Why Customer Success is a Worthwhile Business Investment

People don’t usually have a positive impression of customer service. It brings up memories of waiting on hold forever, being passed from person to person before getting an answer, and then having that answer be unclear or not solve the problem because it was pulled from a script or bot. 

However, survey statistics from Zendesk show that customer service is the number one factor impacting trust in a software provider.

At Quorum, we’ve not only looked to erase negative feelings about customer service, but we’ve made it a priority to make customer success something our clients love about working with us. And we’ve seen the business benefits of this investment.

The Customer Success Team is one of the largest at Quorum and something we have invested in from the very beginning. We believe that this kind of investment helps Quorum and its customers achieve strategic goals by driving better product adoption and retention, providing an open line of communication for product feedback, and building a community of Quorum users.

Customer Success Drives Product Adoption and Retention

It seems obvious, but a product is only as good as a person’s ability to use it. That’s why at Quorum and in an ever-growing number of tech companies the customer service function is called customer success. We’re not just training you on how to use the product. We’re working to ensure your success in achieving the goals you set out when you purchased a Quorum subscription. 

Strong Relationships Provide a Venue for Product Feedback 

Customer success doesn’t end at product training and support. Our customers work in the public affairs industry, where relationship building is critical. We’ve taken that sentiment and applied it to our customer success as well—that we want to build relationships with our customers, not just be your typical tech support.

Quorum is best in class because of the feedback we get from our clients. Our customers feel comfortable sharing with us when there’s a feature they really need in Quorum to work smarter, or when something isn’t working as expected. We’ve been able to grow as a business without investors because our clients saw value in our product early on and we’ve been able to grow the product by responding to client needs. 

Building a Community of Quorum Users

At Quorum, we make an effort to provide positive, memorable experiences for our customers outside of just their time spent logging meetings, tracking legislation, or mapping relationships in Quorum. Every year we take time to do things like reverse trick-or-treating where we deliver candy to many of our client organizations based in DC. We celebrate the wins our customers have, posting about their success on Quorum’s social media accounts. And this year for the first time, we organized a Quorum User Summit to give our users a chance to meet and learn from each other, both about their strategies for using the product and also for trading ideas about how to be more effective public affairs professionals.

Because we’ve invested in our relationships with customers and built trust with our customers, our customers are willing to speak positively about Quorum to others considering using our software. 

How Quorum Provides Unrivaled Customer Success

So once we decided customer success was going to be a major investment in how we grew the Quorum team, how did we make that investment successful? 

When an organization becomes a Quorum client, it receives a customer success manager for each of the products it purchases, ensuring there is a product-specific expert and strategic advisor available to their team. These customer success managers stay with the organization for the duration of the subscription to make sure the users are properly onboarded to the system, have as many team and 1:1 trainings as they like, and are consistently up to date with improvements and additions to the product. 

Quorum clients also have access to our unrivaled customer support team, offering fast answers to questions. Our support team is right here in DC, sitting side-by-side with our customer success managers, rather than working off in a call center somewhere working off of a script to respond to inquiries. 

We take the “unlimited” adjective of our customer success offering seriously. At Quorum, you’re not going to lose access to your customer success manager after a few months, or be charged more to seek their help and advice. We’re going to be a partner throughout the entirety of your subscription. 

The Results

In a recent survey of public affairs professionals, a market research firm asked which public affairs software platforms provide the best customer service, and the results were clear. Among those who have used both Quorum and another public affairs software, the majority felt that Quorum’s customer success was best-in-class. This is a title we’re proud of, and going to continue to work to keep in 2020 and beyond.