Customer Success Management — A Must Have To Stand Out From Competition

Getting new customers is a startup’s main focus once it has reached product-market fit and wants to start scaling. However, growing revenue from new should not be its only objective. Entrepreneurs should also care about their current customers & create an efficient customer success strategy, as it is crucial to maintain and grow revenue.

What is customer success and what does it cover?

Customer success is the process of anticipating customers’ pain points and challenges before they are raised. You need to provide solutions to their problems, for example — launching a new feature that enables the customer to do something faster, can act as a pain reliever. A loyal and happy customer will be the best advocate for your product or service.

” Customer Success is your customers achieving their desired business outcomes.’’ — Lincoln Murphy

You’ll want to be customer-centric in your product strategy and company culture. All your team, including new hires, have to keep in mind these questions:

• What are your customers’ pain points?
• How do they want you to fix these problems?
• How can you help them use your product?

Your product is going to evolve with your customers’ needs: small improvements can have a great impact. You can also guide them through the changes by producing educational content that will help users make the most of your product.

Your customers’ experience and feedbacks are crucial. Their insights will help you stand out from the competition. Integrate this feedback into your product roadmap.

Our expert — Brian Power, VP Customer Success at Dataiku stressed that “adopting a customer-centric approach is a must-have [in your organization]. Overall customer success is a philosophy to adopt for your company in order to be successful in your market.”

As your company grows, you’ll need to separate sales from customer success and assign a specialized team.

There might be cases where your client organization will be change-averse, which will jeopardize the implementation of your new product. When it happens, talk with the user and ask him to walk you through his day and see what his problems are. Involve your customers in the product roadmap and change process. Through their feedback, define how your features can be improved, and help them imagine how they can use your solution to make their lives easier.

“Translate that pain on the user level and take that back to the senior level and make that bridge”. Brian Power

What is the difference between customer success and customer support?

It is pretty common to mistake customer success for customer support. And, although they both focus on the customer and work together, their goals are different at heart.

Customers support teams are reactive and here to assist customers when they encounter problems. Customers Success teams are proactive, and their goal is to make sure that the customers are happy with your solution. Your Customer Success team’s ultimate goal is keeping churn as low as possible by making sure your clients get the most out of your product. By working hand in hand with clients, Customer Success representatives should be able to convince them of the value your product brings to their company.

What really matters when building a customer success team?

Lay the foundation for your customer success team by communicating well what their added value to the company will be. Highlight the benefits of having a CSM and the fact that the job is cross-functional. By explaining how the teams will interact, you will keep alignment in the company. Even if customer success is not essential for the business, it is a great asset that will help the overall company thrive during its hyper-growth.

Your whole organization must adopt a customer-centric approach. That means, in particular, having a strong analytic strategy (website tracking and click monitoring…) to get insights about your customer’s behavior.

Also, Americans are much more sensitive to service than Europeans. It’s better to hire an American to deal with Americans. Your CSM team should have good industry knowledge and believe in the product as they will have to constantly support your clients through all your product changes.

Bear in mind that although reducing churn is the CSM goal, it is impossible to achieve a 0% churn rate. Churn will be part of your business cycle anyway.

If you want to know more about gaining and retaining customers in the US & want to pursue your American dream, Impact USA’s team can help you navigate through the US market.

To learn more about the program visit Impact’s website: https://www.impact-north-america.com/

Special thanks to Charlotte, Achkan, Ania and Maria for providing feedback on this article.