Customer Success: More Than Just a Person on the Other Side of Your Phone

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According to one recent study, 78% of consumers in the United States are actually retracting loyalty to brands at a faster pace than they were just three years ago. A large part of this can likely be explained by the increasing number of businesses who think that “customer success” and “customer support” are the same thing.

“Customer support” is actually something of a misnomer – it’s not focused on the customer at all, but instead on your product or service. It’s about making sure that what you’re offering works the way you said it would. Offering highly trained, passionate and helpful customer support services will be integral, yes – but they are ultimately just one small part of a much larger story.

Customer success, on the other hand, is about something much deeper. Something more meaningful. Something that will allow you to forge a bold new path for yourself and your brand, one that will carry your entire organization into the next decade and beyond.

What is Customer Success?

“Customer success” may sound like a complicated marketing term, but in reality, it couldn’t be more straightforward. It’s the idea that if your customers succeed while using your product or service, they will continue to use your product or service – thus creating a mutually beneficial situation for everyone involved.

The problem with customer support is that it tends to be reactive. You wait for a customer to have a problem with your product, they pick up the phone and give you a call and you help them figure it out. Essential, yes – but again, it’s missing the bigger picture.

Customer success is about being proactive to help make sure that customer doesn’t have to call in the first place. It’s about leveraging the wide range of different data sources you have available to understand as much as possible about the people you’re trying to serve. It’s about anticipating when they might have problems or what questions they’re getting ready to ask and using that information to provide them with a better experience across the board.

Customer success is about finally seeing your audience as more than just line items on a balance sheet, but as the individual people that they truly are. It’s about using a customer success software solution to collect mission-critical data and make it visible. It’s about building an organization-wide strategy around that day and bringing together the professionals necessary to pull it off.

It’s about doubling down on the reason why you started your business in the first place – to change the lives of your customers in an impactful way for all time and for the better.

The Ripple Effect of Customer Success

Devoting as much attention as possible back onto the success of your customers doesn’t just cut down on customer service interactions – it also goes a long way towards increasing loyalty, too. Remember that according to one study, bringing in new customers is between five and 25 times more expensive than retaining the ones you already have. It’s also a proven way to boost profits by between 25 to 95%.

But in the end, customer success is the most important thing of all: showing that you’re willing to live up to the promise that you made to your customers in the first place. Regardless of the type of business you’re running or even the industry you’re operating in, you made a promise to all of your customers that their lives would ultimately be better after your relationship began than it was before. Making an investment in true customer success shows that you’re willing to do anything to make that happen.

You can read this and other customer success, social collaboration and cloud productivity thoughts on our blog. If you'd like to chat more about these topics directly, feel free to shoot me an inbox!