How to Make Customer Success a Habit in 2020
It’s a new year and a new decade! With the rise and spread of technology in the past ten years, this next decade will be more defined by the customer than ever before. Customers are savvier than every before for good customer experiences and executives are keen to make this a top priority for their teams.
However, it’s one thing to talk about making customer a priority and a completely different thing to actually make it a priority.
These past days, the new year has brought a ton of energy to creating new year resolutions and better habits for ourselves.
In this spirit, I propose that we make Customer Success a habit within our teams and companies. This will help create a culture that champions the customer, which will help your company see the multiplicative benefits of customer success earlier and in a more pronounced way.
However, what does this look like and how can we make sure that this habit sticks? To understand this better, we must first understand how habits are formed.
“Habits are formed through repetition in a particular context,” says Wendy Wood, Professor of Psychology and Business at the University of Southern California and author of Good habits, Bad habits. This is called the “habit loop”, which was coined Charles Duhigg in his book, The Power of Habit and in her video on how how habits stick, Vanessa Hill of BrainCraft describes how this loop works: “To truly influence habits, you have to pay attention to contextual cues; these are one of three things that you need to form a habit. Contextual cues can be your environment,… a state that you’re experiencing, like hunger or stress, … or even a time of day, like when you first wake up in the morning.” These contextual cues then lead to a response which then leads to a rewards. Over time through repetition, you then create habit memories which is how habits stick over time.
So to make customer success a habit in 2020, we need to create a better context and rewards for every CSM, every customer experience member, and to be honest — every person in the company — to think about the customer more.
For example, to make it easier for my broader team to get to know the customer, we created a Slack channel called #customer-stories where every person of the customer success team (or anyone really) can tell the rest of the company about a customer they are working with. By providing regular content, people can peruse these stories and get into the shoes of our customers.
And this is paying off! For example, those on the marketing team can get ideas for new ad copy based on what our customers have said about our service or ask to get connected to a happy customer for a testimonial. Furthermore, when the person on the customer success team sees that other teams are interacting with their post and action is taken, they are encouraged to keep going and to continue to develop those customer relationships.
Of course, this is just one idea and I can’t wait to hear about how you implement this at your company. I talk more about creating a culture of customer success and to get buy-in in my book, The Startup’s Guide to Customer Success, but if you ever want to bounce around ideas, I’m always happy to chat!
Cheers,
Jennifer
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennifer-chiang/
Website: guidetocustomersuccess.com
