If you want your business to succeed, make sure your customers succeed. As the economy becomes more customer-centered, the need to foster customer success is more important than ever before.
Achieving customer success means that your customers gain their desired value from your product and can use it to meet their goals long-term. Aligning your business goals with those of yours customers spells prosperity for your business for years to come.
However, this process takes dedicated nurturance of the customer relationship. And you will end up facing customer success challenges along the road of customer-centricity. While problems are inevitable and new ones will always arise, customer-centricity gives you the tools you need to effectively handle any issues.
Customer Success Challenges and How to Face Them
We all want to make our customers happy, but customer success challenges can arise for a variety of reasons. You may not have the right processes in place. You may lack the ability to gather data and draw insights that improve the customer experience. There may be a problem with the product itself. No matter the cause, your customer success team will always be on the front lines of problem-solving and will need best practices to rectify complaints.
Here are some of the most common customer success challenges your team may face and ways to beat them:
#1: Poor Customer Visibility
From the moment the sale is complete, you need to monitor your customer’s progress with your product or service. You need to know if each customer is properly passing each adoption milestone. It’s important to monitor the details of their product usage, such as usage frequency and which features they do and do not use.
You should monitor customer health scores and keep an eye on other KPIs. By taking the time to carefully monitor each customer, you can ensure that they use the product properly and make the most of each feature. Your team can watch over all your customer relationships, ensuring that no at-risk customer slips under the radar.
#2: Gaps in Customer Nurturance
It’s imperative to nurture the relationship your brand has with each of your customers. If nurturance is inconsistent in its thoroughness or scope, customers can slip through the cracks, raising churn rates. You need to invest time in every customer and provide quality engagements.
Accounts should be tracked and routed to customer success team members or managers for proper engagement. Team members can track changes in customer value over time and elevates if there are any concerning signs. This enables your team to give the correct amount of nurturance to every customer.
#3: Customers Aren’t Seeing Value
When customers stop seeing the value of your product, they will most likely churn. While winback campaigns can be effective, the best solution to this problem is prevention.
Your business needs to deliver value constantly. Build value from the moment a customer makes a sale by identifying the value a customer is looking for and helping them achieve it. As adoption goes on, deliver expanding value in the form of new functionalities or features. And listen to feedback, as a customer’s goals can always evolve.
Overcome Customer Success Challenges Using Customer Success Software
If you have many customers or product lines, it may be hard to take control of your customer success initiatives. Customer success software can make it easier and more efficient to monitor the customer experience and steer customers toward achieving their goals.
Quality customer success software can be customized to track the business or customer goals of your choice. Plus, it optimizes processes at every stage of the customer journey. During onboarding, customer success software can be used to monitor adoption and initiate engagements that help customers see value quickly. It offers the capabilities your team needs to make escalations better and it collects feedback you can use to prevent future escalations.
Customer success software can monitor the on-going adoption phase for KPIs, such as frequency of use or customer health scores, to give you the info needed to maintain good customer relationships. And when it’s time to renew, customer success software can help you identify at-risk customers and forecast renewal rates.
Advance Your Customer Success Goals and Watch Your Business Grow
Improving your company’s levels of customer success provides an opportunity to see strong, on-going growth. Happy customers are loyal, and not only are they apt to accept upsell or cross-sell offers, but they may even give your business good word-of-mouth, which is invaluable for your brand’s reputation.
Once you center your company’s goals around those of your customers, you’ll be ready to exceed your customers’ expectations in terms of delivered value. And nothing’s more cost-efficient and beneficial than retaining customers.
If you’re looking for customer success software that can help you align your business priorities with those of your customers, try Totango. Our comprehensive solution uses best practices to help you achieve greater degrees of customer success. Request a demo or explore Spark to learn more.
