More and more businesses are now looking to prioritize customer success. After all, a company will not succeed when clients do not feel successful with a product or service. As a result of this, many organizations created dedicated teams that zero in on customer success. But with all of the confusion on how to build a successful customer success team, it begs the question: how do you build one? First, let’s dive deep into what defines customer success.
What Is Customer Success?
Customer success refers to the efforts a business takes to ensure that its customers are successful with a product. Successful customers tend to be loyal customers and to keep this loyalty, a company must create a dedicated team focused on customer success. Take note that customer success is a lot more than just keeping your customers satisfied, it’s about making your relationships with your customers a priority. This includes answering your customer’s concerns and providing solutions that improve their experience with your offerings.
How Do You Build A Successful Customer Success Team?
Now the definition of customer success is clear, let’s talk about how you can build a killer customer success team. Especially for start-ups, building a team solely focused on customer success could be quite difficult. But, you’ll reap the fruits of your efforts thanks to the benefits that an excellent customer success team provides. Here’s how you can start:
Know Your Customers
The most obvious step in creating a customer success team is to know your customer. What that means is talking to them is essential, and so is asking for feedback. Whether it’s positive or negative feedback they provide, their feedback matters for you to improve existing products or services. But, that doesn’t end there. Talk to them and ask why they feel that way and use this information for the development of your products.
Look For The Right Skills
Ensuring that your team has the right skills should be a top priority. When looking for prospects, observe their communication skills. This is one of the most crucial skills needed when working in a customer success team. Especially because a lot of the talking isn’t done face-to-face, the nuances in tone become more critical when it comes to delivering the right message to your customers. Also, let’s not forget that customer success team members write a lot in their days at the office. Whether it’s through social media or email, it’s a given that knowing basic grammar is a must.
Take note that communication is a two-way street. For customer success team managers, this means understanding what the customer has to say. This information is then cascaded to different departments that would benefit from it.
Ensure That Your Processes Are Scalable
Once you start getting the hang of maintaining a customer success team, you have to be sure that your processes are scalable. Although this may be challenging for some, it starts with centralizing, and sometimes even automating, your business processes. Because you’re dealing with an increase in the number of customers, this part is critical to keep your business running smoothly. What helps with this is providing the necessary documentation to the team, so they can deliver results quickly. Another point worth repeating is that you must know your customer. That means being able to understand the different segments and your approach for each one. For instance, segmentation by behavior could work for a certain type of segment but not for the other. When your company grows, you also need to grow your payment infrastructure. That means you should be able to handle a high volume of customers and at the same time, protect their payment information.
Build An Onboarding Process
Especially with new products, buyers are often confused about their proper usage. This is where the customer success team comes into the picture. These teams must lead customers instead of expecting them to figure things out themselves. Teaching your buyers the right way to use a product can help them achieve their goals more quickly and in turn, increase their satisfaction with your brand.
Measure Your Team’s Progress
Building customer success takes time and usually doesn’t end with forming a team of capable members. One way to measure your team’s progress is through quantitative approaches such as using KPIs. This method determines the performance of each member and the effectiveness of your customer success strategies. Write a report including team updates, customer churn rate, net promoter score, and other metrics that help with evaluation. Try to incorporate some qualitative metrics too, such as customer feedback, to help you see the bigger picture.
The Takeaway
When customers see value in a company’s offering, they stay loyal to the brand. Building a customer success team ensures that a product or service meets a customer’s goals. While it may seem challenging, especially for start-ups, to build a customer success team from scratch, it will all be worth it once you start receiving more buyers. As they say, always understand your customer. And when you do, you’ll see your business grow like never before.
