Customer Success Management: Process Ensuring Customers Achieve Goals

If you are in any decision-making position of a business, then you might have heard of customer success. The term might sound like a buzzword, but it’s an integral aspect of running a business that relies on customers. 

Over the last few years, businesses have been more focused on the buyer, consequently developing various strategies to help companies give the best to consumers. The success of your customers allows you to grow your target market because when users are happy, they keep coming back and attracting other consumers. 

However, customer success doesn’t occur naturally or accidentally. It takes significant work for an enterprise to provide their customers with what they need, which is what customer success management is all about. Businesses have to know the best strategies to direct consumers towards their objectives.

What is Customer Success / customer success management?

Customer success management and customer success is a process that makes sure customers understand your product or service so they can get the best possible benefits and achieve their goals.

Customer success management is a company’s efforts to help consumers attain their desired goals through its products or services. This business methodology focuses on the relationship between the vendor and client to ensure that both get what is best for each party. 

Customer success processes help businesses give consistent results which benefit customers/clients. It is not a one-off process but is about a continuously evolving process. As customer requirements evolve, you must constantly iterate and improve processes to make sure they still align.

A business cannot thrive without the success of its customers. Customer success managers and teams work together with customers to ensure they have the support they need to achieve their goals.

Satisfied consumers are loyal, and more than that, they attract other users. For that reason, companies should invest whatever is necessary to ensure that customers receive value from the services or goods they use. Businesses have to gather as much information about their consumers as possible then use it to create rewarding experiences.

What’s the difference between customer success and customer service?

There are a number of ways to describe the way businesses and customers interact, customer success, customer service or customer support are often used interchangeably, they’re not the same thing.

In an effort to define customer success, it is crucial to differentiate it from customer service or support. Although some people use the two interchangeably, they are not the same thing. 

Customer success / support is a proactive – customer success team that initiates contact and interactions with customers.  establishes processes and programs aimed at shaping experiences from the get-go. Another difference is that in customer success, the enterprise initiates contact with consumers rather than the other way around.

Customer service is reactive – the customer initiates interaction with service or support. People contact the support team when they encounter a problem with a product or service. The company then has to find solutions to deal with that specific issue. 

Customer service / support is continual fire fighting problems, whereas customer success is about forming a relationship with the aim of creating a long term experience that your customers will love about your product or service.

Customer Success

• Proactive
• Long Term
• Revenue Generating
• Customer Goal Achievement
• Customer Value From Product / Service
• Collaboration Sales, Support, and Service

Customer Service

• Reactive
• Short Term
• Cost
• Issue Resolution
• Customer Satisfaction
• Single Function

Essential Factors for Customer Success Management

By understanding the customer better, a company can develop customer success management strategies to help consumers derive value from products and services. Managing customer success involves eight main factors:

Segmentation – Categorising consumers according to their appropriate experiences allows you to give them what they need.
Orchestration – Your customers should know what’s in store and orchestration lets you manage their expectations.
Intervention – Sometimes it is necessary to intervene to help customers move from one success stage to the next.
Measurement – You have to analyse how the company and clients are doing to see if the plan in place meets the intended goals.
Expansion (renewal) – If a customer is successful, then you can start looking at upselling, cross-selling and other renewal options as part of the CSM.
Communication – Communicating with customers is fundamental to their success, whether it’s through marketing messages or when telling them the next logical move to make.
Instrumentation – This stage involves the collection of customer data to see how they interact with an enterprise. It provides insights into how a customer’s success journey is going.
Operationalisation – You can then use the information collected in instrumentation to proceed as required. Note that operationalisation has to factor in the appropriate experience of individual customers.

What is a customer success plan?

A customer success plan identifies what success looks like and how you can help them achieve that success.

A customer success plan is a roadmap of processes that customer success teams need to guide them to help customers achieve their goals and customers will receive value from your product or services.

A customer success plan is a critical part of customer success management.

Steps in Creating a Customer Success Plan

Every business requires a blueprint / process of the path to follow to help customers succeed. A customer success management plan and team need a plan that ensures allocated resources are used accordingly. So, how do you develop an effective customer success plan?

The following steps in our customer success plan checklist should help:

Creating a Customer Success Plan Checklist

Objectives and Expectations

Identify the customer’s objectives and goals. Customer onboarding process can help reveal expectation that they expect for your working relationship.

Create Processes

Chart customer success processes to suit critical moments. Map processes to achieve the Aha! Moment.The “how” to part of your success plan. Identifying clear steps in the process of meeting those goals including potential scenarios that could occur.

Metrics

Identify customer success metrics and measure the progress of each process. Set pre-defined metrics for each stage of the process. This will help you understand the efficacy of your processes and how you can improve and increase the efficiency of each process.

Team

Put together a capable customer success team. Each stage of the process should be allocated to a person who is responsible for the execution and monitoring that the requirements are being met. Predefined stages in each process allow for tracking of progress of each task.

Training

Align customer and product teams. Make sure everyone is aware of the stages of the process and who and how you will deliver the best results. Know who is the best person for each stage of the process.

Customer Success Tools

Pick the correct tools that can help track stages in the process and each individual task. Enable a clear way to guide customer success team in every step in the process while monitoring and knowing exactly where yu are at all times.

Feedback

Gather customer feedback as customer’s input essential. Remember to include their views in changes made rather than assuming.

Why Should you Create a Customer Success Plan? 

It’s not enough for a business to know how to develop a customer success plan; it must learn the value of an effective strategy. For one, a solid success plan drives revenue. 

The relationship between a customer and a business is essential to creating revenue opportunities. Successful and happy consumers strengthen your brand, making it easier for you to sell to other users. Additionally, satisfied buyers return, therefore, providing recurring revenue.

Customer retention: Huge priority for all businesses. However, many enterprises suffer from high business churn rates because they concentrate too much on marketing and customer acquisition. Due to the copious amount of information available to consumers today, they can leave brands as quickly as they decide to use them.
A customer success plan can help the right people predict and prevent churn. The onboarding process can be key in preventing churn. You can use the information collected from customers to improve services and products.

Increase Revenue: Through upselling,cross-selling and other additional recurring revenue. Upselling is when you try to get consumers to purchase pricier or products with more features than what they have already bought.
Cross-selling is recommending additional products or services after a purchase. Both tactics are less challenging to implement when your customers are happy because they are open to spending more. Hence, a business should work on helping customers get as much value as they can from the products they buy before trying to move them to higher tiers.

Consistency: Always make sure you have the end goal of your customers at the forefront of your mind. A customer success plan helps avoid mistakes and ensure you are consistently taking steps in the correct direction with the correct resources at the appropriate time.

Checkify Helping Customer Success Management

Customer success management is key to helping your business achieve its objectives. Successful customers reflect positively on a company, thus, providing the right elements to help it grow. However, customer success is not easy to accomplish, and businesses must know what to focus on.

How can Checkify help your customer success management strategy? Checkify Process management and checklist software. We allow you to document processes with detailed guides that enables everyone to know exactly how the best way to complete a task, reduce mistakes and human errors. Offering a checklist and task management allows you to track progress, document history and comments for ultimate team process collaboration.

Checkify allows you to allocate tasks in a process to the best possible person. Set a timeline for the process steps and stop important steps from being missed.

Customer Success Management helps make sure your customers achieve their desired goals with your business and Checkify can help you manage your customer success processes and tasks.