Much Ado About Customer Success
Do you ever wonder if you are doing customer success the right way? Or is there even is a right way?
For most brands and businesses, it is assumed that once you are able to successfully secure the customer(s), it is a done deal and the brand is doing well and off to a great start.
While I do not mean to be a buzzkill or a party popper, the work has only just begun.
Acquiring the customer might have seemed like a lot of hard work (I do believe it is) but the effort required to retain customers would make that seem like a child's play.
This begs the question; “Now that you have landed the customer(s), what next?
The answer to this question is “Customer retention”. The goal now is to win the heart of the customer and this is not a one-off event but rather a continuous and conscious effort.
How To Go About Customer retention
I could make a list of skills you require as a customer success executive and an even longer list on how to convert your customers to ambassadors but instead I will give you a pretty short summary of my method (some people probably do the same but oh well! I call dibs on it!)
As a customer success executive, skills are great and very necessary but if there is something you cannot do without, it is in depth understanding of the business/brand/product. Think of it as your birthright.
I had no prior experience in customer success when I landed my current role as a customer success executive. All I had was a pretty decent writing skill which I leveraged on. However, getting into the job and actively participating in the process of customer retention, writing good alone just wasn’t good enough. So I developed two personal strategies that have worked for me so far.
I imagine myself as the most dissatisfied and irate customer so that when I come across them (because i definitely will) I wouldn’t be so overwhelmed.
Last but definitely not the least, I try to envisage and study all the possible ways that things could go wrong and try to find fixes from them both within my department and across other departments.
A case in point;
I work for a fintech company and with the ever evolving ecosystem and new features and updates being released, it might be hard to keep up. However, once I am notified of such updates or features, I take it upon myself to try and break the app. I mean, it is better me than a customer right!
And I can attest to the fact that this has helped a lot because if 10 things could go wrong, best believe I discovered 9 of them first. Not only has this helped me be better at my job, it has also helped the product be more fit for the market and the customers have lesser issues.
I can categorically say it has been very fulfilling being a member of the non-cape wearing superhero community.
Cheers,
Seun