Customer success is defined as the efforts that a business undertakes to anticipate customer questions or concerns and provide proactive solutions and answers to help customers be more successful in the usage of products and services. According to Forbes, 73% of companies with above-average customer experiences perform better financially than their counterparts.

Customer success can help businesses increase customer satisfaction, improve client retention rates, increase renewal rates, customer loyalty, and overall revenue. Research shows that companies that prioritize customer experiences generate 60% higher profits than their counterparts that don’t.

What is the ‘Age of the Customer?’

The Age of the Customer is a concept that states that modern consumers have significantly more influence over their purchasing behavior and the overall buying process than ever before. In traditional sales processes, businesses have usually had more control over the overall production process.

However, due to the ability to access a wide variety of information resources relatively quickly, customers can now extensively research products and services online and negotiate varying price and service levels amongst different vendors.

Due to the rise of the age of the customer, businesses now have a responsibility to adjust their marketing campaigns to favor the personalization and customization of brand communication and social media interactions.

Why is Customer Success Important in the Age of the Customer?

1. Justifying Renewal

In the age of the customer, most companies usually sell monthly subscriptions to their products and services. This means that companies must be able to substantiate the renewal process each month by proving the product or service’s value and user success to customers. Therefore, businesses need to prioritize and recognize the importance of customer success. Since customers can cancel their time interval-based subscriptions at any given point in time, businesses must focus on fostering higher renewal rates through customer success strategies.

2. Reducing Churn Rates

Churn rate is defined as the annual percentage of customers that stop using a particular product or service or completely stop doing business with a company. The higher a business’s churn rate, the higher the percentage of people that cancel their subscriptions to your business’s products or services. This means that your business’s revenue will also consequently reduce.

Although your business could replace customers that discontinue their purchases with new sales leads, it is much cheaper to retain existing customers than to generate and convert prospective sales leads. Research shows that acquiring new customers can be up to 5 times more expensive than retaining existing customers. Furthermore, existing customers are 50% more likely to purchase new products when compared to newly acquired customers.

Therefore, companies must recognize the role of customer success in the age of the customer to increase customer retention rates and reduce churn rates.

3. Increasing Customer Satisfaction Rates

Customer success strategies can help businesses consistently stay engaged with their customers through every stage of the product consumption and life cycle. If renewal or subscription rates decrease over a given period, then a business’s revenue can significantly decrease. However, businesses can use customer success strategies to help alleviate customer attrition rates and consequently increase organizational sales and revenue volume.

Customer success can help you enhance customer satisfaction, which can enable them to continue doing business with your company. Studies show that customers who had their complaints and concerns resolved quickly have a purchase intention rate of 82%.

4. Creating Customer Success Stories

One of the most effective ways to convince customers of the value of your business’s products and services is through customer success storytelling. By providing valuable customer experiences to your client base through customer success, your business can leverage past success stories to convince prospective sales leads to purchase products and services.

Past experiences of your business providing satisfactory customer service can be used to entice future customers to trust your business. In other words, providing customer success has an exponential effect on customer satisfaction in the long run.

Who is a Customer Success Manager and How Does He  Ensure Customer Success?

With all the necessary customer success strategies, it is important to maintain retention rates and ensure a permanent source of revenue, your business must recognize the importance of a customer success manager.

A customer success manager aligns the needs of an organization with the customers’ needs to support them as much as possible as they transition through the customer journey. A customer success manager can help customers achieve their goal in the long term, obtain the maximum amount of success while using a particular product or service, and build and improve their extended relationships with your business. This will help improve customer loyalty as well as reduce customer churn rates and customer acquisition costs.

A customer success manager can help ensure customer success by communicating with potential upsells prospects on a one-on-one basis and advocating for your business’s products and services.

Furthermore, a customer success manager must also monitor the customer success of existing clients and convince them of the product’s value at regular time intervals to encourage subscription renewal. Lastly, customer success managers are also responsible for monitoring customer service inquiries and ensuring satisfactory customer experiences. 

Prioritize Customer Success For Your Business

In our current business landscape, where customers have access to a substantial amount of information with minimal time delays, customers have more control over the buying process, making more than ever before. Therefore, modern businesses must undertake customer success strategies to ensure maximum revenue. Customer success is extremely important in the age of the customer as it can help justify the renewal of subscription-based services, reduce organizational customer churn rates and increase customer satisfaction rates as a whole.

Therefore, to ensure customer success, your business must recognize the importance of having a customer success manager. A customer success manager is responsible for various customer relationship-oriented processes such as explaining the value of your products and services, reducing customer churn rates, monitoring customer service inquiries, and assuring adequate customer experiences. 

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