MarketStar Blog | Customer Success

Introduction

The past couple of years, there's been a remarkable shift in how companies perceive and prioritize their customers, evolving from a mere transactional relationship to a full-blown commitment to being “customer-obsessed”. And this is true across any landscape, customer success included. From being a mere support function to being recognized as a strategic pillar for business growth, this domain has undergone quite the transformation. Gone are the days when customer interactions were merely part of a routine; the current landscape champions the art of cultivating lasting relationships. 

Key Takeaways:

• To gain loyal and long-term customers, you need to design a journey map that provides a superb experience

• Providing an incredible journey can turn someone who was casually browsing your website into an advocate who offers valuable referrals

• Journey mapping via pipeline management enables your customers to experience what it’s like to interact with your company

• Pipeline velocity refers to the speed with which leads move through the sales pipeline

Knowing what’s on your customer’s mind can be tricky and challenging. When you think you’ve accounted for their needs, their requirements change, and new buying trends emerge.

Ever wondered why a customer spends hours on your website researching your product/service to close the tab? Why does it take so many steps to get from point A to point B when it should ideally take just one?

Well, the problem could be in your customer journey mapping – you probably don’t have a clear understanding of your prospect’s journey to purchasing your product/service.

What is Prospect Journey Mapping?

Customer journey mapping or prospect journey mapping is a visual representation of how potential customers perceive your brand and how they interact with your product/service. It helps them gain insight into the challenges they’re facing.

The journey mapping aims to understand the needs and resolve pain points at all touchpoints (an instance where your prospect can form an opinion of your company) across the customer lifecycle.

How Prospect Journey Mapping Helps Drive Pipeline Velocity?

Prospect journey mapping enables you to get in your customers’ shoes and experience what it feels like to engage with your brand.

It helps you understand the good and the bad your brand offers, while the insights you gain help personalize the customer experience.

Before we explore the benefits of customer journey mapping and how it helps drive pipeline velocity, let’s find out what pipeline velocity is. 

What is Pipeline Velocity?

Pipeline velocity is the speed at which qualified leads move through a sales pipeline and eventually become customers.

The Benefits:

• Journey mapping helps you understand the role of different touchpoints and see how all customer interactions influence each other.

• By mapping out the prospect journey, you can understand what is interesting to your customers about your brand and what is turning them away. 

• It helps identify roadblocks to reduce customer pain points and improve user experience.

• Mapping out the customer’s journey helps you understand the channels they visit and what they’re trying to do at each touchpoint.

• Journey mapping helps you improve your customer retention rate. According to American Express, 33% of customers switch brands after just one poor experience.

Components in a Prospect Journey Map

A prospect journey map compiles your customer’s experience with your brand and combines the information into a map.

By understanding this relationship between your customers and your brand, you can build your touchpoints for the most effective journey mapping process.

The Purchase Process: This element defines the path/stages you intend for your customers to take to reach a specific goal. Using this path, you can start listing your stages in the right order.

Customer Actions: This component details what your potential customers do at each stage of the purchase process and explores the different ways they might reach their goals.

Adding Emotions: Your customers are looking for solutions to solve a problem. Adding a range of emotions to the journey map can help improve their opinion about your brand and turn them into brand advocates.

Pain Points: Adding pain points to the journey map helps identify the exact stage where your customers are facing issues and work out solutions.

How to Create a Prospect Journey Map

Before you start creating the journey map, you need to ask a few questions yourself – Why are you creating a map in the first place? What experience will it offer? Who is it about?

Based on these questions, you may want to create a buyer persona.

The next step is to interview prospects for direct feedback. A few good questions are:

• How did you hear about us?

• What attracted you to our website?

• On a scale of 1 to 5, how easy was it for you to navigate our website?

Based on the feedback and research, find out where your customers can interact with you on your website; list all the touchpoints your prospects are and should be using.

Determine all the elements your journey map needs to include and identify your resources and the ones you need.

Once you have designed your map, take the customer journey yourself first – this ensures that you are providing a valuable experience.

