5 Steps to Building a Customer Success Team That Drives Growth
Charles (Charlie) Leveillee
Digital Customer Success Manager @ insightsoftware
Are you looking to take your customer success team to the next level?
You're not alone - many professionals within customer success experience a unique challenge when building their teams.
Knowing which processes, tools, and strategies will be best for optimizing productivity can seem like an uphill battle.
Fortunately, there is hope! In this blog post, we'll cover five key steps to get your customer success team performing at its peak - from crafting the perfect onboarding process to leveraging data-driven insights.
Whether you're new or experienced in this field, these tips can help spark innovation and make all the difference in taking your customer success capabilities up a notch or two.. so let's dive right in!
Could you find the right team members?
Finding the right people for your customer success team is no small feat.
It would be best if you had professionals with a deep understanding of customer experience, and you must ensure these folks possess the enthusiasm and drive to provide exceptional service.
Because let's face it, if customers feel they need to be more appreciated or taken seriously, how can you expect them to stay loyal?
Hire people passionate about the customer experience and understand how to work with customers.
The most successful teams are made up of curious individuals who want to help wherever possible.
So, tap into various networks and use whatever resources are at your disposal – include wit and charm during your search; hire the people who can think on their feet and help shape the team into something special.
Design a customer-focused onboarding process.
This customer-focused onboarding process ensures your team builds strong relationships with each customer.
It starts by gathering specific customer data.
That data is then analyzed to paint a picture of what kind of experience each customer needs from their onboarding.
Could you create an onboarding plan tailored to each customer's needs and focus on building relationships?
You can create an individualized onboarding plan explicitly catered to them from there.
During onboarding, remember the little details- the small moments leave significant impacts!
Customer success is all about making the customer feel seen and valued.
Make sure your team takes time to develop that relationship because that could be the difference between a successful long-term partnership or another sale!
Provide continuous learning opportunities.
Providing your customer success team with continuous learning opportunities is necessary for any business that wants to stay ahead of the curve.
This includes ensuring they have adequate access to resources to remain informed about new technologies and trends in their field.
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Giving your team access to relevant resources to stay up-to-date on new technologies and trends is essential.
With knowledge comes power, and giving your team members the tools and information they need to help customers succeed will empower them to reach new heights for your company.
And, who knows – you may find yourself laughing at their newfound pun-filled explanations in front of clients too!
Know what success looks like
Knowing what success looks like for each customer is critical to creating a successful customer success team.
Define the expectations and goals from the start, break them into manageable chunks, and measure progress against them by tracking customer feedback, activity, and sales conversion.
Clearly define what success looks like for each customer and measure progress against those goals.
Creating meaningful objectives, engaging data-driven conversations with your customers, setting realistic milestones, and offering solutions driven by insights are vital ingredients for succeeding with your customer success team.
Aim for growth that's holistic – in other words, an increase in not only revenue but also the overall value of the customers.
You can encourage your team with autonomy.
Empowering your team with autonomy is critical to increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Giving your team the freedom to make decisions when handling customer issues is an effective way to ensure quality outcomes.
Giving your team the freedom to decide to resolve customer issues can lead to higher satisfaction and loyalty.
Not only does it display that you trust and value their expertise, but it also adds an extra level of authenticity - they're not a bunch of robots churning out generic answers!
Incorporating autonomy into your customer success team can be the key to reaching the next level – so go ahead, have faith, and let them fly!
Customer success teams can make or break an organization.
Building a team that drives growth is essential to success, and that means providing learning opportunities and setting clear expectations.
Leaders should find people passionate about customer experience, create an onboarding plan tailored to each customer's needs, explain what success looks like for their customers, and empower the team with autonomy to make decisions.
It's much work — but don't worry!
Take it step-by-step, and you'll be on your way to a successful customer success team before you know it.
After all, if you fail to plan, you're planning to fail…right?
So get out there and start building!
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