Guide To Building a Customer Success Team

Customer Success teams are what everyone is talking about nowadays. And it is because Customer Success is directly related to customer loyalty and experience. Even though customer success is crucial, many companies still do not understand its importance. Therefore, this Apptivo Customer Relationship Management blog tells you all that you should know about a Customer Success Team. It guides you in building one that is focused entirely on delivering the best experience to your customers.

What is Customer Success?

Customer Success is an engagement strategy in which companies interact with their customers to figure out their needs, understand them, and then work on proactive planning to address those needs. It is vital for any business as it helps them in reducing the probability of customer churn. Further, it supports them in improving several key metrics such as customer loyalty, renewal rates, and retention. Customer success is different from any other business model and customer support strategy, focusing entirely on customer needs and fulfilling them. The main aim of any customer success team is to provide the utmost value to their customers while ensuring their success.

As the traditional customer experiences change with new support models, it is becoming more reactive for businesses to solve their customer issues. But for any customer success team, this is not the main focus. Their focus lies in understanding customer needs and expectations and then working on a dedicated experience for their customers that helps them in achieving their goals smoothly. So, instead of waiting for customer inquiries and providing them with the best support, customer success teams work to reduce the rise of such issues and the need to address them. Therefore, customer success teams do not aim at removing support teams but focus on working with their company to ensure the best customer experience.

Guide on how to start and work with customer success teams?

Many businesses would consider it to start and work on their customer success teams right from the start of their company. However, they need to understand that customer success is not like customer support. So, before starting to work on a customer success team, you need to collect more data and get more information about your customers. It would enable you to know what your customers want and their expectations from your brand. The reason behind holding off on your customer success teams is, it would take time for your business to have high-value clients who would take advantage of your customer success teams.

As you gather your success team now, they will understand your customer needs and plot the blueprint for the best strategy for your customers. And as your customer success team forms and starts working, they need to focus on the following responsibilities:

Managing customer success

It is the main work that a customer success manager has to handle. He needs to focus on building strong customer relationships, boost customer retention, and prevent customer churn. The CSM is mainly a strategic partner for your team and handles all these operations efficiently.

Customer onboarding

As there is no dedicated team to help the customers with onboarding, the customer success team would help new customers through the onboarding process.

Providing provisional customer support

While managing different clients, your customer success teams would occasionally need to support them too. It is because success teams work in correlation with support teams. They need to serve some occasional clients since most support requests are handled by support teams.

Training customers and providing proactive education

Your customer success team should focus on proactive customer education and training and provide them with an appropriate medium such as webinars, email campaigns, and education certifications. Additionally, you can conduct Customer Training to facilitate a better understanding of your services or products among your customers.

Providing professional services

It is to additional consulting where your success teams could support the tangential needs of your customers related to your products. In this way, your team would provide the customers with the essential skills needed to succeed with your product.

Working on contract renewals

Your teams should keep track of customer contracts. As the time comes for a customer to renew their contract, your team should guide them through the renewal process and ensure their renewal.

Upselling products

It is the prime responsibility of a customer success team to evaluate customer needs. In doing so, they have to work on telling the customers that how their products fit their needs and use those opportunities to upsell.

Working on pre-sales

It is a primary area where your customer success teams should get involved. They should collaborate with sales teams, and as the customers proceed to make a purchase they need to address their needs. Hence, making it more comfortable for their customers to succeed with your products.

Sharing customer insights with the organization

Customer insights are one thing that is crucial for every organization. And your customer success teams are the ones that know about them the most. So they should focus on sharing those insights with the rest of the company so that they develop a deeper understanding of their customers and help them achieve success with the different business aspects.

So, these were the main highlights of a customer success team. From this, you can understand the role of a customer success team in defining customer journeys and help them succeed with your product.

Conclusion

If you think that it isn’t the right time for your business to work on a customer success team, then hold it off for some time. Your business moves further on providing your customers with the best proactive support and understanding their needs better than anyone. In this way, you can create the best experience for them that lets them succeed with your product.