Customer success has evolved drastically in the last few years. There has been a strategic rise in what it is perceived to be and perform. SaaS businesses have seen that customers are capable of enhancing growth if they are retained with the company. Customer retention impacts company health directly. Preventing churn has always been one of the main components of customer success. The trajectory has now moved to earning potential and revenue increase.

Customer success as a function has revamped itself to focus on outcomes and results. Here, in this blog, we look at how customer success has transformed from churn buster to earn booster – a quote that must be credited to Sue Nabeth Moore. In the below Micro podcast, you can notice how the top customer success leader creates this idea.

Sue Nabeth Moore is the co-founder of Success Chain, whose expertise in the field of customer success makes her a true influencer in space. Her novel ideas and initiatives have shaped the customer success movement.

Customer Success as a Churn Buster

Customer success is when your existing customers are happy with your company and stay with it. This bases on customers being retained with the company. As a company grows, the churn also grows. But if customers are retained through upsells or cross-sells, the revenue lost is reduced. To ensure customer churn reduces, you must achieve negative revenue churn. This guide on customer churn is a great resource to learn more about you can reduce it. Negative revenue churn is when gains from upsells exceed losses from customer churn.

Customer Success: Transformation to become an Earn Booster

When a business needs to grow, the most important factor is revenue growth. This revenue growth is possible when customers see value in the product. Results and outcomes drive retention and revenue. Customer success enables customers to see or realize the value of the product or service. This makes Customer Success necessary to make customers happy and improve revenue. The premise is simple- If customers are happy, they will stick and spend money accordingly. Customer success leads to increased ARR and NRR.

The transformation of customer success from churn buster to an earn booster can be attributed to the following-

Increasing Competition

There is increasing competition among companies to deliver value to customers. In this state, it has become important to retain your customers by giving them the best possible. This drive has led to keeping customer satisfaction on the top. Customer success became no longer important only for arresting churn; it became vital to proposition better to customers.

Defined Value Proposition

Every company has a defined value proposition that focuses on what they want to achieve, how they want to help customers, pain points, goals, needs, etc. With this information, you need to ensure how customer success drives that value- by reducing time to value, ensuring consistent processes, and more.

Customer-centricity

Another reason for the transformation is the company-wide adoption of a customer-focused mindset. This has led to an enhanced performance by all teams- marketing, product, sales, customer success, and technology. A unified vision really came through during the COVID-19 pandemic when every company decided to try everything possible to retain customers.

C-suite buy-in

Change or transformation begins at the top. C-suite executives’ buy-in is critical to how CS has transformed. While CS results showcased their revenue gains, the support of the top executives to repeat the processes is crucial. This is why revenue forecasts are prevalent for CS teams to evaluate and align with. When the C-suite executives are on the best page of customer success, you can be sure of all other teams.

Technology and software tools

The last and most important reason for customer success transformation is the prevalence and usage of tools, metrics, and technology to enhance customer success operations. A dedicated customer success platform will help scale success and bring all customer-facing teams on one front to deliver maximum customer value.

How to Increase Revenue through Customer Success?

Now that we know revenue is important. How can you increase revenue and growth via customer success? Customer success strategies drive revenue by keeping customers happy. Let us take the help of an example.

If you choose to sign up for software, you need to know how to use it. After you learn how to use it, you need to derive the value you signed up for. Once you realize the value, you need to know if you want to stick to this product or move to another one promising the same benefits.

In this process of making one a loyal customer, customer success involves its multiple branches such as-

• Customer onboarding
• Customer success management
• Customer health score
• Product adoption
• Churn prediction

Choosing a customer success software will help you understand and prevent customer churn. Customer success is driven by three major pillars- onboarding, retaining, and expanding. Keeping these three pillars in mind, one must look at customer success as a growth engine.

#SmartKarrot for #CustomerSuccess

For any company, increasing revenue growth can be a challenge. To do that efficiently, SmartKarrot offers a suite of enterprise-grade solutions that predict churn, assess its impact, and analyze customer lifetime value and growth. With SmartKarrot, you can-

• Enhance the quality of customer planning
• Comprehend how the product is being used and adopted
• Estimate how satisfied your customers are
• Know what the customer health score of each account is
• Stay connected to your customers through touchpoints
• Manage your customers proactively

In line with what Sue said, to ensure customer success is your earning booster, a platform that takes a 360-degree view of the customer is essential.

Customer Playbooks

SmartKarrot’s customer success playbooks help you give customers the best experience with templates curated from best practices. You can ensure standard processes with enhanced customer experiences for customers. Playbooks will also help you scale operations and implement consistent outcomes.

Product Adoption

Product adoption is important as companies can determine what aspects of the product work and what doesn’t. Which is the customer’s favorite feature? Why is it their favorite? Why are they not using some features at all?

Augmented Intelligence

With augmented intelligence capacity, you can enhance decision-making based on real-time insights. You can suggest solutions to customers based on automation and artificial intelligence.

Customer Churn

With SmartKarrot, you know which accounts are likely to churn. Identifying customers will help you proactively take measures to arrest churn.

Final Thoughts

Putting your customers at the core of your business is important, which improves revenue. If you put your heart into helping customers realize value, be ready for unparalleled growth. Sue succinctly puts this in her phrase- customer success is an earn booster. Using technology to reach desired outcomes will only lead to greater CS adoption and customer success.

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