibilities will be to support and engage with their customers. That’s the best way to communicate your willingness and ability to ensure your customer succeeds and to determine if there are any roadblocks to that success.Implementing a customer success platform can help with these tasks with customer experience initiatives such as outreach campaigns in conjunction with the ability to collect and get a pulse on feedback from your customers. Improve Retention and Increase Loyalty By collecting and analyzing customer feedback, you can much more effectively improve retention and increase customer loyalty. Churn is going to happen. The question is, at what rate will it happen?Collecting and tracking feedback will help you understand what makes your customers churn and how to lower that rate to improve retention. Consequently, the work you put into decreasing retention will help you increase loyalty, which will eventually lead to advocacy. According to the Harvard Business Review, companies with high rates of loyalty grow in revue nearly 2.5 times faster than their competition. Loyalty is important.The better customer success platforms will have ways to gain that valuable feedback with surveys that will help you find out why they churn and how to best retain them and get them to be loyal long-term customers. Manage Your Customer Success Team For customer success managers, ensuring your team is on task, that they have the knowledge they need, and that they are satisfied in their roles will be part of your daily operations. You’ll want to make sure they have the tools and knowledge that they need. Providing opportunities for training will ensure they have what it takes to succeed at their jobs. Providing opportunities for them to give you feedback with employee surveys or regular touchpoints will give you the information you need to ensure they are satisfied. A disgruntled customer success employee wouldn’t be likely to provide the kind of services to customers that would be efficient.With a customer success platform that also allows you to manage the tasks of your team members, you’ll be able to make sure they are staying on tasks and are happy with what they are doing. Support Other Departments Customer success teams are also called upon to provide support and to receive support from other departments, such as sales, marketing, product managers, development, operations, and more. This is how the synergy between departments can significantly flourish. Since customer success is a more holistic and customer-centric approach to sales, marketing, and account management, it requires all teams to work together to make it happen. If there are any billing errors, for instance, you’ll want to make sure that they get taken care of as soon as possible. If there is an issue with the product, you’ll be the one to break the news to the development team. If done right, your customer success team can be the glue that holds all of the customer-facing and back-office operations together to reach the goals of your customers and ensure their satisfaction with your product and your organization. With a centralized customer success platform, these daily tasks will be seamless between departments since everyone will have access to the same information and receive notifications and automate communications. Move Customers Through the Customer Success Stages This process will start even before they are officially customers in pre-sales activities as you communicate to them the benefits of your organization, including anticipating their needs and making sure they are met. Once the sale is made, your customer success team will help get them signed up and activated. Next, you’ll help them with the onboarding process to facilitate the adoption of your product. As you continue your relationship with them and them with your product, you’ll be able to determine any opportunities to offer new upgrades or extra features that may benefit them based on what you know about their behavior and their needs. You’ll also be able to let your customers know when they are up for renewal. Giving them plenty of advanced notice and making the renewal process easy for them will decrease the potential for losing the customer to churn. Finally, once you’ve established a long-term and successful relationship with your customers eventually getting them to become advocates for your product, you can ask them for referrals, ultimately expanding your business potential.Customer success tools can aid in this effort as well by giving you onboarding tools, user analytics capabilities, renewal reminders, and more. 5. What Results Should I Expect from Implementing Customer Success? So, you’ve done your research, determined customer success is right for you, built your strategy, gathered your tools, and recruited your top-notch team. Now what? Well, now you can reap the benefits, measure the results, and continuously make improvements. We’ll explore how to measure customer success and ways to achieve positive results, but first, let’s explore the benefits of an effective customer success solution. Benefits of Customer Success Reduced Churn (Improved Retention) We can’t stress this one enough. SaaS businesses, in particular, are at risk for high churn rates and lost revenue. You can always hire more salespeople to get more customers, but without a longer-term solution, such as customer success, your churn rate will remain the same so you will eventually be unable to make up the difference. Increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases profits by 25% to 95%. – Frederick Reichheld, Bain & Company Increased Upselling/Cross-selling Next to keeping your customers, upselling is the next most important benefit of customer success. You are much more likely to upsell than to acquire new customers. Cross-selling is also a benefit to customer success, but is not as effective as upselling. The probability of selling to a new prospect is 5-20%. The probability of selling to an existing customer is 60-70%. – Marketing Metrics Better Customer Relationships Of course, the backbone of both reducing churn and increasing upselling opportunities is better relationships with your customers. Customer success strategies inherently work to build better customer relationships with more and better touchpoints so you have a better pulse on how your customers are doing and they know you genuinely want to see them succeed. Better Onboarding With better relationships with your customers comes better onboarding. Better onboarding results in better adoption and higher satisfaction rates. An effective and painless onboarding process will ensure customers want to continue subscribing and may even want to try out new services. It’s an important touchpoint early in the relationship that can make all the difference in the long run. Increased Adoption Better onboarding will inevitably increase adoption by users. Increased adoption increases the success of implementation and reduces churn. Adoption can be an overlooked item for many organizations as they think their job is done once the sale is made and the onboarding is complete. However, if your customers fail to fully adopt your product, you will lose them. Better Team Productivity With your product fully adopted by your customers, you can be sure that they can easily go about their day-to-day operations without spending extra time or energy trying to work with your product. Assuming it is a product that will help them with their jobs, they will also see benefits with increased productivity. Enhanced Customer Experience Gartner found that commitment to optimizing customer experience has been growing rapidly. As long as you are focused on customer success, the customer experience will be optimal. While your customers may be happy with the promises you make to be there for them throughout their journey, actually keeping those promises result in enhanced customer experience. Enhanced customer experiences result in higher retention and increased customer loyalty. Customer experience is the customer success promise executed. 