Customer Success Breeds Business Success

If you want to achieve long-term success for your business, then it is essential to ensure that your customers are satisfied (also see reataining customers). After all, unhappy customers will probably share their displeasure with others. Potentially, this can hurt your revenue from upsells as well as your chances of acquiring new customers. In order to keep your churn rates low, you need to provide customer support and customer service. However, most companies are now becoming proactive by focusing more on customer success.

You should not wait until something goes wrong then provide customer support. With customer success, you can ensure that your customers can gain more value from the product or service. According to Dylan Berno of New Breed, neglecting customer success means that you are also neglecting your client’s needs.

By simply providing solutions, your customers will feel that you are not giving them more priority. Instead, you are providing them with what you think will be best for them rather than considering their needs and challenges.

Companies will greatly differ based on the customer service that they offer. Businesses can choose to use powerful strategies if they want to offer high-quality service to their customers. Most businesses reveal that they value customer success, however, they are not willing to invest more resources into customer service programs.

Businesses have the potential to grow if only they focus more on customer success. A group of growing businesses is aware that customer success is the key factor that can help their business to grow. Here we will give you the reasons why businesses should consider customer success as a way of growing their revenue.

What is Customer Success?

Customer Success is a certain type of methodology used by businesses to ensure that their customers are happy and satisfied with their product or service. Using an effective method for customer service can help in minimising customer complaints and increase their sales.

Why do Businesses Need Customer Success?

The success of a business will greatly depend on the success of your customer. When your customers succeed after using your product, then they will definitely continue to patronise your product. As a result, your business will likely succeed. Essentially, customer success is all about making sure that your customers can achieve the desired result that they want by using your product.

If you want to achieve customer success, then you will need people, methods, and obviously some information. After all, how are you going to help consumers achieve success using your product if you don’t even know how, why, and when are they going to use it?

How Does Customer Success Differs From Customer Experience?

As we have mentioned earlier, customer success can help organisations in recognising customer experience when it comes to using the products or services. This means that customer experience focuses more on how the product was used. On the contrary, customer success focuses more on the methods in which customers use the products or services from the viewpoint of the customer and the company. This can help in understanding how and why the product was used.

Customer Success Should Matter

Traditionally, businesses will invest most of their resources on sales and marketing. This makes a lot of sense because marketers are the ones who are looking for potential customers. And the ones who will close the deal are the salespeople. However,  what will happen after making a conversion? Most often, it’s only very little.

This is why customers of today believe that these companies, where they buy their products, do not actually care about their success. These companies do not give priority to customer success after closing a deal. This is common for startups and small businesses. But the fact is, it should not be like this.

Numerous businesses are competing online in attracting customers. Unfortunately, it is very difficult to stand out when you are trying to entice new customers. Additionally, attracting new customers can be very costly. As a result, a few businesses are now focusing on their current customers and making them advocates for their brand. By making sure that your customers are successful and happy, then you are building the most effective and powerful promotional channel for your business.

Nowadays, consumers will likely admire companies that can give them excellent customer service. In the previous year, 77% of consumers reveal that they have positive experiences, while 24% are posting their compliments on the company’s social media networks. Your existing customers are the best brand advocates since they can provide an incredible word of mouth to those who are searching for reviews or asking their friends about the product to buy.

Business Growth Can Be Associated With Customer Success

When comparing the service strategy of growing companies against those companies that are not so successful, you will see that growing companies are prioritising customer success. Growing businesses consider customer success as very significant compared to sluggish companies. It is quite surprising that a lot of businesses are capable of growing despite the fact that they don’t value customer’s success. However, since the cost of acquiring new customers has grown so fast, it is unlikely that companies that do not focus on customer success will continue to grow.

21% of growing businesses admit that customer success is very essential. Because of this, we can safely say that these growing businesses have put more priority on customer success. They feel that business is good, hence it is only proper that they should spend more cash on their customer’s success. On the other hand, struggling businesses have to be more careful when spending their money.

The fact is, the leaders of these growing companies are very conscious about cost-efficiency compared to struggling companies. This proves that CEOs and VPs from different companies have different points of view when it comes to customer service. Rather than seeing customer success as an additional cost, it should be considered as a differentiator and a profit contributor. Business leaders who invest in customer success believe that customer success can definitely help their business to grow.

