How to Optimize Your Customer Success Strategy

You have a customer success strategy in place. Whoopie! Building a strong customer success program is perhaps the most important thing you can do throughout the customer lifecycle. 

Focusing on keeping customers engaged and happy from onboarding is the cornerstone of customer retention. You set up your KPIs, you’re gaining some nice traction and seeing some results (congrats!). Now, you need this program to work harder for you. 

You’re already working hard to improve time to value (TTV) and reduce churn. You’ve done all the seemingly little things, so what else could you do? 

Have no fear. There are a bunch of things you can do to improve your customer success program. Some are quick and simple to implement while some you can build up over time to keep customers engaged with your product.

At the end of the day, all you want is to make sure your customers are delighted not only with your product but with everything that goes with it. 

5 Ideas to Optimize Your Customer Success Program

1. Be Visible Internally

   You can do a lot with very little (budget) when people inside your company are talking about the work you’re doing. From sharing actual resources to getting some extra brains in on planning sessions. Support from your colleagues can go a long way. Set up regular internal update emails, a Slack channel, meet up for coffee (actually or virtually). Use anything in your toolbox to get people in your company talking about you.

2. Get Leadership Buy-in

   To piggyback off the previous point, even a strong program can fail without support from Leadership. See if you can book some time with several leaders and find one who’s excited about what you’re doing. It doesn’t need to be a leader directly related to CS. It could be the Head of Finance or the Head of Legal or the Head of HR, just make sure it’s someone with influence in the company all the way at the top. This makes it easier to get your program in the room. And if you’re lucky, filter its way into company-wide decisions.

3. Educate Your Customers

   It may seem obvious, but to optimize your customer success strategy you need a customer education program to lay the foundation for them to succeed. Part of that’s ensuring they’re confident users of your platform or service.
   
   Waaait a minute there. That seems complicated and time consuming.
   
   Relax, deep breath.
   
   You don’t need to start with a full-blown customer academy. Instead, start simple, pinpoint your biggest problem and tackle that first. It could be onboarding or it could be a lack of understanding advanced features. Whatever it is, hone in on it and start with one course. And you likely don’t even need to start from scratch. You probably already have more content than you think you do. Look for some blog posts, support documentation, maybe even an ebook to get started. As your program grows you’ll want to look into a learning management system (LMS), but don’t let your lack of LMS or lack of budget keep you from getting started.

4. Create Fans

   An often overlooked goal is to create fans for your company. Customers don’t share your social updates, customers don’t tell their friends or colleagues about a product or service they use, but FANS do. Fans will give you a video testimonial, or do a case study with you. Fans will shout from the rooftop. Creating fans can be its own sub-strategy, but the general gist is this: create opportunities for customers to become fans. Give them reasons to love you. You can send them swag, you can ask them for their input (and implement it), you can create certifications for them to share. The bottom line is to make it personal, make it about THEM… speaking of personalization brings me to my last point. 

5. Personalization

   First, let’s clarify. Personalization is not Hi {First_Name} to start an email. It takes a biiiit more effort than that.
   
   Personalization is taking the time to understand your customers and create experiences or learning opportunities that match their needs, exactly where they are in their customer journey. It’s letting them know that you understand their issues and what makes them tick. We’re all distracted by the hundreds of emails, texts, notifications, etc. that ping, ding, beep, vibrate, pop-up and more each day. To stand out from the noise and really drive engagement make sure every touchpoint and experience is carefully crafted and personalized.

Take Your Customer Success Program to the Next Level with Northpass

To make a real difference in the customer experience strategy, you need to educate your customers. Make sure you have the right tools in place to help them succeed. Talk with a customer success specialist to see how you can move your customer success strategy forward.