In my past life as a teacher, my inbox was full of emails from EdTech tools and software that promised to make my job easier. And while many of those tools did do what they promised, the best tools I sung the praises of were the companies that offered training to increase customer success and the likelihood of me actually using them in the classroom.
I appreciated the businesses that put forth the time and effort to ensure I understood how to use their product. Because in the end, it wasn’t just me they were helping, but my students.
So, why am I talking about my life as a former teacher? Because customer success is the bread and butter of a successful business.
It‘s no secret your business needs exceptional Sales and Marketing to be successful. But in a world where customers have endless options, Sales and Marketing alone aren’t enough to sustain growth. Businesses can no longer rely on annual contracts to lock customers in. Plus, the cost of customer acquisition has steadily increased over the past decade.
So, what else can businesses do today to succeed? The answer: Invest in customer success — one of the most popular, emerging growth opportunities in business today, cross-industry.
What is customer success?
Customer success is anticipating customer challenges or questions and proactively providing solutions and answers. Customer success helps you boost customer happiness and retention, thus increasing your revenue and customer loyalty.
Who needs a customer success strategy?
If you have customers, you should invest in customer success. I think it’s helpful to think of customer success as “customer education” (at least, that’s how my former teacher mind works). When you take the time to teach your new customers how to use your product and the usefulness of its features, you’re increasing the likelihood that they’ll stay your customers.
In recent years, it‘s become more expensive for businesses to acquire new customers. That’s why you need to focus on keeping existing customers happy. Trust me when I say this, happy customers become your advocates.
In fact, 77% of happy customers share their positive experiences with others, with 24% posting praise on their favorite companies’ social media channels. Talk about becoming a cheerleader for your brand!
The growing businesses who invest in their customers understand the most cost-efficient way to run a business today is by ensuring customers are happy and successful, which are both products of customer success.
Customer Success vs. Customer Support
Customer success aligns closely with customer support to take customer satisfaction to the next level. (In fact, at HubSpot, these teams sit together. And in my opinion, there’s not a better combination of teams.)
Customer Success
Customer success is focused on working proactively in partnership with customers throughout their time as a customer to help them get more value out of their purchase and share their feedback with you. It drives the customer experience forward and ensures a successful path into the future.
Customer Support
Customer support focuses on working reactively on the front lines — fielding customer questions, issues, and requests over phone, email, live chat, and social media. Support is the function that solves problems when customers raise them; it's reactive fulfillment to specific customer requests.
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Why is customer success important?
Customer success leads to business success. It improves customer happiness and loyalty; by genuinely helping your customers succeed, they become your biggest promoters and advocates. Customer success is tied to your bottom line as it helps you reduce churn rates, improve renewal and satisfaction, and, therefore, boost revenue.
Customer success has the power to help you grow your base of advocates and promoters. But growing and maintaining your fan base isn’t the only reason to invest in customer success.
In my experience, a solid customer success strategy can help you:
- Drive revenue through cross- and up-selling.
- Improve retention rates and decrease customer churn.
- Continually improve your product or service based on your customers’ feedback and their experiences.
- Tailor and personalize support solutions based on customer interactions.
- Create and implement effective onboarding programs based on the feedback of your current customers.
When it boils down to it, customer success is directly linked to the positive, helpful relationship you build with your customers.
It’s true. It does take time and effort to nurture a positive relationship. But that doesn’t mean you should skip this important part of your business model. Instead, the time and effort you and your team put in means you’re creating a proactive customer experience, rather than a reactive one.
The more helpful you and your team are, the more likely you’ll keep your client roster full.
Customer Success Management
Customer success management is overseeing your business's customer success representatives and maintaining a customer success strategy to proactively assist, delight, and retain customers.
A customer success manager leads the group of representatives who work directly with customers. Depending on the size and organization of your company, customer success managers may report to a senior manager or a VP of Customer Support and Success.
Customer success management is critical to the health of an organization as it directly impacts customer retention rates as well as the rate of cross-sells and upsells. As of today, there are over 7,000 open roles for “customer success manager.”
Customer success (CS) managers have a few key responsibilities:
- To ensure representatives are helping customers get the most out of the product or service — thus increasing the likelihood of retaining those customers.
- To hire, train, and motivate CS representatives on engagement and retention best practices as well as product or service specificities.
- To develop the organization's customer success strategy to actively engage and retain customers.
- To lead the development of any supporting content and materials needed by CS representatives.
- To segment the customer base by agreed-upon factors, such as subscription type, product adoption, business size, or the like so that CS representatives can better help them.
- To address any escalated CS issues or questions.
- To encourage customer feedback through direct questioning and/or customer surveys.
- To analyze the feedback, performance, and retention rates of customers based on their interaction with the CS team to better understand the effectiveness of the broader customer success strategy.
The internal organization of your CS team should be based on the needs of your team, size of your employee base, and complexity of your product. I’ll share a sample customer success organization and discuss how it operates to prioritize customer satisfaction.
In this sample organization, the CS manager leads a three-pronged department. One team manages customer onboarding, another heads up long-term customer success, and the third manages one-off technical issues or requests.
In my opinion, this type of team structure allows for more targeted solutions and provides opportunities for your team to build long-term relationships with customers (meaning a greater chance for cross-selling and upselling).
How Does Customer Success Work?
There are three elements needed for customer success to be effective. These include a customer success solution (e.g., a tool or software), a team and manager of customer success employees, and a customer success strategy.