Finally, you can make the appropriate changes to your map to achieve goals.

5 Best Practices for Customer Journey Mapping

• Set a clear goal for the journey map to improve the customer buying experience.

• Turn customer pain points into business terms that your customer success team can understand and act upon.

• Create customer journey maps for different buyer personas based on demographics and psychographic.

• Update the journey map every time your product/service offers changes. Even a small tweak, like removing an additional field in the form, can significantly impact your customer journey.

• Make the prospect journey map accessible to cross-functional teams, as they are not effective in a silo.

Delight your Customers at Every Stage

Building an effective prospect journey map can help your brand create strong relationships with them. Once you understand their experience with your business, you can provide great delight at every stage of their journey.

Whether you’re optimizing your existing customer journey or exploring a new business opportunity to serve their unrecognized needs, start mapping the future of customer success in your business with the help of experts.

Bonus Takeaway:

Mapping customer journeys can be difficult for the marketing team, especially if they don’t know how and where to start.

So, here’s a handy worksheet designed to help savvy marketers chart their customers’ buying journeys to enhance their overall buying experience.

Print it out, pin it on your desk, and share it with other departments to ensure that everyone is consistently working towards attaining your customer experience vision.

Key Takeaways

In the dynamic marketplace that we are in today, building long-lasting relationships with customers is the only way for organizations to ensure the success of their business goals

A Customer Success program is an essential part of modern business, especially for technology solutions that are challenging to adopt in new environments. But customer success programs can also be a challenge to implement internally, especially if your organization doesn't have the infrastructure, expertise, or resources to handle it. In these situations, outsourcing CS can take those responsibilities off your plate. This allows you to give Customer Success programs the attention they deserve while you can focus on the unique value that your company is known for.

As business solutions grow increasingly complex, some buyers require additional assistance to introduce and implement new products or services into their company’s environment  successfully. It’s no longer enough for business-to-business (B2B) sales organizations to sell a product or service and leave the customer to their own devices. Today, they need support and knowledge over the long haul. 

Our journey starts in the midst of a company wondering why they can't keep customers using their products. The leaders of the company meet in their boardroom, and everyone has the whole day's schedule dedicated to answering the question... "why aren't our customers renewing with us?"  

Key Insights

• With digitization opening more avenues than ever for customers to make a choice, it’s crucial for businesses to stay on the pulse of customer experience

• Creating a culture and practice of prioritizing customer engagement is easier to brainstorm than execute

• While many business ventures might still be averse to outsourcing this customer-facing function, there are clear benefits to doing so

• These range from a deeper understanding of the customer success space to industry-leading methodologies to execute customer success goals

Customer success may be a relatively new term, but growing customer expectations have solidified its significance to revenue growth and long-term success.

A report by Forrester highlights that customer success is on top of mind for many businesses, with 72% reporting it to be a priority.

In particular, the COVID-19 pandemic drove home its importance in protecting relationships with existing customers.

As the economic fallouts of the pandemic unfolded through constrained budgets, shifting business priorities, and disrupted operations, companies realized that a continuous race for the next sale was not sustainable. More important was nurturing the existing customer base beyond the point of sale.

A visible aspect of this shift is the value of trustworthiness in ensuring customer loyalty.

So, should you outsource customer success? To answer this question, one must look at what customer success does for an organization.

What are the Benefits of Customer Success?

Focusing on customer success involves tracking different kinds of value provided to the customer. A Deloitte research identifies three types of value that constitute customer success: performance value, business value, and experience value.

In the B2B world that we are in, getting the signature on the dotted line is only the beginning of the journey with customers.

• Customer Retention: Renewal decisions are based on perceived value. When you focus on customer success, you help your customers realize more value in your products and services. This leads to increased renewal rates and longer customer tenures, both of which increase a customer’s lifetime value and help you drive growth and profitability.

• Increased upsells and cross-sells: As per a report, vendors are 60-70% more likely to sell to existing customers rather than selling to new customers. Existing customers are also more likely to have undertaken integrations that maximize the value to be drawn from greater engagement with related products and services. It is precisely this advantage that customer success secures by increasing the likelihood of customer satisfaction.

