Drive customer ecstasy by creating a foundation of profound customer engagement

Today’s businesses are global and demanding. Companies are adopting intelligent digital technologies rapidly into their business environments in an agile way by introducing best of the breed products and services to realize quicker ROI from their investments. Now-a-days in almost every business environment, we have started noticing machines, humans, software assets are getting connected to create new product offerings and deliver customized experiences of services. In this complex environment, every business is struggling to keep pace with their customer’s expectation and to sustain a meaningful experience knowing the fact that an excellent customer experience can only correlate to future purchase intentions. Temkin Group CX survey says that 41% of consumers who had a bad experience spent less with the company. On the contrary, a recent PwC survey says customers would pay up to 16% more for better experience.

In this dynamic business situation every next-gen fast growing company aims to attain a high level of maturity to drive excellent customer satisfaction by creating an environment to better engage with their customers and understand their needs and expectation in advance. In fact, a recent Salesforce analysis says that 76% of customers expect companies to understand their needs and expectations. Hence, there is a need for businesses to create a culture within the company to drive excellent customer engagement across it’s divisions with an end goal to make it’s customer successful. As customers are going more digital, each and every customer experience will count and that will only ensure the continuity of customer engagement and retention.

Creating a culture of “customer success” within the company is not easy but it is worthwhile for the company’s overall growth. We can see successful companies are already experimenting and nurturing a new role of “Customer Success”. It is a proactive role, mostly relevant at this stage to software and technology based companies, to create value for the customers. This role needs seamless engagement with customer to support them by not only just solving their product or service issues, but by learning new ways to use the product from them, gather continuous feedback to improve its product and services and ensure they gain the full value of the product.

As Mikael Blaisdell, the executive director of the Customer Success Association rightly says - "Software companies are beginning to realize that they can’t just assume that the customer is getting value" ..."Somebody has to make sure of it, and that person is the Customer Success Manager."

Having said that in coming years, customer engagement would require to be more integrated in nature. Customer Success team can primarily orchestrate and drive the initiative but they would certainly need proactive support and participation from various other units like finance, marketing, HR, engineering, product management etc. to create a winning environment of customer engagement.

The customer success function should also adhere to a defined methodology of measurable sub-processes to attain it’s maturity. It kicks off more meticulously once product sale process ends for the customer. Firstly it should have a seamless “sales” to “customer success” handshake. Customer Success team should drive a defined process of advocacy, enablement, right set of training needs, time to time joint analysis and evaluation of adoption of the products and ROI measurement to maximize the investment of customer. The right implementation of these processes will help customer success team to create a sound foundation to introduce new features and products to the customer aligned to their business objectives and roadmap in turn create a fulfilling experience. While driving this flow of customer success cycle, it is important to have a mechanism to capture the data across every channel of interactions. As customer becomes more knowledgeable and mature in their ways of operation, they would expect more personalized and contextual information exchange. Capturing customer sentiments and develop a meaningful insight out of that data is key to proactively resolve lot of customer problems. There will be the need of innovative platforms to capture these interaction and sentiment data and apply right model to create meaningful and personalized experiences at a scale.

The customer success is a continuous journey, it improves as it matures. It is important to design the value of this function and create a foundation of it will only drive the success of this function and enable businesses to create a sustainable deep engagement to retain their customer base and drive a continuous positive experience.

References: Temkin Group Survey Research, PwC Survey, Customer Success Group, The Customer Success Association, Oracle.com

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