7 Steps to Build A Strong Customer Success Team

When you are a proud business owner or are possibly mulling over the idea of owning one, the foremost thought in your mind is achieving customer success. The mantra for this is simple. One happy customer will bring you ten new customers and that is the base concept for attaining customer success.

What the term really means is ensuring that your customers achieve the desired outcome from the use of your product. For example, if you are manufacturing toothpaste, the job of your customer success team will be to ensure that customers are satisfied and are able to achieve the solution to the problem the toothpaste promises to tackle.

By 2020, customer experience will outgrow price and product as the main differentiator in business. Having a customer success team for your business is extremely vital as it not only deals with customer satisfaction but also customer retention. Ensuring customer retention means you make your client loyal to your brand. And this is where the retained customer suggests your brand to others and slowly your customer base grows.

The seven steps to building a strong customer success team are as follows:

1. Strategic Recruitment:

Recruitment and selection processes are critical aspects of any department. It is the process of not just about hiring the right people for the right job, but also about training them to be customer-centric. In your customer success team, you will need people who are from a technical background. The demand for technical workers is not just a trend but a necessity, which is expected to grow at an average of 30.6% by the next decade.

Your recruitment must start with people who have a technical background. Then you must sort them based on experience. Ask probing questions in the interview and hire them only if they show empathy toward customers. This will help you to build a customer success team that will be effective for your business in the long run.

2. Effective Onboarding:

Once you have hired people to build your customer success team, the next major step is to induct them into your organization, so that they are well aware of their roles and responsibilities. This will help them get integrated into your working culture in less time. Provide them with the required knowledge about your suite of products and services so that they can deal with your customers in a better way. Give them insights into different kinds of customers, the issues they face frequently and how these issues can be resolved.

Provide them excellent onboarding wherein you cover everything right from the various divisions in your organization to the work processes followed in your firm. This will give them a detailed idea of how your company functions and the kind of products & services you deal in, which will make it easier for them to deal with customers.

3. Eliminating Obstacles:

Now that you have assembled the best minds, the first task would be to identify the preference of your customers. Whether they like to buy from you online or in-person or through call. Do they like to interact with a large team or just an individual salesperson? Do they prefer a particular salesperson, because they have been dealing with that person for long?

These are the questions that your team can answer only when they are thinking like customers. This process will improve your customer service. Customers are different from one another and have a varied range of preferences. Some customers may prefer buying online while others might want to work with the salesperson they have known for a decade. Running customer success programs and providing your staff with customer service statistics will help them function better as a team.

4. Give Authority:

Yes, you heard it right. Giving authority to your customer success team will help them perform better and be more confident while dealing with clients. This will also ensure that they do their best while solving client issues and not depend on higher management to get approvals for something which can be done at their level. This will save time and instill in them the confidence of providing the best possible solutions to customer queries.

5. Collaboration with Other Departments:

How will your customer success team know when to cross-sell or when to upsell? Therefore, knowing a customer’s buying decision is important. Generally, the statistics of customer buying decisions can be obtained from the marketing or sales department, while the accounting department might assist you in knowing where your customers are investing more. Helping your customer success team collaborate with other teams of your organization will give them valuable insights into what your customers want. When they will know exactly about your customer requirements, they will be able to serve them appropriately.

6. Empower Your Customer Success Team:

Customer success is a new concept and not many organizations are aware of it. But, this team is one of the most crucial teams in any organization, for the simple reason that it helps to keep your customers satisfied, thus increasing the retention rate. Since, your customer success team is the face of your business, as it represents you in front your customers and is constantly in touch with them, it’s important that you do everything possible to keep them updated and informed.

You can build an online knowledge base that has all the information about your products, services and your customers. It’s easily accessible via a mobile phone, laptop or tablet, making it easier for your customer success team to deal with customer queries quickly and provide them accurate information.

7. Evaluate your team’s performance:

It’s very important for your customer success team to evaluate its performance, measure its success and improve its dealings with customers. Some performance indicators that can be used for evaluation are customer feedback, customer churn, retention rate, etc. This will give you an idea of how your customer success team is performing. Once your team knows the strong and weak areas, it will become easier for them to improve their performance and deliver better services to your customers.

Conclusion:

A recent study showed companies that prioritize customer experience, typically generate 60% higher profits and by 2020, customer experience will be the top differentiator for companies. To make sure that you are in the good books of your customers, creating a customer success team that is always there at your clients’ disposal, is of paramount importance. Building a customer success team can keep your existing clients happy, bring you more customers and set a strong foundation for your brand.

Author Bio:

Brayn Wills currently holds the position of knowledge management manager at ProProfs. He is responsible for creating unique and relevant content on knowledge base tools and keeping track of the latest developments in the realm of knowledge management. In his free time, he is either reading a new book or exploring offbeat destinations.