• Operational Improvement: Focusing on customer success increases customer predictability. It provides you detailed insight into developing issues. It will also help you uncover drivers of that outcome, which will help you with recurring revenue predictability and capacity planning.

• Increased Revenue: Customer success is not just about keeping revenue in the business. It also helps generate more revenue at a lower cost. Customer success provides a mechanism for not only creating these chances but also capitalizing on them.

Why Should You Outsource Customer Success?

It might make more sense for you to outsource more transactional engagements such as customer service or customer support rather than outsourcing a long-term, relational role like customer success.

What is important is to acknowledge that outsourcing customer success does come with its fair share of challenges. Despite these challenges, however, outsourcing key customer success activities can contribute in several ways to revenue and growth.

1. Cost Savings

An obvious advantage of outsourcing is cost savings. But this advantage is often misperceived as resulting from hiring low-paid offshore customer success representatives.

Such misperceptions only consider the salaries as part of the costs of building a customer success team. But there are numerous other hard and soft costs such as facility, equipment and technology, travel, recruitment and training, and management costs.

By outsourcing all or part of the customer success function, companies can save on operational costs related to onboarding and training, renting and maintaining office space, management costs, and investing in the latest tools and technology stacks.

2. Skilled Representatives

When you have an in-house team, it can take months or even years to build the kind of high-quality team you have in mind for long-term success. While it might look rewarding, you are putting years of resources and thousands of dollars into building such expertise.

With outsourced customer success, you receive a top-notch crew whose sole responsibility is to provide excellent customer support. Such a team is better equipped to ensure that there is no lag in customer experience.

3. Access to leading technologies

A 2021 report by Talkdesk highlights that while customers want to talk more and for longer, they are not willing to wait on hold for longer than a minute.

Reputable outsourced customer support vendors understand this shift.

An outsourced customer success team will ensure that processes are in place to reduce average wait time (AWT). They have dedicated QA auditors to coach agents on how to minimize “dead time” between calls.

4. Effective Management

An in-house team can cater to high-value customers. However, real growth requires customer success at scale, catering to all segments of customers.

Most companies are likely to have a large segment of long-tail customers who cannot be converted into high-growth customers because of a lack of bandwidth among in-house customer success teams.

Outsourcing the long-tail customers can help organizations move beyond an 80-20 trap in their revenue generation and grow a much larger base of valuable customers.

5. Focus on Core Competencies

Customers are the key to success for any organization. Nevertheless, customer support may not be one of the core competencies of your venture.

Outsourcing customer success can help you focus on what your company does best, without sacrificing customer satisfaction in the process. And this can happen without a huge upfront investment of resources.

Finding the Right Outsourced Customer Success Partner

Pearsons’ Marketing Metrics: The Definitive Guide to Measuring Marketing Performance shows that the probability of selling to an existing customer is up to 14 times higher than the probability of selling it to a new one. 

By bringing an outsourced customer success team, you are better equipped for future growth. The sooner you establish a reliable partnership in this important business segment, the easier it will be for you to master future challenges.

Key Insights

• Over the past few years, industries everywhere have begun using a subscription-based business model

• While convenience and recurring revenue are the top reasons for its popularity, the model does come with its own set of challenges

• Businesses must overcome these roadblocks to cater to the ever-increasing consumer demands

• For the model to be successful, enterprises must have a laser-sharp focus on not just subscription management, but also customer management, financial planning, and performance metrics

It started with magazines and telecom companies and trickled down to the music and video streaming sector.

At present, a wide variety of businesses–from meal boxes to cars to even electronic equipment–have embraced the subscription-based model.

Virtually any product or service can be sold through a subscription-based business model. Sectors that have not jumped on the bandwagon will do so in the future.

The trend to the subscription-based model continues to grow at a CAGR of 17.9% and is forecast to represent 83% of total software revenue by 2025, as per a report by IDC.