80% of customers say that the experience a company provides is as important as its products or services. – Salesforce Revenue Growth Of course, if you are able to retain your customers and successfully upsell, your revenue will grow. This is the ultimate goal with customer success and is likely to be realized as long as you implement customer success well. Better Profitability The cost of growing existing client base is much lower compared to new customer acquisition making profitability better. Higher Valuation With higher ROI, consistent revenue growth, and better profitability, you will achieve higher valuation for your business. Higher Customer Sentiment Customer success will also result in positive emotional connections to your brand among your customers, resulting in higher customer sentiment. This emotional connection among existing customers is often perceived by prospects as well. Metrics for Customer Success Customer success may seem like an abstract concept that would be difficult to measure. However, looking at the benefits above and putting metrics to them will give you effective customer success Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to tell you how you are doing with your customer success initiatives. Churn Rate The churn rate will give you the rate at which customers discontinue doing business with you. Often expressed as an annual percentage, it will calculate the actual number of subscribers you lose. The goal, of course, is to decrease the churn rate, which is where customer success can help. Upsell Rate Similarly, the upsell rate is the percentage of customers that purchase additional products or services in a given time. Upsell rates are very important to measure to determine how well you are doing. Customer success is extremely effective at increasing upsell rates. Cross-sell Rate Cross-selling is not as much of a revenue booster as upselling, but the rate will show you how many of your customers were willing to purchase related products or services, which will indicate that you aren’t failing, but it may not be as indicative of growth. Onboarding Completion As an organization with its eye on customer success, you’ll want to use onboarding as a metric. One of the reasons to do so is that it is very visible. You will be able to tell how quickly your new customer is able to complete their onboarding process. You’ll also be able to tell how engaged they are and whether or not they even complete the onboarding process. NPS Your Net Promoter Score (NPS) is another excellent metric for customer success. It is a score determined by surveying your customers to ask them how likely they would be to recommend your product or brand to someone else on a scale of 0 to 10. Anyone that scores between a zero and a six is considered a “detractor,” those that score a seven or eight are “passives,” and nines and tens are “promoters.” Calculating the difference between the percentage of promoters and the percentage of detractors will give you your NPS. ROI Customer success tends to produce a high Return on Investment (ROI) because it is a cost-effective investment. Though it may seem counterintuitive, putting more money into supporting your existing customers and less into making sales is actually going to give you a higher ROI. Taking a look at all of the metrics listed here and comparing it to your revenue by using an ROI calculator will tell you what your ROI is and how worthy your customer success initiatives are. Revenue Of course, if your revenue is increasing, you are doing things right. Customer success will help you increase your revenue by offering all of the benefits above. How to Achieve Positive Results Now that we’ve explored how customer success will benefit you and how to measure it, you may be wondering how you can achieve these positive results while accomplishing your customer success activities. Good question. There are several tactics we suggest in order to get those positive results from customer success. Here are some examples: Get a full view of your customers’ information With a full, comprehensive view of your customer data, you will have a much better overview allowing you to stay on top of everything, including assessing risk, evaluating health, getting deeper insights, and taking action. Keep tabs on customer health Knowing how much your customers are engaging, if they’ve completed their onboarding, if they paid their invoices, or are ready for upgrades, all in the same place, can make all the difference for busy customer success teams. Keeping tabs on the health of your customers and their place within their journey on a dashboard can be even more effective. Segment customers Taking the little bit of time required to segment your customers can help you to isolate specific user groups and automate actions to engage with each group. Customer segmentation can be accomplished by connecting patterns in users’ behaviors, demographics, or other parameters. Drive adoption and usage You certainly don’t want to sit back and hope customers will adopt your product. By proactively driving adoption and usage, you will help ensure it happens successfully and quickly. Tracking usage will help mitigate churn as well. Multi-channel customer touchpoints Creating campaigns via multiple channels to ensure plenty of customer touchpoints can be very helpful in supporting your customers and getting them to reach their goals. Customer surveys and feedback Survey your customers to get valuable pulse feedback on a regular basis so you know where your customers stand. Automate the process for even better feedback loops that can save you time as well. Automation Make any of your customer success processes more efficient and scalable with automation so you can be sure to get the data you need to monitor your results. Manage customer success tasks You can also focus on ensuring you are able to track your results and that you continually achieve positive results by managing your team’s tasks in a central location. Integrating task management and customer success can be a game-changer for customer success teams. Alerts for changes, milestones, expirations, and more To ensure you always are aware of changes, milestones reached, upcoming subscription renewals, etc. it’s a good idea to have a system of alerts. 6. Conclusion Customer success is an extremely effective and painless solution to ensuring satisfied customers, reducing churn and increasing upselling opportunities. Taking part in the success of your customers reaching their goals can be extremely satisfying and lucrative, especially for SaaS, technology-based, and B2B organizations, but for others as well. SmartKarrot offers the most comprehensive customer success platform that combines aspects of engagement, onboarding, operations, adoption, and customer experience. SmartKarrot helps organizations by showing customers the value of a product. Plus, SmartKarrot helps manage and improve customer experience and makes day-to-day customer operations efficient and scalable. The SmartKarrot platform offers 360° view of all of your insights across systems. It also has configurable health scoring, touchpoint management, and personalized onboarding to operationalize customer success. Other features include tasks and alerts, product adoption guidance, outreach campaigns, and pulse feedback. SmartKarrot also includes usage analytics so you can view feature adoption across the user journey so you can assess usage trends and improve product adoption. Plus, with simplified task management, you can manage all of your team’s tasks within the platform or integrate your existing task management tool.Because of the numerous reasons highlighted here, we believe in customer success and its ability to help organizations and their customers thrive. And, as a platform that drives product and customer success with all of the enhanced features listed above, we are well-equipped to help organizations implement it into their own operations.
