What is customer success?
Customer success is about consistently enabling your customers to achieve their objectives when interacting with your business. It focuses on helping your customers get the most out of your product or service – creating a positive attitude towards your business and making your customers into your most valued ambassadors.
Why is customer success important?
Having an effective customer success team benefits your business in a number of ways, including increased product adoption, reduced customer churn, and increased retention.
Effectively supporting your customers is essential to ensuring they can find value in your product/service. For example, at Invotra we offer extensive product training and workshops – enabling our customers to utilise tools such as teams and message wall to drive collaboration and increase efficiency.
It is the role of our customer success team to make sure our customers are aware of all the features of Invotra – enabling them to solve a huge variety of business-critical issues without having to resort to using external apps or solutions (providing users with a centralised platform and increasing efficiency).
In addition to this, having an increased level of customer satisfaction leads to reductions in customer churn and higher levels of retention. Factors which, when combined, lead to more satisfied customers who are able to more work more effectively.
Customer success vs customer support
It is worth noting that although customer success and customer support are very closely aligned, they are not the same and should not be treated as such. Customer support is centred around being “reactive” and providing short term solutions to solve customer’s issues quickly (the key term being “quickly”), whilst customer success is about being proactive and providing long-term solutions that increase a customer’s lifetime value and satisfaction.
In summary
Customer success should be a key part of your business strategy for a number of reasons. Firstly, by supporting your customers proactively in achieving their goals and ensuring that they not only have the tools necessary to achieve their goals but the understanding of how to use them, you cultivate a satisfied, productive customer base. It also serves as a highly effective way of achieving better customer retention, enabling your business to focus on what it does best.
Finally, through a combination of all of these factors, you gain one of the most valuable assets any company can have when it comes to growth and sales – customer ambassadors who can shout about how amazing their experience has been.
