Customer success might be a relatively new term, but the various components that make up a customer success strategy have existed in business for a long time. The only difference now is you’d be hard pushed to find a successful company that doesn’t dedicate some of its focus to ensuring customer success as a cornerstone of their business.
What is customer success?
Customer success is the holistic approach to ensuring the people who use your service are getting the most out of it and achieving as much as possible. This obviously looks different for different companies and might even look different for different clients of a single business.
However, the focus will always be on ensuring that whatever service you offer, your customer base is making the best use of it, learning how to improve their involvement with it, and achieving success off the back of using it.
What is a customer success strategy?
A customer success strategy is the roadmap a business lays out to ensure their customers are thriving and they’re offering the best service they can to those customers. It might differ from customer to customer, but it will most likely involve the following:
- Education
- Evaluation
- Support
- Relationship building
The last point there is often seen as the most important one of all, because without a good relationship between a customer success expert and their client, progress can be difficult. Whether you have a large customer success team or a solo agent, they’ll need to be able to understand the customer’s implicitly.
They’ll need to know their pain points and goals. They’ll need to understand the technical competency of the client. They’ll need to be able to evaluate areas of growth as well as potential roadblocks. All this needs good communication and relationship building skills.
What tools does a customer success manager need?
There are some obvious ones, such as one or more effective means of communication. This would usually be split between a phone or VOIP application for conversations, emails for more lengthy written communication, and possibly even a shared virtual environment for training.
From there it depends on the industry, the client and the customer success manager. Here at Atlas, we believe in the transformative qualities of iBPM and workflow automation. Our no-code SaaS platform enables businesses of all types to take control of their business processes and achieve more.
Atlas Play provides customer success professionals a means for helping their clients through transformative journeys. From the very start, Atlas Play allows for the mapping and understanding of company wide processes.
Beyond that, automation and integration are possible, allowing businesses to make the most out of previously distinct and disparate systems, maximising efficiency and eliminating waste.
Understanding your customer
By mapping out the processes a customer’s business uses, you get an X-ray view on how they operate. You can understand from end to end how each action they take helps them achieve a goal. It’s also possible that your customer gains new insight, being able to take a big picture view of their company without being bogged down in the minutiae of detail.
Identifying strengths and weaknesses
Through the mapping process, you and your customers or clients will be able to start identifying weakness and strengths. You can start to pinpoint weak links in the business processes and areas where they excel. Between you, you may even begin to eliminate waste before you delve too deep into the technical side of things.
Improving business processes
From here you can start making things better in earnest. You can amend business processes to be more efficient, and even map whole new ones entirely. You can ensure that every resource, employee and system is operating at peak efficiency. All of this can be achieved virtually first, without committing resources. Once everyone’s happy with these new processes, they can be implemented.
Constantly evaluate
With Atlas collecting, collating, cleansing and analysing data, you’re able to ensure your customers success by providing evaluation that’s based on cold hard facts. With every process that’s run within Atlas Play, you’ve got a better idea of how well your customer success strategy is working and where improvement is needed.
Iterate, iterate, iterate
Here’s the real key to success; iteration. A business isn’t a static, monolithic thing. It’s fluid. It grows and changes with time and with the right help and support, that growth and change can be planned for, understood and adapted too. Each process you help implement can be updated, refined and improved in real time. Finally, change stops being something to be afraid of, and becomes something for a customer to be excited by and proud of.
What’s the first step to providing customer success?
Well, that’s a tricky question because the answers are almost infinite. But our suggestion would be to click the link below and start your journey to digital transformation with Atlas. Our platform is award winning and offers a tailored package that can help in whatever way you need.
From Atlas Play with it’s no-code approach to iBPM and workflow automation, to Atlas Boost with it’s industry leading data analytics capabilities. From there we have Atlas Edge to help you eliminate latency and act as though the cloud is with you on premise, and Atlas Optimise giving you control over your resources. Click below and begin your free trial today.