Customer success process is a framework that helps you to make sure that your customers understand your products easily, and improves your capacity to respond to issues, questions and feedbacks much quicker. A customer success process is a better version of customer service because of its speed, effectiveness and that it places you a step ahead of your customers. 

The process of developing a successful business model relies heavily on customer experience, and is anchored on identifying issues before escalations, making the customers feel valued, providing the right level of engagement at the right time, and also by predicting future trends leading to value addition methodologies on products. 

Customer Success Process 

1. Identify Customers’ Preferences 

First, you need to determine why customers are buying your product. Then you’ll proceed to invest in customer research and gather important statistics and data on your customers’preferences. 

Customers nowadays are more demanding, and their attention needs to be maintained through methods that ensure seamless processes and impeccable customer service. You’ll also need to conduct periodic customer success surveys along the way to determine new tastes and trends since their preferences are vital in understanding where your product would fit into their equation. 

2. Create a Customer Success Journey Map 

 A journey-map navigates a customer success process while dictating when your CS team should get involved with your customers? What their responsibilities will be? And how to get access to data that they need from sales? At this stage your team would need a way to communicate with the customers; therefore, it is essential to consider the timing and the channel you’ll use for communication, not forgetting to pick the right time and place for reaching out.

Recently, the market has seen a massive paradigm shift in the way customers and business engage and build relationships with each other, considering the fact that customers now are more informed and have more options at their fingertips, thus you should leverage on levels of service delivery to influence the choices that they eventually make. 

3. Create a Customer Success Team

Building a customer success team would demonstrate to the customers that you are dedicated to helping them reach their goals. A good team should be able to play as team players with excellent communication skills and have a strong knowledge of your product. Your team should be on high touch within the first three months because your customer’s experience in these formative stages must go well, so you should be attentive and proactive. 

More importantly, the customer should be the Centre of focus, and your actions are dependent on understanding the customer. Also remember that the bulk of a lifetime customer’s value lies in the future. Therefore, a dominant subscription model should spread the recurring revenue out over the years or renewal rather than concentrating it out on a single sales event. 

4. Get the Right Tool

Subscription business around the world is evolving, and managers are spending sleepless nights keeping up with market trends and maintaining continuous flow in client acquisition and retention, without jeopardizing profits. And as with any given trade, it is vital to have the right tool for the right job. You should be able to determine your need of doing business such as the appropriate automation software to be used.

A good SaaS business demands software that manages customer success efforts, and also provides features like automatic alerts and customer status reports; which keeps track of customer’s progress. 

5. Establish your Metrics 

It now widely accepted that a good customer success team results in increased publicity, sales, referrals, upsells, retention rates, and also helps create improvements in public relations and shoring ratings up. A recent survey conducted on SaaS companies shows that increment in retention rates by a few percentage points can result in profits increasing by over 25%.

Therefore, you need to put a metric system in place to help you determine how you’ll measure both your customer success and the company’s success. Two popular metrics for measuring your company’s financial impact is the customer lifetime value and customer acquisition cost. On your customers’ side, you’ll look at the churn rate, data like NPS, and social media analytics. 

6. Onboarding

Customer onboarding is considered the most crucial stage in the entire customer lifecycle, beginning at customer registration through to when the customer gains value from the product or service. As a result of this, future interactions will be based on good rapport created with them. To have a smooth ride, you’ll need to implement customer success strategies that are cost-saving and saves your time.

A good CS team should pay attention and instigate an immediate reaction to customer feedback and tackle issues when they arise. You should be able to assist your new customer whenever possible and create manuals and guides that are clear and user friendly, allowing them to use the service for their needs. The critical question to be addressed in this strategy is “Does it work?” 

7. Customer Engagement

This is the stage where your business experiences the most significant growth in the customer cycle. At this stage, the customer should use your service regularly and get the results they need. Your management team should be able to maintain a mantra of first response time, simplification of processes and the immediate action to the customers’ feedback. Do not complicate things anyways and you should assist your customers by creating user-friendly guides and tutorials, and after that, you will be rest assured that they will appreciate this. 

 Remember that your customer is the lifeline or your business. Therefore it is crucial to understand the needs of your customer, without which it won’t worth much. Investing time on your customers and their relationship with your service will deliver positive results. Thus you should provide a unique and personalized experience, and your customers will stick around – because they know you are paying attention. By following the methodology in this article, it doesn’t matter the stage you are in your business, either a veteran or still a rookie, your brand will experience incredible success, likely outsmart most of your competitors. 

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