The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has had an incredible impact on a variety of industries around the globe. There’s no doubt that it’s been a challenging year, and we’re still not out of the woods.
But that means this summer is a great time to reassess your sales approach, determine what’s working and not working, and consider what your customers need, both now and in the future.
As the economy regains focus amid and after COVID-19, Customer Success in particular should be part of your plan. Today, we’ll take a closer look at the benefits of a Customer Success team and how to best implement one in your company.
Basics of Customer Success
Customer Success is a proactive way to serve your customers. Whereas customer support is reactive after a sale, Customer Success involves working with customers throughout the sales process to truly understand their needs and help them achieve their business goals.
Customer Success is cyclical in nature, incorporating pieces of onboarding and experience management. It’s the next step in the evolution of “solution selling,” and a fitting response to our outcome-driven economy.
Benefits of Customer Success
Customer Success helps your business create early, ongoing, and deeper relationships with your customers. This enables several key benefits:
Better understanding of your customers. Your customers’ businesses are changing quickly to adapt to the current challenges. A dedicated Customer Success team helps you form deeper relationships with each customer, which helps you to better understand their business needs and guides you both toward the best solutions.
Customer retention. In the age of COVID-19, a Customer Success team is a surefire way to keep revenue coming in and reassure your customers. Many companies are in wait-and-see mode, so it’s more important than ever to retain and grow your current customers. If you serve them well, your existing customer base “becomes the foundation to pandemic recovery,” as Forrester points out. And improving customer retention can benefit your bottom line in a big way: A 5 percent increase in customer retention can boost revenue by 25-95 percent.
Identification of common customer issues. Incorporating Customer Success with predictive analytics will alert you to potential threats to the customer relationship, such as low first use and likelihood of churn, and allow you to respond proactively. With U.S. companies losing nearly $137 billion each year to avoidable customer churn, this type of customer awareness is vital. This is especially true during economic downturns when customers are looking to cut costs and may be more likely to change vendors suddenly.
Improved customer loyalty. Beyond retaining your customers, Customer Success can help improve their brand loyalty. Forming deeper relationships with your customers increases the odds they will become true brand advocates, wherein they have had such a positive experience that they are willing to advocate for your products or services to others.
Outsourcing Customer Success
It’s common for companies to outsource their customer sales and service to help their own salespeople focus on core competencies. Outsourcing Customer Success provides the same value, enabling companies to benefit from highly trained talent and state-of-the-art technology.
An outsourced Customer Success team is nimble and responsive, so they can get started quickly and adapt as your needs change. It’s also notable that outsourcing Customer Success management is far less expensive than building and maintaining your own in-house team.
MarketStar offers a turnkey approach to growth-centered Customer Success. Building on our proven track record of delivering Sales as a ServiceⓇ, our Customer Success services are designed to improve customer insight, maximize customer satisfaction, and increase your bottom line.
And we are always improving. To help meet the needs of our clients during and after COVID-19, we recently partnered with Totango, the leading platform in Customer Success management. The strategic partnership will help us more efficiently deploy and scale Customer Success solutions for our clients, helping them to accelerate customer growth in these economically trying times.
Getting Started
Remember, today’s sales model is significantly different than it was before COVID-19. It’s an ongoing process that is more of a marathon than a sprint. The more value you can provide to your customers over the long haul, the better your bottom line, both now and in the future. As the economy gradually recovers from a challenging year, take a close look at how Customer Success can help you serve your customers better than ever before.
