Costi

3 Essential Qualities of a Customer Success Leader

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.

by Costi

How to Match Customer Messaging to Their Behaviour

Message personalization is often done in emails by adding the customer’s name to the subject, adjusting send time based on user location.

Personalization has become a buzzword in marketing and service industries, but oftentimes what’s being offered is information that can be captured by age and location data.

True personalization is not just about the static data that you can collect from someone's identity. It also includes their behavior in your product, as well as tailoring your messages around them.

But as your company starts to scale, and more and more people start using your product, the number of behaviors grows exponentially.

Here’s our best practice advice to getting behavior-based messaging right.

DECIDE WHAT ACTIONS WARRANT A MESSAGE

Different actions require different responses. For example, if the user adds 5 teammates to a project it may be appropriate for you to immediately notify them that new team members have joined the group.

If you're unsure of what your product should do to be more successful, start by asking yourself these two questions: What do customers consider the ideal end state? What is their ultimate goal when using this product? These are the actions that your products should encourage.

PRIORITIZE YOUR MESSAGES

You might be tempted to sign up for a new productivity app in addition to inviting your first teammate and creating your first task not long after.

Like a falling chain of dominoes, sometimes messages repeatedly hit your inbox until they run out. To end the chain, you unsubscribe.

Rather than sending messages for every single action, directors may find better success by following and engaging with new users.

When designing an email drip campaign, event-triggered emails can miss the mark. They're not responsive enough to how customers use your product in different ways or recognize people's nonlinear journeys from point A to B to C.

When sending multiple, behavior-based messages in a row, make sure their priority and do not send them close together or you risk overwhelming your users.

IT’S NOT JUST ABOUT FEATURE USAGE DATA

To deliver meaningful 1:1 personalization at scale, leverage all available context signals.

When working with this customer, ask yourself: What else do we know about them?

» Have they seen previous messages?

» Do they often visit the knowledge base?

» What size are they?

» Are they no longer receiving marketing communications?

When delivering relevant messages to customers, it is important to take into account both qualitative and quantitative data. For example, if you are trying to reach a high-value customer who has contacted customer support many times already this month, then your message will have to correspond with that information.

Proper segmentation becomes the key to sound customer engagement strategies, regardless of your company size. "Spray and pray" messages are no longer needed as soon as you properly identify segments that would be most receptive or needful of your product or service.

by Costi

Better Customer Service by Segmentation

Segmentation is the process of organizing your audience based on shared characteristics in order to customize your messages and engage them accordingly.

Targeting your recipients makes the messages you send more relevant and consequently, people will be compelled to take action.

For every product, here is what you should consider in the market research process.

ENGAGED USERS

These are the people who are logging in to your site and using it.

For example, if you run an app to generate invoices, your active users might only log in and use the app once a month. If you're building a photo sharing app, however, it might take more activity—like sessions, likes or shares—before we call them highly engaged.

Treat your most loyal customers with the utmost respect and don't pitch them things they already bought or are uninterested in. When you deal with an engaged customer, focus on what he or she needs to know or will find useful.

INACTIVE OR DISENGAGED USERS

These are the users who have not engaged in meaningful use of your product for a certain amount of time. This is natural and common among most businesses dealing with SaaS. People get curious, try it out, shrug their shoulders and leave without saying goodbye.

It's not uncommon for your average user to feel like they've upgraded. If that is the case, there may be confusion because their impression of you or the product is probably outdated.

Content that does not mention what the customer will or can gain from your product, what news you have about yourself to share with them, or why they should come back is unlikely to be read.

You can take this even further: Not all of your disengaged users are the same. Some were power users before they stopped using your product, while others had only been using it for a few days. Some added their team, some never finished onboarding. Segment accordingly and you will improve the effectiveness of your messages.

FREE

Over the past decade, “freemium” has been the dominant business model among SaaS businesses. The goal of freemium is to attract new paying users, so your messaging strategy should be about getting people to upgrade.

It can be difficult to figure out when your company's free package is being useful for the customer. The goal should be to see that it has become worthwhile and then clearly articulate the value of a premium product.

Free users are important sources for feedback and beta testing new features, but these customers may not be as invested.

PREMIUM

Customers who pay you a lot of money deserve to be treated differently than customers on free or $9-a-month plans. Depending on your business model, you might want to further segment your paying customers based on if they are currently entitled to use the new feature announcement that is going out.

Rather than risk a feature uniting with its target audience, it is better to craft a message to users on your basic plan about what that feature can do for them and why they might want to consider an upgrade.

Take some time to find out which customers are your most profitable and offer the free tickets, swag or office hours.

