4 Steps to Ensuring Customer Success
Guaranteeing the success of customers is top of mind for us at RetailMeNot. Our mission — to help consumers save money on the products and brands they love — is baked into our company DNA. And though we may not go quite as far as employing the “empty chair” strategy that Jeff Bezos used back in his early Amazon days, our Product team champions a customer-first approach that pervades our company culture.
Why Care About Customer Success?
Put simply, if you want to do business with a customer more than once, you should be focused on customer success. This is not a RetailMeNot tenet; it applies to most business-to-consumer companies, whether you have a high or low price product or service, or a one-off sale or subscription.
Here is what happens when you build products and services that ensure customer success: your customer acquisition costs decrease because your customers become your advocates (which means you stretch your marketing dollar). Further, your customer lifetime value increases. Your customers bounce less, stay longer, return more frequently, buy more and pay more to use more of your product.
In short, customer success drives business success.
So, how do we ensure our customers achieve their savings goals at RetailMeNot?
1. Start by Defining Customer Success
To be focused on customer success requires an agreed upon definition of success. Broadly speaking, we define user success as ensuring our customers achieve their desired outcome while using our product. More specifically, that means we strive to provide our customers three things:
- Broadest savings possible
- Relevant, meaningful content
- A simple, intuitive user experience
2. Understand Your Customer and Her Journey
The next step in building products that ensure success is deeply understanding your customer. At RetailMeNot, a significant segment of our audience is made up of what we call “household enthusiasts,” largely women in their late 30s who love the challenge of getting a great deal, and work hard to keep deals organized so they are always ready to save when they shop. Another important — and growing — customer segment for us is our “in-the-moment millennial,” younger shoppers who are not as engaged in forward deal planning, but still like to save on their purchases at hand.
As much as we obsess over our customers at RetailMeNot, we devote even more time to understanding their journeys. We recognize that a customer using our app, for example, represents only a few moments in a much larger journey, created by all of the moments leading up to, and following, the experience. Our efforts in making this journey as positive as possible are all dependent upon the weakest moment.
With that understanding, as Product Managers, we empathize as much as possible, knowing that a negative interaction at any stage of the journey could easily lead to a lost customer. We try to understand the entire experience of doing business with us, from how a customer initially notices us, to how easy — or difficult — it is for them to eventually purchase and save with us. We then double down on optimizing all of those customer touch points we’ve identified to be weak, full of friction or frustrating for our customers.
3. Solve For Your Customer
At RetailMeNot, our Product Managers approach the task of helping our customers save on products and brands they love by working closely with our UX team. Comprised of a group of expert designers and researchers, our UX team spends their fair share of time doing both generative and evaluative research. The goal of generative research, often done by spending extended amounts of time with a small handful of customers, is to study their world and find opportunities for solutions and innovations, sometimes identifying a need the customer didn’t even realize she had.
In contrast, the goal of evaluative research is to test your existing solutions to see if they meet your customer needs. We spend a lot of time doing evaluative research at RetailMeNot, as we believe it’s a critical component to ensuring customer success. We test throughout the product development lifecycle, from early concept design (for example, doing usability on designs or prototypes) to running multiple A/B tests on near-finished products.
A rock-star UX team isn’t all that’s needed to guarantee a fantastic customer experience. We rely upon a variety of other resources at RetailMeNot in our ongoing quest for customer success, including a robust set of data and a business analytics team that helps translate that data into actionable insights. Other vital resources include a lightweight app and web customer conversation tool that keeps us on top of our customer pulse, a monthly in-house “voice of the customer” report compiled by our Support team, along with regular practices like design thinking workshops, as vividly described by my Product colleague, John Cathey.
4. Measure Impact and Iterate
Building digital products that ensure customer success is part art, part science. At RetailMeNot, we regularly measure the impact of our efforts, from studying customer acquisition, engagement and retention metrics, to examining shifts in our Net Promoter Score. The metrics give us a good sense of whether we’re on the right path, and when and where we need to course correct.
It’s an ongoing process, one that is endlessly interesting, sometimes surprising and often humbling. Rarely does a product team achieve customer success the first time around. But it’s worth the effort, because the more we can ensure customer success, the more successful we are at creating a lasting, winning business.
