As the customer success team mission becomes more critical, the teams are turning to data-driven solutions to improve their chances of success. There’s an increasing focus on providing a great experience for customers throughout their journey with a company nowadays.
And rightfully so – happy customers are more likely to stay loyal and continue doing business with you, while unhappy ones will quickly take their business elsewhere. That’s why it’s so important for businesses to invest in customer success teams whose sole purpose is to help clients achieve their desired outcomes using your product or service.
Customer Success Team Mission
The customer success team mission is to ensure that customers are successful in using a company’s products or services. This may involve providing training, support, and other resources to help customers achieve their goals.
The team may also work to improve the product or service itself to better meet customer needs. Ultimately, the goal is to help the company retain customers and grow its business.
The Responsibilities of a CSM and The Success Team:
What are some of the main functions of a CS team? Here are a few of the core functions that success teams typically perform.
Onboarding New Customers
Some businesses prefer a hands-off approach to new client on-boarding, while others like to schedule “Kick-Off” calls for each new client.
They meet with the client to discuss their needs and requirements for the product or service. They then create a plan for implementation over an agreed upon period of time.
Depending on your team size, or the ability to scale up, one way of handling sales may be better for you than the other.
If you have a small team of CS reps, it may be hard to hire enough employees to personally talk to every new client. Instead of hiring more staff, work on processes that help your small team scale up.
Onboarding is a critical part of customer success program and it’s critical that your team members does it well.
Your customer service team should assist your customers with onboarding and show them how to use the features that will help them the most.
Helping in Renewals
Customer success and account managers both play important roles in ensuring customers renew their contracts. However, their roles are different. Account managers are responsible for negotiating contracts and getting them signed, while the customer success is tasked with making sure customers are happy with their purchase.
Customer success is better suited for assisting the renewals process, not for actually managing them. After all, they’re best at providing customers with the tools they need for success, not at generating more revenue.
Your Customer Success Team can be a valuable resource for upselling or renewing customers. By consulting them on which new features or products might be beneficial for the customer, you can show that you have their best interests in mind.
Your customers should trust you more than they trust us. The sales team only deals with them for a short time, but we’ve worked with them for years.
Your Customer Success Manager has the knowledge and trust you both need to negotiate a great rate for your continued service.
Monitor consumer health score and the product usage
Your Customer Success Managers (CSMs) are the people who build relationships with customers, and who hear firsthand what is or isn’t working with the product. They are often at the front line in a customer’s relationship with your company.
Your Customer Success team is responsible for keeping track of your customer’s health. This is measured by a combination of your product’s use, your services’ use, and how often they log in.
The Customer Health Score is a metric that measures how likely it is that your customer will renew their subscription to your service. It can also help you identify which parts of your software are most popular and which aren’t being used at all.
If your customer support reps sees that the usage of a certain feature is dropping off, they can investigate why. If they don’t hear any complaints from your customer base, they can check the dashboard to see if there are any issues. This ensures that everyone is aware of the new features and that any problems are caught early.
From there, they can notify your product team, your customer support team, or the customer directly. This ensures that everyone is aware of the most recent user activity, and that no bugs go unnoticed.
Provide Customer Insights to the product and engineering teams.
If your customers aren’t happy, they will probably first complain to their Customer Success Manager (or your Customer Support team). Your CS and Engineering teams work closely with your Product organization.
Whenever your roadmap changes and new features are being released, your Customer Success Manager needs to be informed.
Your Customer Success team are in an ideal situation to judge how useful a new tool will be to your company.
When engineering and product management teams are planning the next release of their product, it’s up to the customer success team to identify which problems customers are having and to prioritize them.
A customer success manager is the person who takes your customer’s requests and translates them into something your business can realistically accomplish.
Put in Place Best Practices
While your engineers may be more technically knowledgeable, your CS team should be the most familiar with how customers use your product.
A customer success manager (CSM) should be able to listen to a client’s desired outcome and determine whether API integration is the best way to go.
Your customer success is there for all of your teams, but is there for your clients as well. They can help explain the reasons behind your processes, not just how to do them.
Connecting the customer with the right teams
Your Customer Success Manager (CSM) may not have all the answers, but they know the right people to connect you to. Your customer success manager will be more than happy in connecting you to the right resources to get answers to your questions.
Your Customer Success Manager should act as the “operator” for your callers, connecting them to other departments within your organization.
It’s illogical to assume that one person can fulfill the roles of a professional service, a product development team, and customer support — especially if that person is also tasked with mapping out customers’ usage of and the ideal configuration for your product or service.
Your CSM should be your go-to person for any questions you have about the product. If they don’t know the answer to your question, they should be able to point you in the right direction.
Your customer success manager shouldn’t be answering technical questions. Instead, they should direct them to your product team.
Keeping Your Customer Success Team on the Pulse
If customers can’t remember when you last contacted them. Your CSMs aren’t doing the best job of keeping in touch.
It’s up to your CSMs to set the right tone for communicating with any clients in your book.
The frequency with which you contact your customers will vary depending on where they are in their customer journey and what they’re looking to achieve.
After each meeting with a customer, the CSM should communicate the next steps, including when the next scheduled meeting will be.
Why is Customer Success so Important?
Customer success has become an increasingly important part of business as more and more companies adopt software-as-a-service and subscription services.
Instead of just selling a product once, more and more companies are moving to a subscription model. In this type of business model, customers only renew their subscriptions if the product is satisfactory.
Customers need to be continuously reminded of the value and success they’re getting from your product or service. There will always be competitors or alternative products, so it’s important to help your customers understand why yours is the best.
Customer success benefits every organization, even if you don’t have contracts or renewals. Research shows that 26 customers don’t contact support when they have an issue.
If a business does not fix its problems, it risks losing all of its customers. According to research, 91% of customers who do not complain will simply churn instead. This highlights the importance of customer success in ensuring that businesses can retain their customers.
By addressing potential issues before they become problems, and by understanding your customers’ unique needs, you can retain more customers.
Having a customer success mission is to help retain customers, reduce churn, drive revenue and help you understand how and why your customers use your products.
Having a strong relationship with your customer is incredibly important. It will allow you to better understand their needs, wants, and pain points. This, in return, will help you create a more personalized customer experience and also build customer loyalty.
Conclusion
The customer success team mission is critical for businesses because it helps ensure that customers are happy and loyal. By investing in a customer success team, businesses can improve their chances of success while also providing a great experience for their customers.
