How to Succeed in Customer Success: The Basics

In today’s world, there’s far more to running a successful business than simply capturing as many leads for your company as possible. While a thriving pipeline is valuable to any brand, it’s your ability to retain customers and their loyalty that will guarantee your profitability.

After all, there’s a 5-20% chance of selling to a new customer and an up to 70% chance of converting an existing customer. Happy, loyal customers increase your revenue, boost your business reputation, and even help drive new customers to your pipeline as valuable advocates. 

So, how do you boost your retention rates and loyalty scores? Simple: you need a strategy for customer success. Today, we’re going to guide you through the process of developing your customer success team, defining the right metrics for “CS” measurement, and finding the right strategies to boost engagement and revenue. 

The Importance of Sales and Customer Success Alignment

The first step in a successful customer success strategy is recognising your customer success team shouldn’t operate in a vacuum. Years ago, many companies laboured under the false belief that customer service, sales, and marketing teams were all separate entities. 

However, the reality is that if you want to develop a successful business and take a “customer-centric” approach to growth, you need to bridge the gaps. Aligning your sales and marketing teams is crucial to ensuring marketing teams can drive qualified leads to your company.

Connecting sales and customer success is valuable too. Your customer success team can provide sales leaders with insights into which features and solutions drive the most benefits for your audience, and which buyer personas are more likely to purchase extra products.

Your sales team can ensure your customer success team knows the pain points and goals each customer wants to address, so they can deliver a better level of service. 

Aligning customer success and sales teams starts with:

• Setting clear expectations: Outline the responsibilities and roles of each team, and share plans for how you’re going to nurture, support, and retain each customer. Ensure team members have the same vision of what they want to accomplish. 
• Share insights and data: Make sure all of your sales and customer success professionals have access to the same market research, customer feedback, personas, and insights, so they can focus on the most qualified, relevant leads, and their needs. 
• Boost communication and collaboration: Encourage collaboration between your employees with regular team meetings, interactive brainstorming sessions, and combined projects. 

Measuring the Right Customer Success Metrics

One of the most important aspects of a successful customer success strategy is ensuring you can monitor and learn from the right metrics. There are a number of metrics worth monitoring in the CX landscape, but some of the most important include:

• Customer lifetime value: “CLV” refers to the total value your company can expect to earn throughout the lifetime a customer spends with you. It’s an insight into how much revenue you can earn if you retain your customers. 
• Customer retention rate (and churn): Your customer retention rate examines how many customers continue buying from your business after an initial purchase. You can calculate it by looking at the number of specific customers you have at the beginning and end of a certain period. The number of customers you lose is your “churn rate”. 
• Customer health score: Customer health score looks at how often customers are using your products, how happy they feel with the solution they’re getting, and how well they’re growing as a result of your service or product. 
• Net Promoter score: Your Net Promoter Score (NPS) examines how likely customers would be to refer your service to a friend on a scale of 1 to 10 or 1 to 5. The more likely your customers are to refer you to another business or consumer, the happier they probably are. 
• Customer satisfaction score: Similar to NPS, CSAT is measured on a scale. It asks customers to identify how satisfied they are with your service with a specific number. A higher customer satisfaction score indicates you’re targeting the right customers with the correct product, capable of addressing their needs.‍
• Adoption rate: Adoption rate looks at how often buyers are actually using and benefiting from your product. This is particularly crucial in SaaS landscapes, where you want as many people in a business to use your product as possible.

Finding Effective Customer Engagement Strategies

Investing in customer success means finding ways to not only convert your target audience, but keep them satisfied, and loyal to your brand. This means constantly engaging your audience in a positive way. Customers need to feel appreciated and valued, or they’ll simply switch to a competitor. 

Engaging with your customers regularly is a fantastic way to nurture a long-lasting and lucrative relationship. There are a few methods you can try, such as:

• Regular outreach: Connect with your customers through welcome emails, messages, and calls. Send them messages that share access to valuable content, or simply check-in and ask how they’re getting on with your product or service. 
• Training and education: Provide your customers with access to educational resources that can help them make the most of your product or service, such as webinars, classes and courses, videos, and useful articles.
• Build a community: Develop an online community where customers can interact with your brand, share their feedback, and connect with other buyers. This is an excellent way to capture user-generated content for your marketing campaigns too. 

Leveraging Upsell and Cross-Sell Opportunities

One of the best ways customer success and sales teams can work together is to extract as much value from an existing customer as possible. If you want to grow your business, you need to focus on not just getting customers to “renew subscriptions”, but also on encouraging them to buy more of your product or service. 

Customer success teams can work with clients to find out what they like about the current solution they have, and what additional problems they might want to fix. This opens the door to signs that a customer might be ready to consider an upsell or cross-sell opportunity. 

For instance, if a customer loves your SaaS accounting product, but wants access to more tools for creating financial reports, you could suggest upgrading to an enterprise version of your product with more advanced features. To make the most of your upsell and cross-sell opportunities it’s important to gather as much information as you can about your customer pain points and goals. 

Then, ensure your sales and customer success teams have the resources they need to educate each buyer on the benefits of upgrading to a new solution or purchasing additional products.

Collecting and Responding to Customer Feedback

The only effective way to ensure you’re consistently delivering exceptional experiences to your customers (and maintaining their loyalty) is to listen to their feedback. While you can monitor metrics like churn rate for a basic insight into how good you are at retaining clients, collecting feedback will give you more behind-the-scenes insights into what drives loyalty to your brand. 

There are numerous ways to capture customer feedback, from sending out surveys and polls via social media and email, to using social listening tools to monitor brand mentions, ratings, comments on social channels, and even reviews and testimonials. 

The key to success here is making sure you don’t just collect as much feedback as possible – you also act on it. The more you actively respond to your customer’s feedback, the more likely they are to feel respected by your brand. If you’re struggling to gather useful insights, consider offering customers discounts or gifts in exchange for their comments.

Achieving Success with Customer Success

Thriving in today’s competitive world requires more than just a commitment to constantly collecting as many leads and sales opportunities as possible. You need to ensure you’re investing in long-term relationships with your customers, with the right customer success strategy. 

Start by ensuring your sales and customer success teams are aligned, and make sure they know which metrics and KPIs to monitor. Implement proactive and personalised

 strategies for engaging your existing clients, and take advantage of cross-sell and upsell opportunities as they arise.

Most importantly, constantly solicit and act on customer feedback to improve your brand reputation and your chances of retention.