What is Customer Success?
Customer success is proactively providing solutions to your customers and helping them achieve their goals. This in turn will drive customer value from the product, create customer retention, and generate more revenue. Customer success is achieved through a cross-team effort between Sales, Support, Service, and the Product.
Did you know?
80% OF CUSTOMERS
feel that the experience of using a product is as important as the product or service itself. - Salesforce
84% OF COMPANIES
feel that work to improve their customer experience report an increase in their revenue. - Forbes
Building loyalty and customer success
The first step is to begin a discussion internally of what makes your brand unique, creating your core values, making your workflow efficient and making your customers happy. The next important step is to demonstrate those values to your customers.
Let’s start by identifying what makes you, you.
Taking a great photo can be replicated. YOU CANNOT. To identify what makes you, you, you need to ask yourself a few questions.
- What are things you value in life and in business?
- Look backwards. What is your background?
- What are your goals for the future? How are you going to adapt those goals to your business and customers?
By searching within first, you can bring these attributes to your business and set your brand apart from others.
Core values & how you can use these effectively
Core values are the fundamental beliefs of your brand and can help you stand out amongst your competition. These help guide you to fulfill your goals and ensure you don't waver off on the wrong path. It also helps ensures that everyone within the organization are on the same objective and maintain the brand identity.This projects a level of customer service that satisfies you, your business, and your customers. The core values that we found to be successful in customer success are Empathy, Solidarity, Quality, and Craftsmanship
Empathy
Empathy is the tone you set. Put yourself in their shoes, listen to their wants and needs, and deliver above and beyond. This in turn helps you build connections and encourages longterm business with them.
Solidarity
Solidarity is the protocol you set for your customer service. Ensure everyone on the team has strong communication skills and maintain the level of service that you set. When customer issues arise, ensure that it's tracked from beginning to end.
Quality
Quality is obtained by providing quick & accurate solutions, following up with the customer, creating a personal relationship with them, and listening to their feedback. Elevate their wants and needs to improve your studio.
Craftsmanship
Craftsmanship is the service you provide. Every customer is a priority and should be created equal. Ensure accuracy, always ask engaging questions, and adapt to their uniques situation and needs.
Company Efficiency and Happiness
Efficiency
Customers care about service but don't always know what happens behind the scenes. What they see is your response, and the time they put into the service and whether or not it has been wasted. To prevent this, your team needs to be efficient by having the proper tools. Streamline some customer interactions through automated responses, create a structure that follows conversations from start to finish, include multiple methods for contact (especially chat) and collect metrics of your performance.
Happiness
Happy customers and employees drive sales. You are in a service industry in which customers pick up easily on your emotions. Depending on how you portray yourself, it can alter their experience, communicate the wrong message, and hurt you professionally. According to HBR, customers that had the best experiences spend 140% more compared to those who had the poorest experience.
Applying all of these together creates customer retention and loyalty. According to Forbes, "96% of customers say customer service is important in their choice of loyalty to a brand."
How do we know this all actually works?
Not only have we found success ourselves, but we've seen it done time and time again by many other successful companies. Our favorite example to mention is what we call the "Nordstrom success story". Nordstrom has continued to survive over 100 years and continuously appeals not only to their older generation of loyal customers but also with young adults that they are building new relationships with.
This story takes place in 1975 where a man tried to return four tires at Nordstrom, a luxury department store. He had bought them at a tire store that closed and was replaced by Nordstrom. Although they don't sell tires, they took them in and refunded the amount he paid. Why do this? As a result of customer happiness, and above & beyond service, this story has been told millions of times. It has given free publicity to Nordstrom, increased customer loyalty and retention, opened them up to new customers, and has made them stand out from other competitors.
How will you improve your customer service and ensure success?
