Happiness is a measurable outcome. It is revealed in actions, repeated behaviors, and attitudes. In the case of your customers, it’s most evident in their loyalty. Happy customers stay, unhappy customers leave.
Since enduring customer loyalty generates repeat renewals that are the lifeblood of subscription services, it’s critical to keep customers happy. Customers are comfortable changing providers these days, and they’ll do so until they find one that suits them.
Put simply, if you continuously deliver value, your customers will stay happy.
Customer Experience as Value
Every customer that invests in your product is really investing in their own future. They believe your product will help them achieve their goals and ultimately deliver growth. We create value and loyalty by proving that assumption to be true.
To do that, we can use these 5 customer experience tips:
- Turn Customer Hopes into Personal Goals
- Anticipate in Order to Add Extra Value
- Prioritize Escalations and Cherish Feedback
- Learn From Previous Experience
- Stay Close to Your Customers
These tips will help you distill the entire customer journey into easy to manage, easy to accomplish daily goals and actions.
1. Turn Customer Hopes into Personal Goals
What your customer wants must remain front-of-mind in every engagement and decision you make throughout their partnership with your company. Their overall goals and reasons for selecting your solution should be captured during the sales process and then built upon and shared among every team within your enterprise as they progress through the customer journey.
Customer goals should become your goals, and they should guide your everyday actions. Your product knowledge determines which features and what amount of engagement is necessary to drive value for your customer, and your customer success efforts should then go toward making sure these targets are hit.
2. Anticipate in Order to Add Extra Value
When you know where your customer is going, it should be possible to give them a few shortcuts. This kind of proactive, unexpected value, such as completing onboarding early or incorporating advanced product features ahead of schedule, builds loyalty-boosting confidence.
Always be prepared to speak to your customer of the next phase of their growth and development, and have a range of resources on hand to push them along, including
- Webinars
- Videos
- Training materials
The only thing better than proving your value is doing it sooner than expected.
3. Prioritize Escalations and Cherish Feedback
The customer-centered economy created by the rise in SaaS and subscription services places the customer firmly in control of their partnership, so when they speak we must listen. Direct Voice of Customer information usually arrives in two forms; in response to feedback requests and through escalations.
In both cases, the most important thing to do is to acknowledge the customer’s effort to contact you and to respond as soon as possible with a personalized message. Customers love to be heard and few things make them happier than the feeling that you are acting on their information.
Even escalations are a chance to demonstrate your customer commitment and build loyalty, but only if you act quickly and are open about the process and duration of finding a solution.
4. Learn from Previous Experience
No Voice of Customer information occurs in a vacuum. Things you learn from one escalation or survey response can be relevant to the experience of other customers, especially those of similar size, value, or industry.
The more mature your technology and CS processes become, the more agile your team will be and the better they will be able to receive and implement feedback. If a customer finds a particular onboarding module difficult to follow, it may need to be rewritten, moved within the order of presentation, or dismissed altogether. On the positive side, a user interface change that helps one customer might also benefit others.
5. Stay Close to Your Customers
All these customer experience tips depend on your ability to stay close to your customers throughout their journey. After all, customers who view your organization as a partner, not just a vendor, are more likely to work with you long-term. That requires the use of customer success software that is able to capture and organize information from a range of sources and turn it into real-time metrics that reveal the customer experience.
Your software is a living warehouse of information on your customer’s behavior, and the most accurate way to detect happiness through the study of actions. The information can be combined with sound business algorithms to create a highly visible customer health score. This score is an effective account of the customer’s current mood. It can be used to create an early warning system to prompt action to capitalize on renewals and upsells, or to prevent churn.
It’s a way of visualizing customer happiness across segments so you can prioritize actions. You’re using real customer information to create practical and effective customer engagements.
From Customer Experience Tips to Customer Growth
These customer experience tips are meant to help turn customer expectations into customer happiness. In this case, the kind of happiness that results in years of mutually beneficial growth.
Totango has created a customer success platform that gives you unrivaled information about your customers. When you explore Spark you’ll find a flexible, powerful tool for following your customer’s behavior and turning that detail into actionable tasks. Create a free trial account to get started today or download our COVID-19 toolkit.
