Customer Success in the Age of COVID-19

I was recently asked by Jared Stein @Soofa, “If your marketing budget was cut by 50%, where would you spend your time?” and I answered, “I’d spend less on prospect marketing and more on customer marketing.” That would have been my answer before COVID-19, and now during/post-pandemic, we have even more reasons to focus on customer retention in our efforts to grow and/or maintain revenue. 

There we were, riding the crest of the newest wave in marketing – customer success. Marshalling our teams in new ways to grow our business by helping customers successfully use our products/services grow their own business. Then the coronavirus worldwide wave hit and swept us all under. We’re coming up for air now, but the landscape we see looks mighty different.

So, now what do we do?

Success itself looks different, so we’ll have to rethink what that means for our customers if we are to help them in truly relevant and productive ways. Reduced revenue is a fact of life. It will define the new normal for many of our companies, for who-knows-how-long. Getting maximum ROI from whatever marketing spending is still available will be critical. 

Companies adopting the customer success approach have already been redirecting marketing dollars to beef up their retention efforts, because the pathway to growth is paved with upgrades and repeat business. It’s no longer enough to assume that, if your product is good enough, customers will automatically renew or otherwise stick with your brand. Customers have choices, and your competitors are working overtime to lure them away. 

Nothing in life is static, most of all customer relations. COVID-19 has reminded us all of that. A deliberate, proactive customer success program goes beyond sending renewal reminders and offering incentives to spend more. It’s about tailoring your retention marketing to each customer in ways that demonstrate your brand’s essential long-term value to them. Yes, ultimately you want them to upgrade. Buy more. But first, you have to retain them. 

So how are you doing with that? 

Customers have plenty to say, as long as you’re actively listening. You can learn from them and market your business at the same time, using:

Reviews. Are you overtly soliciting this type of feedback? Both B2B and B2C customers rely on reviews to make buying decisions. Positive reviews and ratings build trust and confidence in prospects and reinforce those feelings in existing customers.

Testimonials. Capturing quotes to use in marketing is great, but are you collecting customer stories as well? Real-life examples of how customers are using your products can be excellent sales tools, but they also boost retention by helping existing customers get maximum value from their own experience.

CSAT. Customer satisfaction surveys are popular because you can glean valuable data (assuming you ask the right questions) and at the same time please customers by asking their opinion. And when you can show them you listened and acted on whatever they had to say – fixing a problem, upgrading a product or introducing a new one – you please customers even more.

Net Promoter Score. Solicit simple but telling feedback with one question that asks customer to rate on a scale of 1-10 the likelihood they would recommend your brand to another potential customer. Smart marketers also invite respondents to explain why or why not. Customer success marketers go further, following up on negative scores to explore more deeply with the customer why they aren’t happy.

 LoopVOC. I love this tool because I believe customer success is important with the indirect channel. Gathering insight is great, but we need to assemble it, by topic for example, to identify patterns and better analyze and address issues and opportunities. This app not only enables listening to the voice of the customer in real time, it gives us real-time actionable insights into that customer feedback. Essentially, my team can collaborate with customers to tailor their experience with our brand.

Putting customer marketing into play  

Customer success is everyone’s responsibility, not only marketing or sales or support. We’ve talked about this before, too, yet to make it work now we have to sharpen our internal communications. Our entire team needs to know what now constitutes success for our customers, so we can all focus on providing the most meaningful support. We’re all in recovery mode, so helping customers get back to business faster will certainly be a top priority.

HubSpot now posts weekly updates that benchmark core marketing and sales metrics aggregated from their own huge customer base, so companies can compare their own experience navigating the post-COVID-19 marketplace with that of similar companies. One recent takeaway they noted is that “sales teams need to reinvent how they prospect.” Formerly hot prospects may not be a good fit after all as you redefine your new normal. Even before coronavirus, companies were reassigning prospectors to customer success teams that focus on long-term retention and relationship building. 

What should they be doing? Technical support and other reactive means to assist customers are great, but success marketing anticipates problems or needs and addresses them upfront.

Onboard thoroughly. The more new customers know about how to use your product/service, the happier they will be. It’s up to you to educate and coach them to become adept users and – even more importantly -- to understand how to reap maximum benefit from your product/service. Investing in onboarding is purely practical because customers who feel frustrated with your product or who don’t feel they’re getting their money’s worth will abandon you. And once they believe you are not a viable option for them, they are unlikely to return. 

Education and mentoring that start with onboarding must continue for as long as your relationship continues. Things will continue to change, with your business and with your customers. What they need or prioritize now will be different later on. Will they still see you as the best solution? 

Emphasize value. Retention is the art of proving your value beyond a doubt to customers. If your product/service is seen as a nicety instead of a must-have, it’s time to upgrade your value proposition. Take every opportunity to tell and show your “success value” – how their lives are made easier, more convenient, or more enjoyable thanks to you. How their business is able to operate more efficiently or productively -- or how they are able to strengthen relationships with their own customers -- thanks to you. 

Be flexible wherever possible, to help customers stick with you despite their now-limited resources. Can you offer more extended payment options? Money-saving downgrades or other discounts to preclude cancellations? 

Create a website-based knowledge base. Self-help options save time and put information just a click away 24/7. Everyone appreciates convenience. Use your knowledge base as well as your blog to explain the benefits of upgraded features or product options. In order for customers to succeed, they need more than your marvelous product/service, so use your knowledge base to offer a broader range of business-building tools and tips (marketing, sales, customer service) along with educational resources that directly relate to your own products. 

Establish customer communities. Website-based forums make it easy for customers to connect with one another, to get answers to product usage questions or even discuss wider business topics. Are you using social media effectively to support these conversations, too? 

Reach out more often, in more ways. Use surveys, etc. to invite feedback from groups of customers and check in periodically with one-on-one communications. Think of this as post-sales nurturing via email or live conversations with members of the customer success team. How are they doing right now? How can you help right now? 

Surprise them with a smile – Chewy.com sends seemingly hand-written birthday cards to customers’ pets. Just-for-fun communications personalize customer relationships, but you can capitalize on something more serious as well. The effects of COVID-19 are far greater than lost business and revenue. People and organizations have suffered tremendously. Now more than ever customers want to see your caring side, both in deed as well as word. If you are actively supporting some type of relief effort, let your customers know. (Maybe they want to join you.) 

Get creative. Keep in mind that success, like life itself, is a work in progress -- not a matter of perfection but of improvement. That means success is scalable. Each small problem you help a customer solve and each small boost you provide in their efficiency or effectiveness is an incremental step toward their ultimate success. And yours, because each new “win” for them reinforces your value to them.   

So, how is your own team holding up?

We all know – or should by now – that customer experience is driven by their interactions with employees, not just with your product/service. And we all know – or should by now – that employees are customers, too, and even more important in some ways because they have multiple effects on your bottom line. Obviously, then, it stands to reason that happy, successful employees are more likely to create happier, more successful customers.

We’re all in this together. Nurture your team, and they will nurture your customers.

Peering into the future

Not everything has changed. But marketers who are able to discern what has changed for their customers, and in what ways, will do the best job of retaining those customers and enjoying long-term benefits of their loyalty. In turn, these lessons will drive successful customer success-based marketing to new prospects also, as funding allows, ensuring your company will not only survive but thrive in the future. 

“No contact” may still be the watchword of the day. But that should never mean “no communication,” and in the age of COVID-19 it is essential to up your game when it comes to customer communication if you expect to retain their loyalty and revenue dollars. One of the simplest and most effective communication tools is not new at all. So let’s all remember the two little words everyone loves to hear: thank you.