Customer Success == Company Success
The biggest complaint our prospects have about their current provider is not their tech or it's capabilities, but how the supplier engages with them. I hear it a lot:
- They're so slow to respond to questions, I have to chase them.
- When we need help they won't have a call with us.
- After we signed we barely heard from them.
It's easy to forget the importance of customers success when the push is sales or tech iteration, yet the more value a client unlocks in your product then the more successful they will be in their job. The ease or difficulty of the renewal conversion in x months can be set by the action or inaction months before.
The challenge for most customers is that they're busy and they easily forget the width of features you have, and how to use them. They're a few clicks away from value but they aren't able to access it.
The challenge for SaaS is that the customer success team is the last team to scale up. The priorities are often Tech and Sales, then that softer group of people who have a long term impact on metrics.
Let me flip this around; would you rather lose a client because:
- They've had budget changes and have to kill all spend.
- A competitor has a better feature-set.
- They didn't know how to use your product, and you didn't help them.
All are painful, two are within your control, but one will make your heart-ache. Poor customer engagement shouldn't be why clients churn.
Customer Success is no easier a problem to fix than sales or tech; it requires strong processes and motivated individuals. You'll end up with a different process and team-members than what you started with. It will feel difficult to get right.
Customer Success isn't just answering questions or being pulled towards the client when they want you. It's a push out to make sure that every team-member at a client understands your ever-changing product, and how it will make them successful in their role. Sometimes clients will be eager to engage, at other times you'll have to work hard to get them on a call. The effort will be rewarded months or years down the line.
I asked our Senior Customer Success manager Amy how she viewed her role:
I believe delivering a great customer experience doesn’t just stop at the product - it goes way beyond that.
My MI is ensuring customers not only have confidence in their data but what it means.
Delivering value for our customers is not just providing vast amounts of data but empowering our customers with the knowledge to get to the insight within it.
To break down how she supports customers, here are some of the ways she engages with them:
- On-boarding support and initial data validation.
- Quick-response customer service queries.
- Data reviews to transpose her form optimisation experience onto clients.
- Team-wide platform training sessions, to upskill users and draw more people into the platform.
- Alerting customers to new features, and any content that we create that could help them.
- Feedback and feature suggestion reviews; encouraging responses that can be fed into our product development process.
- Ad-hoc issue highlighting; when she spots an opportunity or a problem with a clients forms, she'll reach out to clients to let them know.
Backing up the type of communications she has with clients is a strong process that ensures we reach out to clients regularly, and we're able to predict client disengagement and become even more pro-active with them. None of the above is rocket-science; the key component is the process.
I'm always interested in client feedback, and here are some recent reviews that back-up the value of a good customer success process. If you want to check the temperature of your Customer Success process then customer feedback will lead you to the answers quickly. With Customer Success, no news is bad news. If clients don't mention your CS process, then it's probably broken.
“The expertise & support in understanding how to leverage our data has been as valuable if not more valuable than the data itself.”
"The level of data that this tool produces is unparalleled! And the team offers excellent support in understanding the data and recommending best practices."
"Amy is a rockstar, she's always available to jump on a quick Zoom call and help me with questions/issues."
If you want to read more about how we help companies improve their online forms and checkout processes, take a look at our next generation Form Analytics platform Zuko.