In a world where expectations, multiple service offerings and access to streams of information to solve customer problems is at an all time high, it is more important than ever for businesses to place focus on their customer success strategy and the team behind it. 

Making customer success your purpose should be at the forefront of business growth.

Building a nimble, in-tune customer success team can reap dividends for a growing business. These teams must be carefully crafted as they hold a wealth of power when it comes to driving revenue, keeping customers and creating promoters to drive new business. If customer success is falling short, your business may be at risk. 

But what do customer success teams do?

A business exists because customers need something. Their success relies on customer success teams to deliver the solution offered to them. But there’s so much more to these teams than meets the eye. Customer success teams have the potential to become a prosperous growth engine for businesses and it’s often through using those innate, softer skills that some businesses take for granted. 

Leadership and management need to be able to recognise the softer skills required and ensure that they recruit and 

retain the right people to help move their business in the right direction. Let’s take a look at what those behaviours look like in more detail:

Build Relationships

For customer success teams to be successful, building relationships is paramount. These relationships are often how customers will start to turn into advocates. There are three, simple pointers for keeping relationships steady. If your customer success teams don’t deliver in these core areas there may well be missed opportunities: 

Listen 

The customer success team is ultimately the voice of the customer. Listening to their needs carefully and being able to accurately relay this to the wider business is key. Finding out customer pain points, when and how they like to be updated on progress and acting on the information provided is the first step to building a winning relationship.

Understand

Acknowledging the way a customer is feeling and asking the right questions at different parts of the delivery process is also a skill that many customer success teams develop with time. Misinterpretation, or not providing the right information, can lead to confusion and dissatisfaction later down the line.

Respond 

Never leave your customers waiting for a response. If there’s a technical question that needs further business investigation, send a holding email and get back to them when you say you are going to. If there is a deadline delay, let them know right away. Being proactive rather than reactive will keep customers in the know, without them having to spend their time chasing you.

Relationships are the backbone to growing customers with the business. Returning customers are likely to spend 67% more on your company's products and services. This is a surprisingly high figure, emphasising the vital role success teams have on driving revenue and extracting opportunity for businesses.

Reducing churn

Whilst it’s inevitable that keeping 100% of your existing customers is a little unrealistic, customer churn is an important metric for growing businesses to keep an eye on.

A simple way to calculate churn rate is to divide the number of clients lost with the total number of clients for a specific time period.

It takes on average 7 times more to acquire a new customer than to keep one. Great customer success teams should be able to do the following to mitigate churn:

• Analyse churn and act on it - identify why customers are leaving and implement measures to avoid this in future
• Show customers that your business cares from the outset - demonstrate that you care about their experience, delight them by going above and beyond and exceed their expectations
• Focus on the business’ best customers - be careful not to focus on customers who aren’t promoters and lose sight of delivering for those that already are

Customer success teams are more than just delivery. They’re frontline business advocates. They use knowledge from customer interactions to develop their own business for the better. They take insight from listening to customers to delight and drive further revenue. They’re vehicles that facilitate expansion and help to move businesses toward their own and their customers’ growth targets.

Looking for your Customer Success Team to delight? Speak to us about some of the tools that could help.