How To Drive Growth With Customer Success

Customers are among the key growth drivers of any brand.

The relationship you build with your existing customers could help you break into new markets, or it could stagnate your growth.  

BBN Times can confirm that outstanding customer support is vital in building strong customer relationships and forms a fundamental aspect of marketing. Many CMOs and business leaders would agree without hesitation.

But customer success can create even stronger relationships and trigger immense business growth.    

How Does Customer Success Drive Growth in Your Business?

Customer success is when you enable your customers to achieve business or personal growth and meet their goals using your product or service. 

It involves taking a proactive approach to customers’ challenges and reducing the number of issues the customer faces when dealing with your brand. 

When the customer has a pleasant experience with your business, this promotes loyalty and advocacy. 

And drives growth in your business.

Customer success doesn't just happen by chance; you need to strategise and construct a dedicated task force to implement it.  

Let’s get into more details.

Key Areas in Customer Success That Drive Business Growth

Adoption 

Sometimes referred to as onboarding, adoption is the stage when customers become accustomed to your product or service. 

You must guide your new customer into using your product or service in a way that provides maximum value and helps them achieve growth.  

To get this right, you need to understand your customers’ needs and goals and then provide a corresponding solution.

Retention

Every time a customer stops using your product, you lose revenue, which slows business growth. 

Retention involves ensuring that your product consistently provides value to your customer, which keeps them interested.  

You need to reassess the customers’ needs and goals from time to time and ensure that your product or service meets these needs.

Successful adoption and retention will do two things for your business:

• Promote expansion — Having kept your customer happy to the point of remaining loyal to your business, they’re likely to spend more with your company. This accelerates business growth target="_blank" rel="noopener".
• Promote referrals — If your customer achieves success, they will likely recommend your products to a friend. This increases your market share, also driving growth.  

Here are five tactics that can help you boost customer success.

Build a Highly Effective Customer Success Team

No matter your business’s size, you need a dedicated team to build a proactive relationship with your customers, fostering your business growth.   

Each team member should know their role in achieving customer success, both individually and with the team. 

Depending on your business’s size, create a clear structure to promote smooth operations within the team.

Here are some roles you can include:

• Head of Customer Success — In charge of creating and implementing customer success strategies and overseeing the customer success team's growth. They report directly to the CEO or CMO.

• Customer Success Analyst – Studies customer data to identify patterns that can help create effective customer success strategies.

• Customer Success Manager – Works directly with customers. Identifies customers’ business goals and anticipates how to meet them.

You can segment your customers based on their unique needs and expectations for your business. Then, assign individuals or sets of team members to handle customer success in each segment. By doing so, you will improve your team's effectiveness, resulting in increased growth rates.

However, be sure to recruit the right members for your team to foster customer success and facilitate business growth. 

Customer success team members should display:

• Strategic thinking

• Metacognition and empathy

• Excellent communication skills

• Social skills

• Proactive problem-solving skills

• A deep understanding of customer success and its impact on business growth

Align your customer success team with the marketing team. With this approach, the customer team will better understand the customers and engage with them more effectively.

Create an Effective Strategy 

To achieve business growth through customer success, you need a robust strategy. 

It should involve providing consistent and quality customer service to your customers from the adoption stage until they achieve success and growth using your product or service.

Your company’s products and services are bound to evolve. So will the needs of your customers and the world around them. Modify your strategy to match these changes. 

A global leader in shipping services, Maersk is a good example. Despite the operational challenges associated with the current worldwide health crisis, they continue to achieve significant growth and high profits. They have accomplished this by continuously simplifying their supply chain and putting the needs of their customers first. 

Although the customer success team is responsible for helping the customers succeed, the team shouldn’t work alone. 

Embrace cross-functionality and maintain open communication lines between various departments.

Bake your customer success strategies into everything the company does. All interactions with customers at every point of your business should be consistent with these strategies. This will make it easier to achieve customer success and business growth. 

Quickly implement your customer success strategy by investing in the right tools.

Make the Best Use of Available Customer Data

Every time a customer interacts with your company, they generate valuable data. 

Gather this data from multiple points to get a complete picture of the customer’s journey.

Analyzing the data can help you deduce actionable insights that drive business growth, such as:

• Areas where you need to enhance the customer’s experience.

• The product features that your customers appreciate most and least.

• Warning signs of customers at risk of going to a competitor.

Keep this data in a central location where all teams can access it.

Be sure to keep real-time data of your customers to stay updated on their changing needs and goals. Having this information readily available will allow your customer success team to respond promptly to these changes.  

Educate Your Customers While Applying SEO Techniques 

With plenty of data on how your customers interact with your business or company, you can anticipate issues that are likely to arise.

Use this info to address common pain points before they become a nuisance to your customers. 

Educate customers on how to solve their day-to-day problems using your products and services. 

Create a knowledge base on your website with an FAQ section, or use a content calendar to ensure you publish content on schedule. 

Incorporate SEO techniques into your content. Marketing with optimized content can help you reach new markets. It drives organic traffic to your website and boosts growth. 

When educating your customers, keep it simple—no need to overwhelm them with your product or service's technical details. Instead, focus on the value your product or service will add to their life or business.

Personalisation Is Key to Customer Success  

Similar to how personalised marketing works, you can personalise your customer outreach to improve customer success and achieve growth.

Assign team members to all your customer segments. The team can then focus on the unique needs and goals of the customers in each group.

For instance, if you have a new product coming up that will be particularly relevant to a particular customer, a team member can personally talk to them about it. Likewise, if a customer is experiencing growth in their business, congratulate them. 

When it comes to more general communication forms, such as product portfolios, personalise every segment’s communication.

Speaking directly to what your customer needs guides them into achieving their goals using your product or service.   

Personalisation is a significant growth driver. It makes your customers feel valued and fosters loyalty. 

Ready to Achieve Business Growth Through Customer Success?

Successful business models and marketing leaders place customer success at the core of their growth strategies. 

When the customers are happy, they remain loyal and become committed advocates for the brand. These two factors drive business growth and can introduce you to new markets.

Hop on the bandwagon. Make customer success an integral part of your marketing growth strategies and build a strong team to implement it. 

Educate your customers and monitor their journey to ensure they get maximum value from your products or services. And be sure to properly guide your customers towards success by staying in tune with their individual needs.