Despite its tremendous uptake, the subscription-based business model is not as straightforward as it sounds. There are multiple roadblocks that subscription businesses must be prepared for to provide a stellar experience and a hassle-free customer journey.

But before we jump into the unique challenges of subscription-based businesses, let’s look at what the domain is all about and why the model is growing so fast.

What Are Subscription-based Businesses?

A subscription-based service model is based on the idea of selling a product or service to receive monthly or yearly recurring subscription revenue.

Such a model focuses on customer retention rather than customer acquisition.

Take Spotify or Netflix, for example. Closer to home, we have businesses such as Zomato, MakeMyTrip, and many others where customers can opt for memberships to avail themselves of exclusive deals.

Subscription-based business models benefit both the company and its customers.

As a customer, you can automatically repurchase a product or service. As a business, you retain customers for future sales rather than needing to re-engage with them on a more frequent basis.

Why are Subscription-based Businesses Becoming So Popular?

Subscription-based businesses are popular for one main reason: convenience.

The shift to online shopping and availing of products or services from the comfort of one’s home was rising even before the pandemic. With lockdowns in place and storefronts closed, the need for recurring goods and services rose sharply.

So, even when the pandemic had a negative effect on much of the economy, the subscription-based market grew about 12% at that time, as per the Subscription Economy Index by Zuora.

Digital media, video streaming, and eLearning platforms had subscriptions grow by over 25%, according to the same report.

Several factors are driving the surge. For businesses looking to shift towards a subscription-based service model, three factors reign supreme:

• Predictability

• Recurring revenue

• Customer insight

Additionally, such a model offers more definitive revenue sources that business trailblazers can rely on for planning and investment.

Customer insight is another bonus. When businesses have consistent relationships with their customers, they are better equipped to track and gain deeper insights into how customers interact with their offerings.

Overcoming the 6 Unique Challenges in Subscription-based businesses

Many subscription-based businesses are enjoying unprecedented popularity.

However, plenty can go wrong if there is a gap in alignment between pricing, product, and customer management.

Let’s look at six of the most common challenges plaguing subscription-based businesses.

1. Providing Multiple Subscription Billing Models

Subscription plans are all about flexibility. It should cater to each customer’s unique demands. This means that there is no one-size-fits-all solution to pricing models.

Any subscription-based business must offer multiple categories of billing models so that customers have the choice and freedom to choose what they like.

Taking into consideration that the model you opt for has a direct impact on revenue, there are a few you can make way for:

• Freemium: This type of subscription plan allows customers to get started for free with the option to pay when/if they wish to upgrade

• Fixed Schedule and Pricing: In this type of plan, customers are charged a fixed amount at a time period for a pre-decided quantity of the product

• Tiered/pay-per-unit pricing: In this type of plan, the customer is charged based on the quantity purchased as per the pre-defined tiers

2. Customer Management

Subscription-based businesses tend to have a significant number of users at any given time, making it a tough task for businesses to manage all the customer records.

An inaccurate customer management database can have a damaging effect on the customer relationship if mistakes are made. Mostly, these mistakes often come down to repetitive manual tasks that lead to human error.

Additionally, any gap in customer data would lead to inadequate information flow among the staff. In this case, they would not know if customers were on trial or if their subscription period had ended.

You can avoid this by using an effective subscription management system that categorizes where your customer is in the sales process, giving you relevant data of any previous interactions.

3. Flexibility and Real-Time Modifications

Even when you have a detailed pricing plan, your customer might want to upgrade, downgrade, cancel or change their plan a few days before their billing. You must provide them with the flexibility to change their plan without having to wait for the next billing date.

Real-time modifications are another area to look into.

Additionally, the changes your customers are making to their plans need to be properly accounted for and communicated to the customer. By doing this, you ensure that their experience remains the same, hassle-free, and smooth.

4. Reducing Churn

While subscription-based businesses don’t typically have to worry about their service losing novelty, they do need to ensure that their service is always adding value to their customers’ lives.

Routine surveys are a great way to assess what your customers like and dislike about your product or service. Creating stackable loyalty reward programs is another way to keep your customers delighted.