SLIPPING AWAY

When customers stop using a product, it often doesn't happen instantly. Instead, they gradually fall out of routine with the product and stop purchasing it altogether.

This is your “slipping away” cohort, people not active in 30 days or more.

When reaching out to a customer, you should focus on reminding them of the improvements your product has undergone since they last visited it. You are seeking to persuade them that by using your product now, they will receive significantly more value than when they previously used it.

RECENTLY CANCELLED

The issue these group members have with your product may not be fixable, but at least you can prevent this from being a deal breaker for other potential customers.

And no matter how much you want to convince them that your product or service is great, the best time to do that is probably not immediately after they have canceled their account.

In order to segment an audience for engagement, it's important to understand your marketing goals and how much data you have access to.

You can tailor your messages to individual customers by looking at data that is more granular. For example, you might start tailoring your message to a specific individual rather than just sending out general demographic messages.

by Costi

Listening Techniques of Great Customer Service Leaders

As a customer success leader, you are no doubt well-versed in the importance of listening to your customers. When done properly, listening builds strong relationships and without this skill, trust suffers.

There are countless books and resources focusing on the importance of listening in all aspects of life. While there's many skills to learn, listening is one of the most important ones we should be aware of.

Our focus is on how customer success managers should listen to both clients – those inside of the organization as well as outside clients that are paying for a product or service.

1. Listen First, than take action

Customer success management professionals talk to customers in several ways that may include, but are not limited to:

• What is your opinion of XYZ feature?

• What is the problem you have with X?

• Why are you contemplating abandoning us?

Customers will often share feedback with you if you lend them an ear, but even when they do there may be information that's left off the table.

Asking questions allows you to guide the conversation and learn what they want to talk about.

Rather than starting with a barrage of open-ended personal questions, write them down so you can come back to them later. Open your conversation by asking one closed question that begins with “would you …”

By asking your customers a simple question, you can steer them towards the problem they're experiencing.

Many customer success leaders are required to have many phone conversations in their job. This can be hard even though you cannot read facial expressions from a distance, like with video or in person meetings.

If you have to use your phone when assisting a customer, make sure you are actively listening and following along by responding with simple words such as “Got it”, “Okay” and “Makes sense.

2. Ask for Clarification

As soon as the customer starts talking, take some notes. The customer will love knowing you're actively listening to their story and taking down their words.

When the customer has let you respond after asking questions, refer to your own set of questions.

Make sure you fully understand what the customer has confided in order to be of better service.

3. Repeat Back

In order for your customer to know you understand their needs, make sure you ask questions clarifying what they are asking before just giving a response.

Too often, we believe we understand the situation and take action when it's not yet clear what the problem actually is. Taking action on a problem without examining the data can have disastrous results – even if our intention is good.

Once you have repeated the necessary information back to a customer and they acknowledge that you understood them, let them know what will happen with their input. Make sure they are aware of your plan for future use so that it doesn't feel like their valuable data is disappearing into a black hole.

4. Take Action

If you told the customer you would take action, now is the time to do the task. Not all data points are important, but each deserves attention and tracking for future reference.

When you have a calendar reminder to bring up information in your next CS team meeting, or need to pick up the phone and act on something more urgent, do it immediately.

Waiting to take action can simply create dust and lose you trust with your customers if they begin to notice nothing happens with the information they entrust.

Most CEOs of companies don’t have time in a day to focus on the bigger picture (i.e., not just responding to fires). To overcome this, put your thoughts together each morning--review everything from yesterday and try to address problems or act on deadlines. Use that hour every morning as sort of a gut check for how your company is handling clients.

5. Report Back

A forgotten step that often gets overlooked is reporting back to the original creators. So much helpful feedback can be given in this way. Information might help fix a bug, streamline business, or create more seamless experiences for clients.

This customer input is gold but, unless they know it's being taken seriously and considered, they'll stop sharing. Reporting back in this way takes time away from their job so you want to say thank you for their input.

Employees should be reminded of their positive contributions as well as warned about forthcoming changes.

Send an over-the-top thank you when someone provides valuable information to your company. Since these gestures will be memorable and people know you’ll care about their input, they’ll continue to share good ideas with you moving forward.

6. Seek Input & Repeat

Use this technique to create the never-ending feedback loop that will push your customer engagement and ultimately make them a much happier customer.

Ask them what they think could have made the process better or what else is on their mind.

Customers will likely provide more feedback when they feel that you are listening, so it is important to reward open and honest communication.

Customers will be more willing to work with you when they know that you are listening and responding to their feedback. They will feel confident in your products or services knowing that you value them enough to take the time to help.

The outcome: Greater customer trust

by Costi