Most business’ decision makers encounter many things daily. Some promise the world and others are just too ambiguous to understand. To some, the pace of technology is just too much for them. It becomes difficult to understand everything. Sometimes, if you are too eager to adopt new things, you end up duplicating services.
One service that most people are duplicating is customer success. To some, they don’t know that they are already doing it. Some are doing it correctly, but once they hear it is the trend, they want in too. First, customer success is not an ideal technology that one ought to get confused about. It involves several tasks. In this article, we will look at how you have been implementing three customer success elements without knowing it. We will look at whether you are doing it right.
- Is your brand awareness strong?
The starting point of getting a customer is to make your product available to them. Sometimes, you don’t need to make the product available; you just need to make the customer know that such a product exists. This means, those that need such a product will contact you, those who may have a need or know someone who has such a need will have an option in you, and those who already have substitutes can know that you also have a working product.
Brand awareness is, therefore, a balancing act—it defines the place that your product occupies. It answers the questions; is the product better than alternatives? Is it value for money? What do people associate your product with? Without the right answers to those questions, you may lose significant business to competitors or fail to land business that you would otherwise get.
- How is your communication?
Today’s communication is not just two way—it goes beyond the usual exchange to making meaning from continued communication between parties. Here it is where data and analytics come into play. You want to understand your customer so that you can serve her exactly what she wants.
Availing contacts, responding and engaging potential customers, acquiring customer trusts and signing them up for regular communication, are some of the concerns that you must stay on top of them. If you are not promptly responding to feedback; if you are seeing customer queries as a bother; if you ignore a continued partnership with a client, and much more, you are doing your customer success an injustice.
- Do you promise and offer value?
Assume you have been having a problem with something. On this day, you decide to Google search your problem and voila, someone offers a solution. You are excited and go ahead to order the service or product. You expect to get the exact thing that you were promised. If you don’t, the sheer disappointment can make you do nasty things. Mostly, you will leave a very negative review. The company will take years to overcome that review, sometimes never.
Ensure that the sales team, technical team, and all teams work towards one value. If you have shortfalls in functional capacity, let the sales team know. There is no need of promising what you cannot meticulously deliver. It will backfire on you, and you may never recover. Companies are spending a fortune on reputation management, something that is avoidable.
Conclusion
You can use a customer success platform or customer success software from reputable institutions to manage your customer experience from awareness, acquisition, expansion, loyalty and value generation.