Growing businesses allege that they always aspire to have successful customers. But how can they accomplish this? The simplest way to do this is to invest in their customer service program. More than half, or 55% of growing companies believe that it is very important to invest in their customer service program, compared to 29% of struggling companies.

But where do these investments go? Growing companies will prioritise training for their service representatives so they will have the capacity to handle any situation with the customer. Training customer service representatives is very important for growing businesses.

For growing businesses, customer service representatives are treated as investments. In fact, they are as valuable as lead-generating marketers and profit-generating salespeople. It actually makes sense. Service is a highly valuable aspect. This means that managers should focus more on retention in order to avoid spending more on hiring and training new service representatives.

Finally, in today’s world where customers count a lot, we can assume that businesses that do not prioritise the happiness of their customers won’t probably last for long. However, it is quite amazing that there are still some businesses that are able to grow even if they do no focus more on the satisfaction of their customers.

Customer Success Begins With Good Service

Based on some research, businesses that give importance to customer success can reap more profit benefits and this success will begin with customer service teams. But sad to say, there are times that these teams can also suffer too much pressure which can often affect their way of handling their customers. As a result, it can create inconsistencies and subpar service experiences.

Sometimes the role of customer representatives is difficult most especially if they are dealing with agitated customers and there is only minimal internal support. According to a survey, there are several customer service representatives who feel that they are not given importance and more than half of them are planning to leave their jobs.

The effect of attrition becomes evident when comparing the length of time that these people have been in customer service. Based on the survey, only 19% are planning to stay with their job after working for less than a year as a customer service representative.  As a result, these businesses will constantly be looking for replacements and training them to become excellent customer representatives. This is because 81% of the service representatives that they hire will likely leave their jobs within the first year.

Since a lot of these representatives are not planning to stay long in the service field then most probably they will leave their jobs within the first few years. So, it is safe to assume that those people who remain in their jobs as service representatives are more committed and they will likely stay. However, there is only less number of representatives who have reached five or more years in their jobs and plans to stay on. Consistent attrition can destabilise the service field. When tenured representatives leave, some valuable knowledge will also be lost.

Why Do Customer Service Representatives Leave?

There are a lot of reasons why these customer service representatives decide to quit in their jobs. First of all, this job will require a lot of patience, particularly in dealing with frustrated clients. Typically, it is considered an entry-level job with little chances of advancement. If you are looking for a glamorous job, then this is not the job for you.

Hubspot Research conducted an interview by asking service representatives with different types of questions in order to know what they think about their jobs. Based on their attrition data, most of the representatives who are less satisfied are those who have less tenure. These people feel that they cannot make the right decisions to help their customers. Perhaps this is due to procedural or structural restrictions. When people do not feel empowered by their jobs, then this can greatly influence their morale and longevity in the job. Representatives who stay with their jobs for three or five years will likely feel satisfied with their ability in assisting customers.

Additionally, these service representatives who have less tenure feel that they are not valued by their companies. When customer service is considered an insignificant function, then it only makes sense that most of these representatives will leave and look for a more significant role.

Service representatives who have been working for more than five years will sometimes feel frustrated. In fact, their confidence in their value will start to decline after four years in service. 15% of these long-time representatives feel that the organisation does not give them more value. It seems that there is a  ceiling of satisfaction once the representative has remained in the service role for four years. When service representatives who have stayed the longest in their jobs because they are the most loyal, feel that they have less value, then this should serve as a major concern for business leaders.

Ultimately, service representatives who have less experience can also feel uncertainties particularly, in their career path. Leaders should be constantly aware of the opportunities that they provide to their service representatives. Or else these representatives will continue to assume that customer service is not the right path for them.

Service Teams Are Very Valuable

The success of a business is in the hands of the customers. That is why customer service should be prioritised. Leaders should realise that the service organisation is just as important as marketing and sales. Keep in mind that the customer service team has a close relationship with the customers. They are the ones who listen to their product-related frustrations. They also understand the latest trend in the market. The service team can provide valuable insights to businesses, aside from serving their customers.

If you want your customer service to be a success, then you should follow the footsteps of growing companies. Try to re-evaluate the customer service strategies of your organisation. You should avoid the philosophy that service is a cost center. Instead, your principles should be more customer-oriented. Investing in service teams can greatly help in eliminating the concerns of most service representatives. It can also provide them with better working experience, most especially for highly critical teams.