Not-So-Secret Sauce for Customer Delight
How do you keep customers happy? Engaged? Successful? Delighted?
By the time a customer is deciding whether to renew your service or to buy more from you, it is too late to change their thinking. Think ahead and get ahead. And remember that it is not just the responsibility of the customer support team to drive customer delight; any part of the company that touches the customer experience drives the outcome. Product management, marketing and sales all have important roles to play.
Some themes that will get you ahead in the game:
“First Use Equals Success” should be a key objective of the product team. How easily your product is installed, learned and used has huge impact on customer happiness and subsequent adoption. Especially in a company serving individuals or small businesses, it is critical to provide the right tools to have customers self-serve installation and troubleshooting, ideally without needing human touch. Product marketing can also play a role in creating the tools (eg videos) to enable understanding of the product and how to integrate/install. Enterprise companies can benefit as well; providing good online help/FAQs, building and supporting strong customer communities where customers can help each other is invaluable.
Adoption is king (a.k.a. renewal happens looong before renewal happens). If you are lucky enough to offer a cloud-based product, the wonder of SaaS is that you can usually get real-time adoption information. You learn who and how many people are using your product, how often they use it, and what functions they use most. These early warning signals provide valuable insights for customer support. It also provides great feature/functionality feedback for product teams. Communicate with customers often; share best practices and trouble-shooting tips. “Show them the money”: by telling them how your product is helping them; quantify whenever you can. Renewal decisions never really happen at the time of renewal; its about the customer experience and perceptions of price-to-value developed right from the start of the relationship.
Sales is NOT a dirty word, even if you work in customer success. Many customer support reps feel that identifying opportunities to sell the customer more “stuff” is in direct opposition to their primary mission of problem solving and helping the customer to be successful. Far from it…if the customer support rep is able to identify a need during conversations with the customer, and this need can be met with a product the company offers, it is a win-win for both. It is not often that a company gets to interact directly with a customer after the initial sale; a customer support interaction is a prime avenue to learn more about needs and then satisfy them.
Customer evangelism is the goal. It is not just about engaged customers, it is about customers ready to proclaim the wonderfulness of your product to everyone around them. Always true, it has become even more important in today’s socially connected world. “Net promoter scores” have become important for a good reason; you need your customers to be wildly excited about what you do for them; the payback in brand awareness and referral business is invaluable. It is about finding those people at your customers who are innovators and promoters for you and giving them recognition as superstar evangelists. It is about learning from them when you need feedback. If you can develop a culture that promotes customer evangelism, you have hit gold.As Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, says “The future of communicating with customers rests in engaging with them through every possible channel….Customers are discussing a company’s products and brand in real time. Companies need to join the conversation.”
Originally published on LinkedIn