As America gets back to work and begins recovering from the economic downturn and delays that accompanied the 2020 pandemic, companies are discovering they must focus on their customers more than ever to remain competitive.
With everyone scrambling to retain customers while simultaneously strategizing ways to attract new business, it pays to know what your customers want. The #1 way to be sure of customers’ needs is to employ a customer-centric focus across your company. No longer solely the role of the CS team; customer-centricity belongs to everyone and requires collaboration across sales, executives, product groups, and marketing groups.
Shared insight delivers the needed customer context. Yet, even with customer retention and business survival at stake, sharing customer updates across an organization can be difficult. True collaboration requires three essentials:
- Access to a digitized and centralized data hub
- Freedom to share insight and resources across departmental teams
- Technology that makes collaboration and engagement seamless.
Access one digital repository, instantly.
Sorry old world, but customer data and context can no longer live in separate systems and inside people’s heads. Customer-centricity demands a shareable and updatable digital repository of information about every customer. Especially in an environment of rapid change, the need for instant access to and distribution of accurate customer data is imperative.
Let’s picture how that could look. You run into a customer in an online gathering or at an in-person event. Instantly, from any device you’re using and with any communication tool, whether you are on Slack or in Salesforce, you pull up their profile, review a timeline of their touchpoints, product usage, and support requests. Instantly, you know their health score and unique needs.
After you meet with the customer, you note the conversation. You add action items by logging tasks and assigning them to the right member on your CS, Sales, or Product teams. Everyone with access to customer data within the organization can see the notes you shared, because you’re all working from one hive of data. Shared information includes which success plans are in play, so teams can see who’s interacting with customers and the resulting outcomes.
Inter-departmental mingling encouraged.
With customer impact at the center of your company’s growth strategy, employees inspire to work in unison toward the shared goal of Customer Success. And guess what? Customers notice when a company’s products, services, and employees focus on them. They respond with continued renewals and upsells. In any way possible, encourage and enable the freedom to share insight and resources amongst your Support, Sales, Executive, Marketing, and Customer Success teams.
Zoe enables customer-centricity.
Companies can organize around the customer, empowering everyone to take part in Customer Success.
Watch this video to learn more about Zoe >
Provide frictionless virtual team collaboration.
Cross-functional teams need to come together easily to lend their expertise and time on projects designed to impact customers. Totango’s Zoe is a collaboration-instigator and accelerator that works seamlessly across apps like Slack, Salesforce, Zendesk, and email—connecting teams of all types to the customer information held within Totango Spark.
While Zoom, Google Hangouts, or Microsoft Teams are all great for virtual meetings, true collaboration requires more than A/V. Team members need to be equipped with tech that lets them access data, participate, and impact. They need to share insights and make informed decisions together—even when meetings are over. Through a conversational interface, Zoe affords everyone access to the rich information available in Totango. Here are a couple of scenarios Zoe’s integrated technology enables:
- One of your product managers needs to run a beta test. He wants to target accounts with the highest adoption rates of new features. He emails Zoe and gets a list of the top 30 power users sent right to his in-box, with single-click access to their customer profiles where he can learn more.
- Your CEO wants to know who the company’s top ‘at-risk’ accounts are, so she Slacks Zoe. In reply, Zoe sends a list of customers to the CEO who uses the information to speak to Customer Success Managers to identify how she can help.
Totango believes Customer Success is everyone’s business. To remain competitive, collaborate well, and continually innovate, it is necessary to place the customer at the center of company culture. Technology that seamlessly enables virtual teams to self-organize empowers a proactive impact on customers.
When you can seamlessly contribute to the customer cause through your daily actions, with no special logins required, collaboration is frictionless. Sharing customer insight becomes second nature, and speedy paths to insight is par for the course. So go ahead, collaborate, innovate, stay relevant, and competitive. And when you need to know if anyone talked to the customer today, just ask Zoe.
In these challenging times, you can’t afford to buy before you try. Get started on Totango for free. If you are specifically looking for more information on Zoe, request a demo today.
