Irrespective of which type of business you own, customer success is always about what outcome the customer hopes to achieve with your products and services, and how you as a company you are helping them to meet their goal.
No Customer Success = No Success.
Success of a business is not about —
- How quick you are releasing your product versions.
- How many downloads your app had.
- How many employees you have.
- How quickly you are expanding to many cities.
Success of a business is about-
How happy customers are using your product or service. Customer success is the new way to do business .
As the saying goes-
You make sure your customers are successful and they’ll make sure you’re successful.
Is your service helping customers to gain success?
This is the most important question to ask, and yes all the time. It is the ultimate thing to measure. Each feature you are implementing, each design driven decisions you are taking are they helping your customers to achieve something more? Analytics data can help you surely with user behavior and usage of a certain component, but only customers can tell what they are liking and what they are expecting from your product.
Take feedbacks
Taking feedbacks is the best way to know what a customer is thinking about you. In the reviews, customer reveal not only the good and the bad about your service, but also they provide valuable inputs which you can leverage to build an awesome business.
Which clients are going to stick around?
Ask your team. The metrics talk. You must track the usage and Listen to what your customers are saying.
See what Slack founder Stewart Butterfield said about metrics of Slack —
“But at the end of the day, only you can really determine your company’s magic numbers — the numbers that shed light on who is really using your product (and how you can get them to keep using it).”
For Slack, the number is 2,000–2,000 messages. “Based on experience of which companies stuck with us and which didn’t, we decided that any team that has exchanged 2,000 messages in its history has tried Slack — really tried it. Regardless of any other factor, after 2,000 messages, 93% of those customers are still using Slack today.”
In this post we discussed why listening to the voice of your customer is important for your business.
What has changed in the last few months?
This question can be a lifesaver.
Question your system and see did you made any improvement from where you were before 3 to 4 months? If a customer told something is not right did you made it right? If you wanted to change how your company responds to your customers are you realizing any good vibe now?
Self evaluating help us all to walk a long mile.
Are you walking an extra mile to ensure your customer satisfaction?
Are your customers liking your product or they want to love your product or they love your product? Irrespective of which stage your product has if you want your customers to brag about your product it is always about small gestures.
It’s the little things that matter”
Here are some things that can be done to improve customer satisfaction:
- Rather than telling someone where to find it, if possible include a link to the item.
- Apologize if the customer had to wait to reach you or the customer faced some issues with your product.
- Asking if you can so something more for them.
- Follow up and see if their problem has been solved and if have anything more to say.
- Send thank you notes.
- Tell them how important they are to you.
Finding solution
Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers.
- Voltaire
The answer lies in asking right questions and when coming across any problem asking why is best to get to the root cause.
Taiichi Ohno, the architect of the Toyota Production System in the 1950s, describes the “5 Why” method in his book Toyota Production System: Beyond Large-Scale Production . Taiichi said by repeating why five times, the nature of the problem, as well as its solution becomes clear.
when Buffer followed 5 why method following a system-wide outage in early 2014 and this is what it looked like:
Not only problem asking why can also help you understand why something is working. Ask a client why did they choose you? Ask your team why a client is sticking around? and will know which is working and which is not.
**Which questions do you ask to improve your customer success?