You have marketing staff and a strong sales force, but is that all your company requires to achieve its full potential?
No, that is not the case.
When everyone else in the business is doing the same thing, you must go above and beyond to make your company stand out and reap the benefits of your efforts. So, what other options do you have to close this gap? Customer success is the answer. Customer success is an increasing possibility for your company to promote growth through marketing and expansion.
Did you know that 86% of purchasers with all rights retained will pay a higher price for a product if they have a better customer experience?
Seeing the versatility of customer success and the growth it has helped achieve SaaS, it is time to take a step further with customer success and apply it beyond SaaS.
But before that, we want to talk about the history of Customer Success and how it boomed.
The Boom of Customer Success
The claim that Customer Success Management has become one of the most attractive and promising “modern” jobs of the 21st century may seem like an exaggeration. But it is the truth.
Businesses, especially subscription-based ones, are finding that they cannot survive without the role of Customer Success. Companies that have adopted it are growing faster than their competition. A role that is at the center of digital transformation, especially for companies based on recurring business. Those that view Customer Success (CS) as a strategic priority saw the greatest improvement in metrics, with roughly double the number of companies reporting a double-digit improvement in renewal rates according to Deloitte.
Check out Customer Success Manager Salary Trends in 2022
The data is clear. The Customer Success Manager (CSM) role has seen a 736% increase since 2015 and is one of the most promising professions according to a study. According to LinkedIn's '2020 Emerging Jobs Report', the Customer Success Specialist role:
- 6th in the US with a 7-fold increase from 2015.
- 3rd in Germany with a 15-fold increase since 2015.
The CS function is the bridge between customer expectations, the experience they receive, and ultimately their retention. As a result, Customer Success is now one of the most important contributors to company growth. In 2016, McKinsey & Company released a report titled “Grow Fast or Die Slow: Focusing on Customer Success to Drive Growth.” They concluded: "Ultimately, a focus on customer success not only accelerates revenue growth but also creates an effective marketing organization."
For companies that sell the software, primarily through a subscription model, they soon realized that there was a vacancy in their operational moves. Marketing was busy creating demand and qualified leads. Sales were busy recruiting and closing new deals. Professional Services was busy implementing and getting customers started on their journey. Meanwhile, the support team was reacting to customer questions that were unsuccessful in nature, rarely proactive, and never strategic.
No single function was responsible for making sure the customer met the desired expectations. More importantly, no one was ultimately responsible for ensuring that the customer stayed a customer and bought more from him. They definitely would not become fans of your company, freely defending your greatness on their social media, your prospects, and your industry.
It has been 20 years since the birth of cloud computing. It's been a decade since Customer Success emerged from the SaaS industry to save it. People still didn't see the value of customer success as a role or a team. For many, it was still too new to operate as an entity on its own in the organization chart, even though it performed functions that the Sales and Service teams could not and could not do. For one thing, CS was limited to performance metrics that Sales didn't want, such as monitoring product usage, examining performance data, and tracking customer value.
In the past, companies relied heavily on customer surveys and call centers to collect information about product usage. Somehow they were trying to determine when a customer relationship was in an unstable state. Companies tend to hear more from customers when something goes wrong, and often not until it's too late. This methodology relied too heavily on lagged measurements. Slowly, companies saw the need for earlier intervention and early indicators of customer health. Perhaps even a proactive investigation. The operational movements of Customer Success were maturing.
The SaaS industry was realizing that customer success was no longer a fad. CS grew beyond preventing high dropout rates. There was more to it. Customer success was becoming a business imperative. Companies were finding that with just a 5% increase in customer retention rates, a company could generate profit increases of between 25% and 95%.
As your organization matures, your business benefits from growth through four key factors:
- Better retention,
- Expansion,
- Increased promotion, and
- Increased efficiency across all your teams.
Analyzing different organizations, we identified four stages of customer success maturity: Reactive, Insights and Actions, Outcomes, and Transformation.
Now all of this has worked for SaaS and now it's time to make Customer Success a function for all businesses!
Simply saying Customer Success is a Profit Centre!
Five Reasons Customer Success should be applied beyond SaaS
1. Improving internal communication is aided by customer success.
The initial sales call or email establishes a customer's relationship with a brand. Every interaction after that has an impact on how successful this consumer is throughout their trip. This means that every department is responsible for a portion of overall consumer mood and satisfaction, no matter how tiny.
A customer-focused organization will carefully orchestrate planned interdepartmental handoffs. It helps customers transition between journey stages and become comfortable working with new teams and faces, rather than shuttling a customer through their journey with a series of online-only phone calls or impersonal introduction emails. Well-organized companies will have a clear plan in place for how these handoffs will take place, ensuring that all departments are on the same page and that no one is left behind.
2. Customer success can boost your product roadmap's appeal.
A customer success department that holds check-in meetings on a regular basis can get vital product information that would otherwise be difficult to obtain. Your most important customer, for example, may express satisfaction over the phone, but deploying a customer success representative to their location can enhance their experience with your product even more. Furthermore, the requirements and desires of your current clients are frequently similar to those of your prospects. Allow these typical client requests to impact your product roadmap and the communications you send to existing prospects to help you grow your business. To a prospect, saying "we'll be adding that soon" is preferable to "we don't have it."
3. It has an impact on the KPIs of every department.
In terms of day-to-day operations, many departments' goals and KPIs should already be centered on customer success. Sales team members collaborate with CSMs to establish new accounts and manage any business that arises from the relationship. To collect success stories or design up-sell marketing strategies, marketers frequently have to work directly with customers. Product teams work to design and construct new products in response to customer requests. Even administrative jobs can aid in the streamlining of internal processes or workflows to provide the best possible customer experience.
Every department is focused on improving customer pleasure and experience, and everyone is working toward a common goal.
4. It ensures that all key stakeholders are satisfied.
When the consumer is pleased, the firm is happy, as the old adage goes. Any B2B or B2C company's dream is to have a portfolio of satisfied clients who are happy with their service or product and want to engage and communicate with a brand.
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Organizations that want to become really customer-centric must create a sense of alignment between customer and company emotion. This isn't as simple as asking an entire organization to revolt if a consumer is dissatisfied with their service. Actually, it's almost the polar opposite. When a consumer is upset, organizations as a whole must recognize it and work together as a team to resolve the problem.
5. It ensures that senior management is focused and committed.
At the end of the day, customer service starts at the top and works its way down. If the management team does not believe in the concept of a customer-centric organization, no one else will. Executives must comprehend the implications of customer success on a firm, including how it affects income. Executives can then share this information with other stakeholders, such as board members, to garner the complete support of the organization's decision-makers.
Customer success has a place at the table when executive teams and other members are committed to establishing and supporting a customer-centric culture. This entails incorporating client centricity and success into an organization's overall goals and KPIs. When an organization is entirely customer-focused, it can accomplish a lot, but it takes leadership buy-in to get there.
Extra Resource: What Customer Success can Unlock for Every Business
Takeaways
Seeing the explosive growth of Customer Success as a function and the variety of applications & values it can bring to the table, it is time Customer Success again evolves beyond SaaS. The benefits of making your business customer-centric are clear. Customer Success as a function makes certain philosophical changes to the structure of your organization. These changes will facilitate growth but are difficult to digest too. You can learn more about it through our blog at CustomerSuccessBox.
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Sruti Satish is a Content Marketer with SalesGear