These tactics can help you keep your customers engaged and prevent them from buying products from a competing business.

You can regularly surprise your customers with reward points so they feel genuinely valued. This goes a long way in decreasing dissatisfaction and, consequently, reducing churn.

5. Go for Automation

Giving your customers flexibility also means more complexity for your business.

As a subscription-based business, your customers have various options for customizations, enhancements, and convenience to pause or resume their plan and to upgrade or downgrade. But this also makes invoice management a challenge.

Manual billing is completely out of the question, considering the massive amount of data you would have to stay up to date with. You must automate your billing system so that invoices are generated and sent to customers without any delay.

6. Tracking the Progress

Rather than measuring success by tracking Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR), churn, and recurring profit margins individually, combine them.

A combination will allow businesses following a subscription-based business model to have more actionable insights and answer critical questions about the company’s overall financial health. A real-time dashboard can help you visualize the progress better.

Riding the Subscription Wave

At the heart of the subscription-based business model lies customer-centricity. It is all about putting customers at the center and creating personalized experiences, on the strength of technology.

To make it big in the subscription-based business landscape, think of these challenges as tiny roadblocks which you need to overcome.

As long as you focus on delivering a stellar customer experience, you are better positioned to create a niche for yourself in the marketplace.

This is the first installment in our series on Unique Challenges where we deep-dive into hurdles faced by businesses in different industries and their game-changing impact on business growth.

Head over to our blog, Overcoming the 8 Challenges of On-Demand Delivery Services, and explore eight of the most common challenges plaguing on-demand delivery services and how to overcome them to be successful.

Key Insights

• With consumers spending more time online, we see an increase in expectations for a more personalized and seamless customer experience

• When not managed effectively, online advertising is often viewed as a negative disruption in the consumer’s overall journey. This limits engagement as well as ad performance

• Fortunately, there is a way out of this–Customer Obsession!

• A customer-obsessed business model can help the industry not only create ads that inspire shoppers but also reach them at the right time

• Such an approach will help businesses stay true to their vision while achieving online marketing goals

Everyone in the ad tech industry strives to beat the competition, focusing more on features than anything else. However, it takes more than features to win the hearts and minds of customers.

Your success rests on your complete understanding of your prospects. This is how you will be able to ensure a seamless customer journey while serving your prospects with relevant content at any given time.

In other words, you need to know how to be customer obsessed.

What Do We Mean by Customer Obsession?

Customer obsession is the very core of customer experience.

Customer-obsessed organizations are always thinking of new and unique ways to understand their clients better. Such business ventures apply their knowledge and data to produce products and services that solve their customers’ problems.

Customer-obsessed businesses will focus on adding value to the customer experience.

They collect feedback regularly and ensure that client needs are a priority in every business goal. They’re more concerned with retaining and delighting existing customers than acquiring new ones.

The goal is to increase customer loyalty, leading them to become more reliant on your brand. Your customers may believe that your company is looking out for their best interests, which boosts their chances of making repeat purchases. 

Why is Customer Obsession So Important?

More than anything, customer obsession refers to a type of mindset or business model that focuses on prioritizing customer needs above everything else. Amazon and Alibaba are great examples of this type of approach.

In Amazon, for instance, customer obsession is not a responsibility that falls on any single team, such as customer service. It falls on every team. Every department needs to be customer obsessed. And that ripple effect starts from the top down.

Customer obsessed businesses:

• Prioritize retention over acquisition

• Focus on quality over quantity

• Align every department with customer success

• Analyze customer data frequently

What are the Strategies for Becoming Customer-obsessed in Adtech?

Customer obsession has never been as vital as it is now for AdTech. The industry is in a resurgence. Despite languishing in investors’ bad graces over the past few years, AdTech has suddenly shot up.

Luma’s Q2 2021 Market Report shows how AdTech deals have drastically increased year on year by more than 500%. 

