My previous blog mentioned customer success teams in cultivating an effective support community. Customer success teams were also identified in developing customer loyalty and empowering customers, and building strong relationships without much detail. This blog focuses the critical role customer support teams perform in your business.
While technical support teams respond to product troubles, customer success teams ensure customers receive optimum value from your solutions. Just as importantly, customer success teams make sure your customers realize it too. In this model, success and support teams must align. Although an easy principle to grasp, communication must not only be your mantra, it must be built into your processes. Customer success teams represent the people involved in the processes.
You may recall this series on creating an amazing customer experience started with communication as a primary hiring criterion. In identifying written and verbal customer skills, staff communication was not mentioned. Communication in this blog addresses the period technically known as "throwing something over the fence." During this stage, your communication and fulfillment processes represent a critical period in retaining highly satisfied customers. For this to happen, your customer success team must communicate on both sides and across.
Customer Success Starts at Deployment
As you know, a support organization consists of moving parts, priorities and escalation paths seeking fulfillment. Amid all this complexity, don’t forget support services exist to deliver value. When customers experience success, more than likely operations run flawlessly. Customer loyalty takes hold. To make the customer experience seamless, customer success teams form the glue behind the scenes. They must be empowered with the flexibility to immediately adapt and respond for your customers to notice.
Keep success managers connected so they are on alert, when customers they work with open tickets. At each touch point along the journey, customer success teams must provide the right assistance. In knowing what’s needed, customer success teams proactively communicate milestones and deliver value to customers. At the forefront, customer success teams stay attuned to user adoption and activity trends. This engagement level should not stop once a solution reaches production.
Customer Success Teams Help You Use Feedback Wisely
Customer success teams cannot know how well they’re doing unless you survey customers. You can get a surprising amount of information from the "Satisfied/Not Satisfied" end-of-ticket question—and from the comments added when you give customers an opportunity.
A support interaction is one of the few times a customer actively reaches out to you. For this reason, squeeze the most out of the opportunity and what they’re telling you. Make a customer feel at home when it comes to providing feedback. They need to believe they’ll get a response every time they need help.
Surveys help you figure out how you’re doing in the moment. Take a look at responses and comments going back a month. If you’re just starting to survey, use whatever you have. What matters is to determine a benchmark for starters. After that, take a look at the recent surveys, analyze the feedback, communicate with your customer success teams, and adjust.
Consider negative feedback as even more valuable than positive feedback. When a customer says they’re dissatisfied, take time to find out why. Follow up and find out more. Such conversations help you understand an experience from a customer’s perspective. Communicate what you learn to your customer success teams. Without empathy, providing good service becomes more of a challenge and developing customer loyalty less likely.
In a service-first world to deliver an amazing customer experience, the ultimate question becomes. Would your customers recommend you to others? It’s that simple. Customer success teams make YES possible. They create an organization that is aligned in structure, process and mind-set. Customer success teams strengthen and nurture
customer loyalty through communication, rapid fulfillment and relationships building.
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