How to Crush It In a Customer Success Role

How to Crush It In a Customer Success Role

DAVIS FLACHS

What distinguishes customer success from customer service can be simplified into one word: proactivity. Customer success is about beating the problem to the punch, reaching out and establishing a line of communication before anything even occurs. There are many benefits to this. Instead of an angry customer sending frustrated messages into your help-ticket inbox, the dialogue flows more smoothly, as they already have an email to reply to and whatever knowledge of your customer support system you supplied them. They’re not stuck going in blind, unsure if there even is a person at the end of their request. At the end of the day, low prices and other gimmicks are a great way to sign new customers, but good support is the best way to keep them.

Examples of Proper Customer Success Functions

That being said, customer success is not just sending one email when they sign up then waiting for a problem to arise. It’s good to keep up a line of communication, even if your communication is automated. In my own experience in worker’s compensation, I was on a team that would make sure every client had met with us in the last three to four months face-to face, while checking in once a month via Zoom or phone to see how everything is going.

This is how we managed to grow so quickly while retaining so many clients. This was the hallmark that distinguished us from the competition. 

Obviously this approach can’t be taken for all business models. Take Zoom as an example. A business with that many users isn’t going to fly out to each individual client to make sure they’re having a pleasant experience with their services. Instead, they send out form emails and introduce their help staff, which helps humanize the company in the eyes of the client. From there, they can explain how they can help and how to reach them. Once the user has been on the platform for some time, they will send out emails to check in with the user, possibly ask for a review, thank them for using their product, and resupply them with the information given in the introduction email. 

To summarize, what you need to be successful in turning customer support into customer success is:

• Initial Outreach and Introduction

• Ongoing Lines of Communication

• Supplying the Customer With Necessary Information

• Keeping a Line Open With The Customer

Which can all be boiled back down to one word: Proactivity.

"If B2B companies want to get ahead of the game, they are going to have to get rid of all the friction in their business to better attract, engage and delight customers. It used to be what you sold that mattered, but now it's how you sell. [In the past,] your product needed to be 10 times better than the competition's. Now, your customer experience must be 10 times lighter than the competition's." – Brian Halligan, CEO, HubSpot

Customer success is the name of the game now when it comes to optimizing your client intake and retention. In this day and age, most companies don’t offer a help line for you to call. If they do, you’re often on hold for quite some time. Many companies who use digital support methods still don’t allot enough resources to those departments, leaving customers waiting for days or even weeks to hear back about their issue. 

As HubSpot CEO Brian Halligan explains in the quote above, this is the way not just for a company to break into the market, but how to stay on top. In the modern world, you cannot expect a client to sit idly by when they have an issue with a service and subsequently have to wait five days to hear back. It’s likely, now more than ever, that they will simply go find someone else’s services so they can get back to doing what they need to do. 

To Conclude…

Unless you’re the only one in your specific market, customer success is likely going to be the most important distinguishing mark your business has compared to your competitors. Marketing is the face of a company to the public, but customer success is the face of a company to their clientele.

To reiterate, proactivity is what can differentiate you from the competition and−in turn−bring you success in not just helping customers, but growing the company as a whole.