1. Choose a customer success solution.
To proactively manage all interactions you have with customers, take my advice: You'll want to implement a customer success solution for your team — meaning customer success software and tools.
For example, the HubSpot Service Hub allows you to connect with your customers on their time and grow through their success. I like HubSpot Service Hub because it helps you bring customer success to the forefront so you can ensure you have happy customers who want to remain customers, refer their friends, and tell their network about your business and offerings — a.k.a. become promoters!
2. Hire and train a customer success team.
You'll need a person (or, preferably, a team) of people working on customer success. I like to think of customer success representatives as your “company’s product teachers.” The number of representatives, or product teachers, and managers on your customer success team will depend on the size of your business and available resources.
Note: It’s important to remember to expand your customer success team as your company grows so you can proactively assist your customer base. Too few customer success representatives can lead to problems and unhappy clients.
3. Create a customer success strategy.
Depending on the product you sell and what your customers need from you, your customer success strategy may vary a bit. However, here are some universal steps to creating a customer success strategy for your team:
- Establish a customer success team.
- Implement the appropriate customer success tools and software.
- Identify your customers' end goals (and why they need customer success).
- Create a roadmap for success to explain your business's expectations and goals for customer success in both the short and long term.
- Share and implement the strategy on your team, and ensure everyone knows what's expected of them individually and as a team.
- Analyze your results — Do your customers have the tools and support they need to succeed?
- Make modifications to your customer success strategy and the team as your business and customer base grow.
Now that you have a better understanding of customer success and why it's so important, I’ll share some ways to help your customers succeed.
50 Free Customer Service Email Templates
Templates to communicate price increases, apologies, thanks, and notifications to your customers with sincere, on-brand messaging.
- Price Increase Letter Templates
- Customer Apology Email Templates
- Referral Email Templates
- And More!
Download Free
All fields are required.
5 Tips for Helping Customers Succeed
Feel free to modify the following list of customer success tips to better suit your customers and their needs. Since every business and base of customers is different, you might find that some of these tips work better than others for your specific situation.
1. Implement a customer success program.
Create a customer success program to guide your team to effectively and proactively assist your customers. Every business will have a version of a customer success strategy, so ensure your customer success strategy meets the needs and expectations of your customers.
If you haven’t already, I suggest you take a minute to really dig into the mind of your customer. Take some time to figure out what they like, what they need, their expectations, and their core characteristics. Sending a survey to your client base can help you design your customer success program.
If you need extra help to create your customer success program, I encourage you to check out our ebook, 7 Smart Customer Success Playbooks. This playbook will give you step-by-step guidance, proven strategies, and industry best practices to help you craft your own customer success strategy.
Pro tip: As a small business owner myself, I understand how some strategies get pushed to the side as your business grows. But, as I’ve learned, don't forget to modify your strategy as your business grows — the needs of your customers are bound to change over time, especially as your products and features evolve.
2. Educate your customers.
To best support your customers, you need to anticipate the questions that are bound to arise as they work with your products. Remember when I called customer success representatives “product teachers”? This is where the teaching part comes into play.
To ensure your customers are not sitting on the phone on-hold or awaiting your response to their inquiry, empower your customers through education about your product.
This is especially important if you sell a complex product or service like software. For example, you can create a knowledge base where you list product and feature descriptions or include live chat on your site so success reps can better support your customers in real-time. Or host weekly webinars to showcase your product’s core features and functionality.
3. Onboard customers.
Onboard your customers to support them throughout the initial parts of their journey with your brand and product. Provide them with the tools, training, resources, and knowledge they need to get the ball rolling. I think onboarding customers is a great way to delight them and get them acquainted with your product — and answer any questions proactively.
By onboarding your customers, you set the tone for what to expect from your business throughout the rest of the time they're customers. Examples of onboarding materials include step-by-step tutorials, unlimited one-on-one guidance from reps, or milestone celebrations when a customer achieves success using your product.
Pro tip: I’ve written plenty of step-by-step tutorials for my clients. When you create these kinds of materials, it’s helpful to get into the mindset of your customer. Although your product might be intuitive, it’s helpful to write down each and every step of how to use it — from the initial log in all the way through to the end.
4. Communicate with other teams.
Keeping the lines of communication open among the various departments at your company will help you help your customers. Work with marketing to create blogs and video content to explain how a product or feature works. And when you have a new product or feature video, I think it’s important that you share the video with your customers — social media and emails are effective!
Communicate with sales to understand and target specific pain points that customers approach you with. Chat with support to align your proactive and reactive efforts, so all interactions with your customers are professional and consistent.
5. Promote customer loyalty.
Loyalty results from a customer‘s positive experiences with your business. You want your customers to feel satisfied and certain they’re getting value out of their investment. There are many ways to promote customer loyalty to establish brand advocates and promoters who increase your customer retention rates.
I can’t be the only one that links loyalty programs and points, right? With that thought in mind, you might create a customer loyalty program, develop a community for your current customers to interact with each other, or establish a point and discount system for current customers making additional purchases.
You Succeed When Your Customers Do
As a teacher, I know that the most successful students are the students who are invested in their education and have access to additional support and resources to ensure continued success inside and outside of the classroom.
When you think of a business’s customer success program, it’s the same thing. The most successful businesses are those that ensure the continued happiness, product education, and success of their customers.
By creating a customer success program at your company and ensuring your customers feel supported throughout their time working with your business, you'll turn them into loyal advocates of your brand. This will allow you to grow sustainably, all while building long-term relationships with the people you depend on most: your customers.
Editor's note: This post was originally published in July 2019 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.
