Success of any company is built on customers and their loyalty. A great customer service opens room for renewals and promotes opportunities. To achieve a greater level of customer success, a dedicated team should be functional which can focus on the customer and their journey with your product and services.
A customer success team helps your customers to achieve their goals by proactively communicating with them throughout their journey with your company. Customer success teams are responsible for optimizing a meaningful relationship between your company and potential customers.
But nevertheless, one should take time to introspect the objectives and address the mistakes that occur during the customer journey process. Few slip-ups can be resolved quickly but certain errors require substantial changes within the team.
In the following section, we will quickly walk you through the most common mistakes that customer success teams make along with a few tips to avoid and overcome them:
- Missing out the bigger picture while being preoccupied on the everyday
- Interaction without intent
- Lack of proper communication during the time of crisis
- Last minute calls especially during “renewal” times
Working towards the objectives of the company is a key component of any customer success team but one needs to tread this path meticulously.
Accomplishing goals from one quarter to the next does not promise good and long-term relationship. So, what have you missed?
Customers have requests and needs that change frequently and it might be difficult to prioritize all of them for your company. At times they might not even know that they need a particular feature or property until they see it somewhere else.
Companies are so occupied in the day-to-day activities that they might lose the sight of organization’s bigger initiatives or industry trends. This might hamper the overall performance of the team.
Do you frequently send emails to your customers and keep them posted with new features and ask their wellbeing? If yes, then great but then you should ensure that it shouldn’t be overbearing for customers. Just “checking-in” emails will do more harm than good and might spoil the deal with a potential customer.
Companies should aim at providing value and build mutual trust and respect. Always offer services based on strategic insights, targeted suggestions and right perspective.
Crisis may arise in the companies internally or from external factors. During these times, the customer success teams are bombarded with calls and emails asking for an explanation or update and information about the situation. It can be tedious for the team and enticing enough to avoid the calls or interaction with customers. But it’s an absolute No-No. It can affect your relationship with the customer, and you might lose them in worst case.
Provide Assurance – It is a known fact that when a crisis occurs in SaaS companies, it results in software outage. In such scenarios the first thing you must do is to acknowledge the crisis and share the initial information you have, with the team and customers based on how much they should know.
The next step is to let customers know about the next update. It will help in building a reliable relation with customers in the time if crisis. Customers will anticipate that a solution will be found soon.
Decide on who should be notified and when. Will just a message be enough to convey the situation, or should you come up with a customized mailer or calls? Determine these things and respond accordingly.
If you have not actively contacted a long-term or a stable customer in months and you try to reach out just before their contract renewal period expires, it is not a good move.
You should create a customer journey map way ahead and determine when the call should be made to inform about the upcoming renewal and the new features, product and service workflows. All the interactions with customers and their journey with your company should have lifecycle diagram with stages and tie it as an engagement model.
Customer success software like Freshdesk Customer Success (a flagship feature of FreshWorks) comes with an engagement model. They are created to help you achieve major lifecycle milestones. This model includes Quarterly business reviews (QBRs), monthly calls, bi-weekly usage updates, and boils down to individual touchpoints such as onboarding and survey feedback.
Every Customer Success Team is Different
There is no formula or sure shot way to build an incredible Customer Success team. It’s a relatively new concept in the industry and not many companies have one. So, each company’s success teams are bound to look different based on their goals and needs.
The key to build a strong customer success team is to ensure that the success team is well coordinated with other existing teams in the company. It is also important that the customer success team functions as a strategic associate with your sales team.
The success of any business is established on the customer success strategy. One wrong approach can spoil the entire infrastructure. You can make your vision become a reality provided you identify the issues quickly and resolve them efficiently.
