Updated on by Hayley Brown
Businesses depend on happy customers and you want them to understand and maximise your product or service to meet their needs. Therefore designing a winning customer success workflow can bring together everything they need to know for success.
What is customer success?
Customer success is defined as a valuable business concept ensuring that customers achieve success. In other words, their objectives are achieved while using your product or service.
Customer success is a key metric for a SaaS company’s growth opportunities. It measures whether you are meeting your customer’s needs. The goal of customer success is to reduce the churn rate. This is done by ensuring customers understand the product or service and how it works.
Understanding your Customer’s Journey
Prior to designing your winning customer success workflow, it is important to know your customers. Knowing them requires understanding their use case, needs and what they wish to achieve by using your product or service.
As well as understanding your customers it is vital to understand the customer’s journey to your product or service. Understanding, this is can help to define and streamline your customer journey map. Within this map, you’ll be able to pinpoint touchpoints, mark the departments involved and if any tools are required. As well as see where processes can be improved or removed.
You’ll then be able to design a winning customer success workflow that is customer-centric and sets them up for success.
Designing a winning Customer Success Workflow
The customer success process isn’t one size fits all. As a startup, you may not have a well-established workflow. Alternatively, a larger organisation may be looking to tweak the process. A customer success workflow is a tailored process that is bespoke to your organisation and personalised for your customers.
A customer success workflow could look like the following:
Customer Interest
The customer identifies your product or service as a potential solution for their needs. They evaluate it before making the decision to purchase. This evaluation could involve a meeting with a sales representative. Who can provide more information about the product and provide details about its use case?
With this use case information, the customer success team can prepare useful initial onboarding with automated tools. With the tools, teams can demonstrate through personalisation that they understand their customer’s needs and goals. As the tools provide a series of steps customers need to follow. In doing so they will understand the product’s potential and how it can add value to them.
In understanding your customer and their goals you can set their expectations. These expectations will explain what they need to do on their end to achieve success with your product.
Stay in Touch
Communication is key during the customer success workflow. It can not only help with the sales process but also demonstrate the type of customer support they would receive post-purchase.
Therefore it is important to find the right tools to help nurture and communicate with customers. Shared digital spaces are becoming a popular tool, especially for sales teams. As they help with communication, nurturing and closing deals.
For example, Valuecase is a platform that allows sales representatives to build digital spaces or a microsite for customers. Customers have access to relevant information and resources about the product to help them make a decision about purchasing. As well as the ability to directly chat with a member of the sales or customer success teams.
Tools such as Valuecase can be easily integrated into your tech stack. The integration capabilities and automated actions can be implemented. For instance, generating customer status reports. Triggering alerts for risk of withdrawal and tracking customer progress and performance.
Coordinate
A successful customer success team are able to coordinate with other departments. Especially when customer questions arise that require more in-depth technical knowledge.
Liaising with your development team can provide answers for customers but also educate the customer success team. If the same question or issue arises again one solution could be to turn it into useful blog content. Then the customer success team can use it as a future resource.
Use Real-Time Data
Using real-time data such as customer acquisition cost, monthly recurring revenue, customer lifetime value and churn rate can help inform the customer success team’s decision-making. As well as indicate the health of customers.
Continually Improve and Standardise the Process
Using customer feedback the customer success team can continually iterate on the process and improve it over time. By continuously gathering customer feedback workflows can be adjusted and indicate if they are having the intended effect.
With access to this customer data, the team can build out their best practices. These then become a point of reference and standardise the process. A good customer success workflow results in a scalable and repeatable customer experience. As a result, there is improved customer satisfaction and a reduced customer churn rate.
Customer success teams should continually measure the effectiveness of the workflow and iterate to improve standardised practices.
A winning customer success workflow doesn’t happen overnight
Building a winning customer success workflow takes time to implement. Ultimately it is important for the team to understand the customer and their goals.
Then they can educate them on how to use your product to achieve their desired outcome and success.
