You create a marketing team to find new leads. You hire a sales team to close new customers. And finally, you develop a customer success team to retain those customers whom your marketing and sales team has acquired and keep them happy.
When it comes to cracking customer retention problems, there are so many places to get the ball rolling that it is nearly impossible to understand what you should tackle first.
Here are 5 actionable steps that your customer success team can carry out to increase customer retention and see success in half the amount of time that you may need otherwise.
1. Customer Success Starts with Talking to Your Customers
This may sound weird, but the number one action that your new customer success team must follow is to figure out your target market.
Make two lists, one consisting of customers who have found success and the second one who have canceled or have given a negative review and feedback of your product. Once you have acquired this list start reaching out to these people. Understand the reason behind their sentiments and highlight the trends for your unhappy and happy customers.
This is the basic step in your persona development. If you fail to bring in the customers you are creating your product for, you will always be fighting an uphill battle. Hence, make sure that you take care of this step right in the beginning.
2. Create Survey at Each Stage of the Customer Lifecycle
As your customer grows you will need to develop a more consistent feedback mechanism to find the level of customer satisfaction. Deploy regular survey system and prioritize on getting feedback in all areas of your customer experience.
The most common way to survey customer’s satisfaction with your brand is to do a Net Promotion Score (NPS) survey. You can also add in surveys to other parts of the customer lifecycle but remain aware that you are not overdoing the communication with your customers. The best time for sending out a survey is after initial onboarding of a new customer and thereafter at the point of cancellation. The more you can find out about when and why the customer is canceling your products and services, the better you will be able to help and understand your customer and consequently retain more customers in the future.
3. Be the Voice of Your Customer
One of the most important reasons to build up a customer success team is that by working directly with the customers, you become the best person to represent their feelings about your brand and company. Compile your customer’s feedbacks by writing a paragraph every week titled “What is like to be a customer at {Your Company Name}. Doing this you can illustrate the highlights and lowlights of all the feedback that you receive from the customer’s point of view, and thereafter circulate that note wither through email or any other form of internal communication to make it visible to all employees in your company.
If it is required, plan a weekly meeting where your customer success team can meet with your product development representatives to communicate with the product engineering team about your customer’s pain points.
4. Focus on Your Resources
It is necessary that your customers find quick and simple answers to their questions when they are using your product. This is where a Knowledge Base comes into action- like ours in ConvergeHub.
The most simple way to create a Knowledge Base is to write about any question your customers asked more than two times. Hence, once any customer generated question reaches this threshold, you need to include that question in your Knowledge Base and help your customers to solve their common roadblocks.
Never think that your help resource always have to be perfect, for the more you agonize about the quality of your contents the lesser efficient you will remain in creating your Knowledge Base. This is because, as your product changes, the frequency with which you need to update these articles will not be sustainable if you always remain worried about the quality of your contents.
You can also create videos since 4X customers prefer to watch video helps rather than reading the same. Therefore, if you have not created any help videos, get started and create one right away.
5. Send weekly customer success reports
To keep all your support, development and sales team members on the same page, send them weekly report card tracking KPIs.
The weekly report card should contain metrics such as:
This will help all the members of your customer support team to keep a pulse on what is happening to your team on the front lines.
Lastly, empower your team to learn from their past errors, so that you can provide better customer support in the days to come.
