Imagine you are in a restaurant, and no one is helping you out with the seating, food, combos, or options- feeling lost? Well, that is how startups and SaaS companies feel when they do not take customer success seriously. To grow a SaaS company, it is important to communicate and engage with customers as much as possible. Customer success needs to curate a good customer experience to retain customers for a long-term commitment.

Customer success can be defined by whether customers can achieve the results they signed up for through customer communication. However, it is not only the customer success teams responsible for customer success. Customer expansion and retention will help you meet the goals of customer success. Therefore, customer success needs to seep into your processes and become a vital part of the DNA.

How Different Teams can Make Customer Success Core to their Processes

A company is made of different teams. Every team has a unique aspect they bring forth to growth. The major goals for any team are increasing revenue, making customers happy, product adoption growth, and more. Every team needs to keep customers at the core to align their work accordingly. All arms of the company, such as product, support, sales, engineering, marketing, and IT, need to work with customers in mind. This will ensure all are on the same line with customer success goals.

Product

The product team creates new features for the end-users who are customers. They need to keep customer goals and aspirations in mind. What does the customer want to achieve? Is it possible for them to do that with existing features? Is their customer feedback helpful? The product team can enable their architecture and work to meet customer and company objectives.

Support

The customer support and success team work closely with customers. They are the front line of staff when it comes to any customer’s issue. The team tries to respond and close as many customer queries and tickets as possible. The team also explains various product aspects to customers and ensures they are satisfied. The team needs to be as customer-focused as possible and have high-level coordination to resolve issues.

Sales

The sales team is responsible for bringing in the business. The sales team brings in customers based on marketing leads, referrals, and advertisements. They handle the prospect journey before they become a customer. The team needs to educate customers as much as possible and explain the product more. The sales team is also responsible for upsells, cross-sells, and renewals. Expansion revenue is another job of the sales team. The sales team needs to make customers understand the nuances of the product- why it is different and its benefits.

Marketing

The Marketing team creates demand for the product through content. Blogs, videos, social media posts, PR pieces can help generate leads. These leads can be nurtured to push prospects further down the sales pipeline to become customers. The customer success team also works with the marketing team for account expansion, retention, and revenue gains.

IT

The IT team has its focus on platform infrastructure and reducing bugs. The team looks to improve efficiency and drive customer happiness. If customers face any issues with the team, they can connect with the IT team who solves the problem. The IT team is important to handle customer problems. If the turnaround time to receive a solution for a product is slow, customers might be frustrated and dissatisfied.

End Goal: Loyal Customers

In all, the end goal of every team is loyal customers. However, each team has its personal goals as well. For marketing, it is leads and engagement. The sales team is concerned with their targets. Combining all of that with the final goal of customer loyalty is how teams should function. Every team needs to take customer success seriously and keep customers in mind to create a base of loyal customers.

7 Ways to Make sure Customer Success is part of the Company’s DNA

Have a plan with KPIs in place

The first and foremost thing is to have a plan that drives customer engagement with KPIs mentioned. You need to note what is important to the business and provide insights accordingly. Some KPIs include customer metrics like churn rates, retention rates, MAU, DAU, NPS, google reviews, Capterra reviews, social media scores, etc. Even how customers respond to a survey can help us understand what they want.

Get the leaders on board

Every team leader needs to get together and form a customer success strategy. Marketing, sales, product, IT teams need to observe the customer angle in their processes and work on a strategy to streamline it.

Collect feedback

Customer feedback is a great way to improve customer success operations across teams. For example, if the customer has a problem with understanding the product and communicates that, the product team and marketing team can develop relevant content or videos, or live help that will help the customer ace the situation. This collaborative behavior is possible if teams can know all the customer feedback in one place.

Rewards are everything

To incentivize teams to be customer-centric, the company can develop a rewards system. An acknowledgment to show they are ready to change can mean a lot. Rewards are a great way to keep various teams happy and focused on driving change for customer success.  

Keep Data at the core

Customer success is easier when data is at the core. Teams can know the intent and action of certain events or responses. Survey data, NPS data, and user data can help know customers better and align products and services as per their needs.

Communicate clearly

Communication across teams helps simplify and adjust processes to meet customer demand. Good communication strategies will help scale and engage on another level. You can also know what problems other team members are facing. Live chat, customer touchpoints, video calls, and mails are great forms of communication.

Empathy is key

Customers have access to a lot of information and alternatives. It is important to ensure they engage with the company. The key to doing that is being empathetic with them. When you say, create, write, or mail something, put yourself in their shoes. Customer interactions should be accessible across teams so that others know about operational issues.

Bottom Line

To ensure Customer Success is ingrained in the organization’s DNA, you need to have a clear strategy. All teams are responsible for the organization’s success and customer success is its heart. You need to show how CS is important for growth and how it can contribute to success. Nothing can be achieved alone. Different teams must come together to make customers their loyal advocates.

 

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