Why Customer Success Is So Important and How to Promote It

Customer success is the key to building strong customer relationships. When your brand helps your customers succeed at their goals, they want to continue your relationship. Customer success nurtures the positive experiences of your brand, promoting repeat business and retention. In this blog, you’ll learn:

• Why customer success is so important
• How customer success drives customer experience
• How improving customer experience promotes retention

While covering these topics, we’ll also discuss how the latest technology can help you optimize customer experience and retention. Read on to learn why helping your customers succeed is essential to your own success and how you can promote better experiences for higher retention.

Understanding Why Customer Success Is So Important

To appreciate why customer success is so important, it will be helpful to begin with a definition. Customer success occurs when your customers achieve the goals that led them to seek out your product or service. When your brand fails to deliver what your customers sought when they came to you, their experience of your brand falls short of success.

You can define customer success in greater detail by relating it to each stage of your customer’s journey. For example:

• During the lead acquisition stage, success can mean that your website provides your visitors with the information they were looking for when they searched on the term that led them to your site
• During the purchase stage, success can mean that your sales copy persuades customers of the value of your product or service and that they enjoy a smooth experience of your payment process
• During the onboarding stage, success can mean that new customers find it easy to start using your product or service
• During the adoption stage, success can mean that your customers’ use of your product or service adds value to their personal life or business
• During the escalation stage, success can mean that your customers found quick solutions to support issues
• During the retention stage, success can mean that customers want to buy from you again and recommend you to their family and friends

The retention stage of the customer journey underscores the importance of customer success. When customers enjoy success throughout their journey with your brand, when they reach the retention stage, they will be inclined to buy from you again and refer your brand to others. On the other hand, failure at any stage can become an impediment to their journey with you, stopping them from becoming repeat buyers and referral sources.

This directly impacts your revenue by affecting your customer lifetime value (CLTV). Your CLTV projects how much your average customer can be expected to spend with you over the course of your relationship with them. Repeat business will increase your CLTV, while customer churn will decrease it. The bottom line is that customer success directly affects your profitability.

How Customer Success Influences Customer Experience

Customer success directly relates to your customers’ experience of your brand and their satisfaction with your product. Success during the customer journey leaves customers with a satisfying experience of your brand. Failure promotes dissatisfaction.

Automate Customer Journeys to Optimize Experience

You can improve customer success by using technology to promote better experiences of your brand throughout your customer journey. One way to do this is by automating the stages of your customer journey. By defining best practices for each stage, you can create and automate standard procedures to promote positive experiences. For instance, you can standardize your onboarding procedure by creating support materials to guide your customer during the post-purchase process, and set up automated triggers to notify new buyers about how to access the materials.

To ensure optimal implementation of your automated procedures, you can use key performance indicators (KPI’s) to create scorecards that track customer progress through their journey. For example, you can break the onboarding process down into steps and assign each step a numerical weight, yielding a score that reflects how far a customer has progressed towards completion of onboarding. A low score can indicate a customer is at risk of failing to complete onboarding. When this occurs, you can set up your software to automatically take corrective action, such as sending a reminder of the next step the customer should take.

The Totango Spark platform includes modular toolkits called SuccessBLOCs which are templates designed to help you orchestrate this type of strategy. You can select SuccessBLOCs corresponding to the various stages of your customers’ journey. For example, there is a Customer Adoption SuccessBLOC designed to help you promote desired customer actions so that your customers get more value out of your product. There are other modules designed to perform functions such as promoting digital onboarding, detecting and reducing churn risk.

Personalization Promotes Enhanced Experience

You can also improve the customer experience by using technology to promote a more personalized experience. Analytics technology allows you to integrate data about your customers from different channels into a single database which can be analyzed to segment customers based on their needs. Using automation, your customer success team has the ability to personalize their customer touchpoints at scale, delivering more relevant services to individual customers. 

For instance, the Key Account Management SuccesBLOC helps you deliver more personalized attention to your most important accounts. You can use KPIs to track the health of your key accounts, segment accounts meeting specific criteria and trigger automated actions to maintain account health. 

How Improving Customer Experience Increases Retention

By implementing strategies to promote a better customer experience, you can promote higher customer retention rates, translating into higher revenue. Companies that excel at delivering superior customer experience enjoy revenue growth 4% to 8% above their market, according to Bain & Company. Companies that invest in improving customer experience enjoy an 84% increase in revenue, according to Dimension Data.

You can also increase retention by using the automation strategies discussed above to prevent customer churn. Create KPIs to measure churn risk so that you can use a scoring system to segment customers who are at high churn risk and set up automated actions to intervene. For instance, you might define a customer with a high number of support tickets as a churn risk and assign a representative to work with them personally to resolve their concerns. Totango’s Detect Risk SuccessBLOC is designed to help you monitor customer behaviors that signal churn.

Promote Customer Success for More Profitable Customer Relationships

Customer success positions you for business success. When your customers achieve their desired outcomes as a result of using your brand, they are more likely to purchase from you again, as well as buy additional products you may offer while recommending you to others within and outside their organizations. Word of mouth is increasingly important and can lead to significant growth in your CLTV. Your customers’ success depends directly on the quality of their experience at each stage of their journey with your brand. Satisfying experiences promote retention, while dissatisfaction increases churn.

Totango helps you promote customer success by providing technology to optimize your customers’ experience at each stage of their journey with your brand. View a live demo to find out how our platform can help you promote your customers’ success, or register for a free trial to experience how we can help your customers succeed.