As a customer success leader, you spend your days creating the best experience for our customers so we can retain and grow in long-term.

Winning teams find confidence when company leaders are confident in their strategies. A trickle-down effect can occur with managers, team leads, and customers if there is focus and confidence of winning strategies among these groups.

Here are three of the most important things for CS leaders to stay on top of:

1. Having a customer success department is critical to the long term profitability of your company.

Your customer success department should take the lead in making sure customers are your foremost concern, but they shouldn’t be the only ones.

We believe our customers are the true north of each aspect of the company, whether it is product, sales or HR.

As someone who has a vital role in the success of your customers, it’s important that you create a culture focused on pleasing them.

You cannot tackle customer success without the support of executives across the company. This starts with your CEO and covers all areas including marketing, product development, distribution, etc…

The success of one department is necessary for the overall company to succeed. Customers will see a more unified and streamlined experience when all departments work toward customer ‘true north’.

2. In order to track key customer success metrics, you must identify and define them ahead of time.

Now is the time to take a deeper look at your current methods. Do you think there are ways to monitor key metrics more efficiently? Is it possible that someone on your team has an expertise in data visualization that would be able to help you or point out any missing critical pieces of information?

You may not have yet found data to track or collected it, or you may already know measurements that need improving. Keep it simple.

Feedback and comments should be tracked from users who are positive or negative, even if the feedback is not about a new product. These could include usage patterns, NPS scores, and interest in features you offer.

Monitoring these critical metrics and the overall customer health will not only provide a newer perspective on where to focus more energy, it will allow for a better understanding how our customer success is affecting your business.

3. Invest in a culture of customer retention and growth

Any company leader striving to create a lasting customer culture will want to do their best to maintain goodwill and trust, as it not only helps generate revenue, but it also makes customers more likely to return in the future.

• Know the definition of your client’s success, and move past what they do to why.

• Know how your products drives the metrics that matter to customers.

• Even when there is nothing for you to do with the customer, stay engaged and interested in them.