Customer success means different things to each business. But what it comes down to is improving the customer experiencing and increasing customer retention. Success is a methodology that’s used to ensure that your customers achieve their goals while using your products and services. Here are six ways to improve success across your entire organization.
1. Implement Customer Retention KPIs for Each Department
The success team is just one of part of your strategy. You also need to have a shared customer retention KPI that touches upon each department. Improving and maintaining the customer retention rate is crucial to your business’s success. Your Key Performance Indicator (KPI) is a value that shows how your company is meeting its goals.
Remember that your success team’s sole responsibility isn’t customer retention. Every department of your organization must find ways to improve and maintain customer retention. That includes your engineering, marketing, operations, products, and sales teams.
2. Start SaaS Renewals on Day One
Your renewal strategy can’t occur three months before the renewal date. You should work on the renewal strategy from the start, so you can tailor the customer experience by focusing on maintaining happy and healthy customers. By noticing your customer health metrics and establishing a strong relationship with them, you’ll help them better meet their goals. You’ll also be able to spot a risk before it happens.
3. Customer Success Involves Everyone
This step goes back to number one. Everyone must be involved when it comes to success. It’s everyone’s responsibility to create happy and healthy customers who keep returning to your business. In order for this to happen, you need to understand how your products and services meet their needs.
SaaS business don’t understand their customers and what needs to be achieved to have their goals met. Don’t know your customer base? Here are some important things you should ask:
What makes them happy?
What are their interests?
What’s their personality like?
What matters mean the most to them?
Why do they buy your products and services?
What causes trouble and what improves their livelihood and well-being?
Knowing the answers to each of these questions is how you can get your customer’s time, money, and attention.
4. Most Customers Won’t Stay on Their Own
Unless you’re a successful enterprise, you’re going to have to put time, money, and effort into keeping customers around. It’s natural for most of your customers to drift away from your products and services, especially when they longer feel a need for them. It’s important to understand this so you can create a strong relationship with your customers. Understanding that you need customers to choose your business allows you to shift your focus on customer development.
5. Maintain Accurate & Visible Customer Health Metrics
Every department should know what it takes to have a happy customer. They should also be aware of the factors that create an unhappy customer. Successful companies that spot these issues early on to ensure that it’s addressed. One way to maintain happy and healthy customers is to create a success playbook and share it with every department so everyone is on the same page.
Maintaining accurate health metrics and keeping them visible across your organization can help you determine which customers are healthy or unhealthy. Seeing these issues allows you to address the problem early on.
6. Do Whatever It Takes
You want to do whatever it takes to find the right customers, to maintain their happiness and healthy, and to keep them around. Your goal is to prevent happy customers from turning into unhappy customers. If you believe your customers can receive value from your products and services, then you’ll have to work harder to win them over. Doing whatever it takes means coming up with a winning strategy that provides them with greater knowledge.
When your business embraces customer success, then everyone is more focused on your customer base. Your SaaS strategy is about keeping customers, or those who aren’t engaged, happy, and healthy won’t renew.
