Enhancing your customer experience is the key to customer success for any business. It’s not just about making a sale but about keeping your customers happy and coming back for more. In short, it’s about pushing the idea of customer success in your business.

What does ‘customer success’ mean?

Customer success is a holistic approach to retaining your customers. It focuses on the customer’s experience, and how this experience leads to a successful outcome – both for the customer and your business.

Customer success is about more than just delivering product or service value to customers. It’s about anticipating and meeting customers’ needs before they even know they have them.

To be proactive with your organisation’s customer success you should:

  • Proactively manage each customer’s relationship with the company, so you can curate their customer journey from beginning to end.
  • Make sure all your paying customers have a positive experience with the company’s products or services (and ask them for their feedback on this experience).
  • Identify potential problems in advance and provide resources and assistance to resolve these issues efficiently (reducing negative feedback).
  • Offer technical support to help customers overcome issues, so your products or services work as expected and deliver the expected value.

Focusing on creating the best customer experience

As any successful business owner will tell you, customer experience doesn’t stop at the point of making a sale. Customers are no longer satisfied just by receiving a product or service; they want to be delighted by it. They want to feel that genuine thought was put into their purchase and that they are being properly taken care of by the company.

Because of this, you need to focus on the entire customer journey.

This means taking care of your customer from their first contact with the brand, through to the point of a sale being made – as well as the after-sales care and long-term value you offer them.

Give your customers a great onboarding experience

Your customer’s initial journey with your business might be the most crucial. The best way to turn a customer into a repeat customer is to give them a great experience, and that starts with onboarding. In these first few months it’s essential you unlock the value of your products and services quickly and prove to do business with you was the right decision.

Develop an onboarding process that is welcoming, fast, and smooth, and sets your customers up for success right from day one. Your onboarding should help them understand your business, your point of difference, and how to get value from it, right from the start. 

Provide education that gives instant answers

After you’ve established a great onboarding experience, the next step is to ensure you have strategies in place to continue to unlock the increasing value of your products and services through a customer’s lifetime with you. The more they know how to access your business, and understand its full offering and its point of difference – the more likely they are to be loyal to you. 

Also, consider how you’ll deliver this education to your customers. Will support content on your website be enough to help answer customer questions? Or can you hold in-person training sessions or workshops with your customers? Is virtual training a better option? Can you offer webinars or one-to-one education sessions?

When you’re developing content for your business, we recommend that you think about how you’ll educate your customers as you scale. If you can offer one-to-one education to your customer base now, will that be possible as you grow by 10%? What about 30%?

Another benefit of a good customer content and education offering is that you may find the demand for customer support decreases. Your customers will be able to easily find the answer to their question – and so your support team can dedicate their time to complex, not repetitive, customer queries. 

Ensure your content is ever-evolving

Producing content to support your customers should never be seen as a ‘once and done’ task. Make sure your content is kept up to date, and relevant to your customers – you don’t want a website, brochure, or social media page with information that is no longer correct.

My tip is to first base your content on your customers’ common questions. Then use analytics to determine what they’re engaging with – and what they aren’t. By identifying popular topics, you can create more relevant content, and consider changing headlines and placement on your website to attract customers to read content that’s less popular. 

Embrace technology

Can technology support your customers and improve their experience with your business? Our customers’ expectations are changing rapidly and they expect information and answers in the moment that are fast, relevant, and personalised to them. Technology and artificial intelligence (AI) are big enablers to deliver on this expectation.

Communication is key

Communication among your team is key – your team should be cohesive and agree on your strategy and goals. I think it’s important to work across teams in your business to better understand your customers and how you can meet their needs: customer support, sales, and marketing will all offer unique perspectives that you can use to develop your customer success strategy. Customer Success as a function is relatively new as a concept but incredibly critical to achieving both your organisation’s commercial outcomes and customer happiness at scale when competition in all various types of business has never been so fierce.

You may also want to consider creating a community for your customers, giving them a space to connect and share thoughts with like-minded businesses or people.

Most of all – keep it #human

While I’m a big champion of technology and automation to help you run customer success efficiently, it’s so important to keep your customer at heart. Don’t become so efficient that you lose your personal touch – the reason your customers found you in the first place. While we take a digital-first approach, person-to-person interactions are incredibly important in those moments that really matter.

Even as Invigor8 continues to grow, we’re determined not to lose our #human value. We want our clients to know that we value each one of them, and strive to find ways to show this, including #delight – where we surprise a customer with a gift. 

Never miss an opportunity to thank and appreciate your customers, and they’ll reward you with their loyalty and ambassadorship. The source of this article can also be found in Xero.

Schedule a meeting with us at 1300 844 678 or email [email protected] if you have any concerns or would like to get business advice in your business.