The customer success team has a critical role in the growth of any SaaS business. It’s their job to ensure that each customer is successful with your product or service—and beyond.The DNA of customer success is built upon a foundation of trust, empathy, and transparency. By improving these three key areas, you can not only build trust with your customers but also empower them to achieve their goals using your product or service.
What is customer success?
Customer success is the process of helping your customers get the most value from your product or service. It’s about helping them achieve their goals, whether those goals are to reduce churn, increase revenue, or both.
Customer success is often confused with customer support or sales—and while those are important parts of the lifecycle as well, they’re not what you mean when you talk about “customer success.” A good way to think about this role is by looking at what it isn’t: customer support is reactive whereas CS teams have a broader focus; sales focus on selling new business while CS ensures that existing customers continue using your product/service successfully and happily every month.
The DNA of customer success
Customer success is a function of the entire organization. It’s not enough to have a customer success team; you need an entire organization that supports customers and ensures their success.
There are many facets to this idea:
- Customer success starts with your product or service. If you don’t have a great product, it’s difficult for your customers to succeed.
- Your customer’s experience with your company plays a big part in their success—and therefore, whether they become loyal advocates for you or churn out the door before anyone can say goodbye.
The science and art of the right message
A customer success team is only as good as the messages they send to customers. The right message at the right time can be instrumental in turning a losing customer into a profitable one, and this is where understanding the science and art of messaging comes into play.
Emotion drives all human behavior, so if you want your customers to engage with your content (and ultimately become loyal), then you have got to appeal on an emotional level first. Your team needs more than just data scientists; you need people who understand how humans communicate with each other through words and images, which means practicing empathy before sending out any messages at all.
Metrics for customer success
Metrics are important for your business. And they’re important to the health of your customer success team, too. This is because metrics help you track progress and identify areas where you can improve. They also give you an objective way to measure the impact of changes made as part of a Customer Success transformation initiative—or any other initiative, for that matter.
A good metric should be specific, measurable, attainable/achievable/actionable (SMART), relevant and timely (STAR). For example: “customer retention rates by channel” or “Number of recurring revenue contracts signed per month” would both make great metrics because they’re specific; but “customer satisfaction level” wouldn’t because it’s not easily measured or quantifiable.
How customer success gets done
Customer success is a process, not a marketing campaign. It requires collaboration and coordination between many different teams to be successful. And it requires that you understand the needs of your customers, and evolve your product to meet those needs better every single day.
Customer success should never be done in isolation; it’s not just about the customer — it’s also about their onboarding experience, their first purchase experience, and how they use your product after they become customers.
Conclusion
There’s no doubt that customer success is a complex discipline that requires investment in time, money, and resources. With the right approach, however, your team can develop the tools they need to achieve this goal. To start on the right foot, it is recommended creating a customer success framework for customers at various stages of their journey with your brand.