There is a natural curiosity surrounding customer success
In the most basic sense of the word, customer success is a business method that ensures customers are achieving their goals while using your product or services.
Katherine explains: “It’s definitely understanding the customer, which I know seems very basic and very obvious, but it’s really understanding their values and goals and actually aligning the value proposition with those goals.
“A key part of customer success is highlighting the first 30 days. If you haven’t gotten their interest within 30 days, it’s not impossible to get it back, but it’s more difficult and there are bigger hurdles post-30 days.”
In addition to Katherine’s expertise, Barbara has been training numerous marketers around what customer success is in B2B and she says it makes complete sense why customer success has overtaken customer experience. She says on top of marketer’s natural curiosity around the role, it’s still a relatively new position for people to get their heads around.
Often, people are curious about where customer success sits. Is it an extension of ABM? Customer service? Marketing? Organisations are trying to wrap their heads around how to bring customer success to the real world.
Barbara says: “Customer success is absolutely a part of CX. It’s a true, genuine proof point that CX is finally being taken seriously as customer success has come about. It’s a good way to see if a business is taking their retention strategy seriously.”
If a business looks at their pirate metrics using the AARRR model (AARRR- Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, Revenue), sales and marketing both primarily focus on acquisition, activation and revenue in hopes that the other Rs will be an output, rather than a strategic target. When this happens, the retention and referral are often overlooked. Customer success, however, can be the solution to both retention and referral.
Barbara explains: “It’s a gamechanger and we’re finally being more customer oriented.Your customer is going to be there and listen not when things go wrong, but to listen to people about how they want to use your products and services.”
Customer success is above and beyond ‘customer support’
If you were to ask Google about customer success, one of the first things that would pop up would be the difference between customer success and support.
Barbara says: “Customer support is when something goes wrong, or when something in the customer service failed. For whatever reason, it didn’t deliver because the client’s expectations weren’t matched, or you didn’t foresee a friction point and have it solved. Customer success has nothing to do with that.”
Customer success isn’t at the front end of the mess occurring. Instead, its role is to partner with the clients and understand exactly how to give them the best experience with your products or services. Customers feel like they are constantly getting the value exchange on when their expectations are met.
Katherine agrees and says: “Customer support is similar to IT support. If they can’t login, forget a password, or have a bug in the product, then that mess needs to end in a resolution. Customer support is driving value and making sure it’s aligned with the client goals, but also making a plan or programme.”
Remote work and Covid-19 brought customer success to the forefront
With that being said, customer support was the last thing customers needed during Covid-19. There was chaos everywhere, and, in that sense, there became an appetite to become more customer oriented and Covid-19 was able to speed that up.
Businesses quickly had to pivot and, while customers were forgiving at first, there were only so many excuses to be made once companies were able to adapt to the new normal.
Barbara explains: “For me, customer success stepped in because we are never allowed to show our clients chaos and we needed to start showing solutions. When we come up with excuses, it breaks the relationship. For our customers, they are paying for us to be reliable. That is the reality – customers notice when you are not delivering what you’re supposed to.”
Customer support served as a quick fix bandage, but marketers had to ask themselves: ‘what can we do?’ Barbara notes that the smart businesses worked swiftly to put their customers first. Katherine added that the last thing a customer wants when they have questions is an automated recording saying ‘how can I help you?’
Katherine adds: “You just want someone who can support you – someone with a first name and someone you can have a conversation with. It’s something really basic, but in the past year, it really has come to life. Covid has really highlighted the need for customer success. Working from home can often feel like groundhog day, especially when speaking to the same people on Zoom. You want to be confident that the businesses you’re working with understand your needs within your company.”
There is a stronger need for sales and marketing alignment
While also training marketers, Barbara has also sat down with lots of teams and businesses during her career and guess what? She rarely sees marketing and sales aligned together. Customer success can change that. The relationship between sales and marketing has always been analysed in detail. Marketing is often misunderstood for doing fluffy tasks, while sales often get the rewards or congratulations since they’re at the frontline having conversations.
Barbara says: “However, if you don’t understand who our personas are, what their needs are and how to communicate that, then you’re just going to run around like a headless chicken, communicating with everyone, spending all this money, and not focusing on the right people. For me, you need to make sure CS and CX works – you’ll need to bring sales and marketing together because they are two halves of one. They have to listen to each other, respect each other and know what on earth is going on in that customer funnel.”
For example, sales might be making false promises based on their interpretation of what marketing was saying and promising. However, a simple misunderstanding between marketing and sales will lead to a customer not getting what they promised in the first place and it sets up the customers for failure.
Barbara advises: “We have to stop thinking about funnels, users and customers and the departments we work in. When a buyer is buying, they don’t care what department you’re in. All they care about is how they are going to solve their own problem. You need to ask how a customer might be feeling and why.”