Notable examples include Mediaocean’s acquisition of Flashtalking for a reported $500 million and AdTheorent Inc. combining with a special-purpose acquisition company (SPAC) to go public with a $1 billion-plus valuation.

When it comes to value, the answer is simple: Programmatic advertising or ad tech works. Publishers are in a much better position to incur additional revenue now than what they generated in the pre-programmatic era.

As the industry prepares for the future, key players must shift their focus on becoming a customer-obsessed brand and how this facet will go a long way in improving customer experience.

After all, the ad tech industry is expected to grow tremendously. The backbone of the internet advertising industry is set to grow from $438bn in 2021 to $1 trillion in 2030, as per the forecasts by Global Data.

Let’s explore a few strategies that will help you establish a mindset that is customer-obsessed:

1. Role of Data

Data should be your key pillar behind effective online marketing to provide a seamless customer experience.

With better technology available to assist us in accessing big data, the market is growing at an astronomical rate, reaching a value of $103 billion by 2027 (Statista report).

Real-time insights from this data will help businesses to create meaningful ads.

Start with combining location data with business, consumer, and contextual information to ensure that relevant ad content reaches the right audience at the right time.

2. Focus on Content

Content is equally important.

Marketers must have the ability to determine which ad is the right ad to show to a specific user without overexposing the consumer to their ads.

Predictive bidding, which leverages the power of data, can be of tremendous advantage.

This type of approach develops and implements algorithms to analyze the individual before the ad is displayed. This ensures consumers are being served the ad that is most relevant to them across their devices.

3. Speak Your Purpose

Improving customer experience will be incomplete without brands being true to their purpose. Your customers want to know what your business stands for and its driving mission.

Take Verizon for instance. The company’s vision is to deliver the promise of the digital world by enhancing the ability of humans, businesses, and society to do more and do better. It defines why they are here and who they are here for.

Once these are aligned, customer-obsessed companies must understand their customers’ needs — even before the customer has articulated them. Customer conversations and survey feedback can help you kickstart this process.

4. Being Multichannel

When customer obsession is the foundation of all your customer experience strategies, make use of multi-channel marketing to get the word out about your promotions.

You can utilize email to generate excitement about your promotions early among your current and most loyal customers.

Social media is another powerful tool for you to promote your offerings. This will also enable you to interact with customers and gather information on customer sentiment.

5. Keep Advancing

Technology and media are industries in constant flux.

To stay ahead of the competition, ad-tech ventures must keep abreast of the changes. And while successful startups keep up with changes, the most successful are always two steps ahead.

The key is to be nimble and innovative to turn challenges into golden opportunities. This will not be possible if companies don’t dream big. Allow your teams to contribute to the creative process.

6. Integrating AdTech and MarTech

Adtech and Martech do overlap but have primarily remained distinct from each other with a common goal—to provide better customer experiences.

Such disconnected systems add unnecessary complexities, making it hard for companies to know their customers well. Integrating AdTech and Martech can solve this challenge.

This type of integration helps advertisers by optimizing advertising investments while creating a 360-degree view of the customer. Additionally, companies can make use of Martech data to improve their ad targeting initiatives.

Looking Ahead

There has never been a better time for brands to leverage the new opportunities of digital advertising. And infusing a customer-obsessed mindset can help you take your digital ad campaigns to millions.

From how you handle customer complaints to the details that bring them joy, each step must be focused on how it might be perceived by your buyer.

Finally, a customer obsession focus will help you create a better stream of repeat customers who know they will get a quality product or service with top-notch customer service.

This is the second installment in our series on Customer Obsession where we look into the benefits of having a customer-obsessed mindset and how it will help businesses understand what’s motivating their customers.

Head over to our blog, On-Demand Delivery Services: 6 Key Steps to Customer Obsession and explore the six leading strategies that customer-obsessed companies can employ to recalibrate their model to deliver a smooth last-mile experience.

Do give it a read, if you haven’t, till now!

Key Takeaways:

While it is easy to think that they work in silos, both the customer success and sales teams have quite a few overlaps in their day-to-day activities. What binds them together is their ability to nurture relationships with their customers.