The digitization of business has shifted the way customer value is achieved and how investments generate returns. In this customer-centered economy, you need to provide customers with a responsive, personalized service that is focused on their needs. Customers are empowered to expect cyclical subscription arrangements they can opt-in or out of depending on their experience of value.
Enterprises invest time and money delivering value to customers, and ROI returns often come in the form of recurring revenue from renewals and upsells. ROI is now an outcome of the customer experience, and the best way to boost customer success ROI is to streamline those efforts using targeted best practices.
How Customer Success Maximizes ROI
In a customer-centered economy, the bulk of customer value is captured throughout the lifetime of a customer relationship rather than at a single sales event. This means retaining and nurturing existing customers has become just as important as acquiring new ones.
While sales is still vital, retention and growth have become the primary goal of the customer success team. The customer journey begins when you obtain a customer, but the focus shifts to product adoption and providing value. One method your organization may follow is LAER:
- Land: Activities leading to a prospect of becoming a customer.
- Adopt: Helping the customer effectively use your offer to achieve their business outcomes.
- Expand: Encouraging customers to buy more of your products and services.
- Renew: Convincing your customers to renew their relationship with your company.
Based on that outline, you can see the importance of customer success to the health of your enterprise. Distinguished by a desire to understand, monitor, and anticipate the needs of customers, customer success helps improve retention rates and reduce churn by proactively engaging customers to aid their experience of value.
It is commonly achieved through practical actions such as:
- Efficient onboarding that speeds up time to value
- Personalized customer engagements
- Quick, intelligent responses to escalations
- Incorporating Voice-of-Customer information
- Establish an early warning system to track product usage
- Use of customer data to create results-oriented goals
Customer success leads to higher customer retention which, in turn, generates recurring revenue and the potential for expansion or cross-sell opportunities. As such, your main focus should be on helping customers work towards their goals, and then identifying if they need additional resources or products.
How to Improve Your Customer Success ROI
Tracking customer success revenue is a process of weighing potential customer lifetime value against the cost of serving customer segments that promote renewal. You can shift the balance in your favor by introducing more efficient customer success strategies. By understanding how your customers use the product, and achieve their business goals, you can deliver engagements that drive value.
Here’s how:
Bring All Your Data Together
Use a Customer Data Platform to compile all customer data and touchpoints from internal teams, such as:
- Financial
- Product
- Support
- Customer Experience
- Customer Success
Track the Customer Experience
Every customer interaction reveals something about their product experience and their business goals.
- Establish unique metrics or milestones for each phase of the Customer Journey
- Segment your customers and report on how they are doing at each stage of the customer journey (e.g. Totango Scorecards)
- Leverage the Customer’s Health Score
- Create an early warning system to identify at-risk customers
Share Your Best Practices & Assets
Provide your teams with access to standardized best practices and assets so they are equipped for any situation. These may include:
- Things to know before your kick-off call
- Onboarding steps and expectations
- Who should they reach out to for escalations
- Q&A for Customer Adoption
- Steps to manage the renewal process
- How to deliver a standard contract
Turn Customer Data into Action
Customer information is only as valuable as the proactive actions it produces. Using the right software you could:
- Establish an early warning system that helps to automate your processes
- Notify and set up standardized next steps for your CSMs
- Leverage campaigns that will reach out the right segments at the right time
Drive Customer-Centricity
Customer-centricity should be an organization-wide focus, and your CS team should be able to provide updates to the appropriate teams.
- Share KPIs and goal reports with Executive team
- Track Voice of Customer data and work with the Product team
- Identify customer advocates and sync those with Marketing
- Renew customers on time and work with Finance to update contracts
Iterate
Give your teams the ability to be flexible and agile.
- Analyze data and identify bottlenecks
- Implement improvements to processes or the product
- Test new messaging with your campaigns
Customer Success ROI Focuses on the Customer Experience
And the most effective way to achieve this is through the use of customer success software. With a central, shared repository of every customer interaction and product history at their disposal, your customer success team can track the customer experience, scale their engagements through automation, and make decisions based on proven metrics. It aids in providing value at every step of the journey, and when customers are meeting their goals, they are much more likely to renew.
The customer-centered economy runs on the ability to maintain mutually beneficial relationships over time. That ability, in turn, hinges on your efforts to understand customers and efficiently engage them at the right time and in the right way.
Totango’s customer success platform helps you turn customer information into actions. If you explore Spark, you’ll find an adaptable, robust system that helps you improve the customer experience and deliver results in a matter of weeks, not months. Request a demo and start improving your ROI today.
