How To Leverage Education To Increase Customer Satisfaction
For new businesses, scaling customer success organizations to profitably satisfy the demands of an ever-growing client base can seem daunting. However, it does not have to be.
I'd like to introduce me : I'm Gerard Recio, Director of Customer Success - Commercial at Hootsuite.
- educated over 450,000 students across the globe
- Accredited 72,000 students
- Enrolled more than 1,000 schools
In this article will cover:
- Defining customer success
- Identifying why customer retention is crucial
- Outlining the three fundamental blocks to increase customer satisfaction
Let's get started!
Defining customer success
Let's begin at the beginning - what does customer success mean?
I prefer to sum up it using a formula I've seen used by others: CX + CO = CX
A customer's experience (CX) is the place where everything begins. Customer experience includes a mix of both frontline teams including customer service, customer success and so on. as well as the product teams within.
They work together to achieve customer outcomes (CO). Customer outcomes are their company's goals or objectives that they want to achieve using your service or product.
If you can do this, you could make a difference in the customer experience (CS) through your products and services.
Why retention of customers is important
Then I'm going to ask you, which is your most valued client? You can't let go.
You've heard that says it's more costly find a new customer as it is to retain the one you already have. It can take up to five times more.
This is why the most valuable asset is your existing customers. That's the reason why retention is among the key methods of growth for every business.
We'll look at a real-world instance:
- The company A is experiencing 20percent growth in new customers, and its retention rate of customers is 85%. Therefore, net growth in customers is 5 percent.
- Company B is experiencing 20 percent growth in new customers while its retention is 95 95%. So, its growth in net customers has been 15 percent.
Businesses that are able to expand their customer service organization, produce a quality product, implement a successful expansion plan, etc. will increase their retention between 85% and 95 percent.
Why is that ten percentage point difference significant? Since a 5 percent increase in retention can grow profit by 75%. That's hundreds of millions of dollars of income over a 3-year duration.
So, how do we get that additional retention rate? CX + CO = CS.
A positive user experience across the entire journey can help them to achieve their goals and increase customer retention rates.
How can you scale up the customer's success
In an ideal scenario, customer success looks something like this:
In reality it's more like this:
This is because the newer companies face a variety of challenges that I refer to as"the "perfect storm," that includes:
- Hypergrowth
- Stretched CSM capacity
- Weak product strategy
- There are no playbooks or checklists.
- No education strategy to improve customer performance
If a company is suffering from the perfect storm situation the customer success team will likely think they're mowing the lawn, one blade of grass at each moment.
This is the right time to alter the course of your business and grow your customer success team to achieve meaningful value for both the company and its customers. How? With these three building blocks for scale:
- Make your foundation
- Operationalize your systems ( Pro suggestion : online education is an important factor in this)
- Develop a focus on the customer
Let's dig into each.
Building Block #1 Create your foundation
The first step on the journey to scaling customer satisfaction is to establish the foundation of your business with
- Segmentation
- People
- Process
Segmentation
Segmentation is essential because it essentially helps your organization identify how online education is a part of.
Customer success organizations typically have a three-tiered engagement model.
- The low-touch interactions are typically designed for the least-paying customers. With this model, CSMs manage 200+ accounts.
- Medium-touch interactions can be handled by CSMs who manage 40-100 accounts.
- High-touch engagements are your strategic customers who likely make up 20% of your company however account for the majority of revenues. Customers who pay more typically demand high-end service. CSMs usually manage a lesser number of customers.
Now my question is, do you think it is possible to manage over 200 accounts with no online education? I can't either.
Digital engagement is an important element of the success of any low-touch customer success team. Digital engagement includes:
- Automated email
- Webinars
- Videos
- Online education landing pages
As you scale up the amount of content you offer on digital engagement could be a great resource for medium and higher-touch customers. But don't forget that customers that pay more require a more personalized educational service with specially trained CSMs.
People
The next step in making your foundation strong is to build relationships with people.
It's not a surprise that CSMs are busy. Within the context of an ordinary day, they're doing:
- Training
- Reviews of business
- Renewals
- Sales operations
- Contacting the support team
- Communication with internal teams
Plus!
As you establish your base the company should establish the things that are repeatable over time for example, onboarding, training, and support, and create an online education course around this.
Process
The final step in building your foundation is to establish your processes.
There should be a system in place for each step in the journey of a customer. In other words, they must have a checklist of
- Steps to be taken
- Resources to use
- Education resources for online use to help create
By doing this, organizations can take the repeatable procedures and incorporate them in a playbook. Playbooks that are documented will enable you to scale.
Pro tip: Work with your data team to identify the actions that customers must perform within your service to see its value.
Building Block 2 Implementation of your systems
After you've established your foundation, you can start to implement your system that includes:
- Setting KPIs that go beyond renewal rates
- Implementing CS systems
- Monitoring the systems
KPIs beyond Renewal Rate
A person's health score can consist of multiple measures that include:
- Adoption
- Activities
- Basic functionality
- Number of active days
- Opportunities to open up-sells
- Upsell is a winner
We can also do better. We can create next-level health scorecards to support customer outcomes and give companies complete information about the client.
What is the best way to accomplish this? Implementing under one single customer success tool.
Install CS Systems
CS tools are a combination of various programs which your team of customer service has already been working on, as well as allowing the monitoring of various elements of your customer's health score.
The role of online education is to action: Automation in the CS tool can drive lower-touch customers directly to your online education program. In this case, businesses can track usage information in their CS tool. When engagement of a customer drops to a specific level, the tool can initiate an automated program that sends an email to the user with a hyperlink to education online training courses.
In essence, everything can be done by hand for a high-touch customer engagement model. But companies can be much more efficient in scaling their workforces by using a CS tools and an online education system.
Check those systems
When you've created more specific KPIs, and set up the CS instrument, you're now ready to monitor your software.
When we think of the perfect storm scenario, CSMs generally serve as the initial second line of defense. They contact the support team to get assistance after the issue has been resolved they follow up with the support team. CSM follows up with links to the online education program.
It is necessary to reverse this trend.
In order to scale a low-touch client success organization, we need to take the lead in online education.
If you are monitoring your education online program It will show:
- What courses are being taught?
- When customers have begun with a recommended course
- Overall customer progress
- The rate of completion of courses
The monitoring feature of the online education platform will reduce the amount of support tickets which support staff will resolve. It will also reduce reactive engagements and instead, help CSMs concentrate on proactive engagements which drive the strategic interactions with customers and results.
Ultimately, the CS tool can help take the CSM away from repeatable processes while still providing quality to the customers with high-end technology.
Building Block 3: Drive a customer-first mindset
After you've established the foundation of your business and have implemented your system, you're ready to drive customers-first thinking throughout your organization.
A mission that is centered around the customer is driven by cross-functional accountability within the internal department. That means promoting a customer-first attitude doesn't just stop on the front lines. In fact, it's integrated throughout the company.
Also, it is important to establish a great internal feedback strategy to help customers, especially those who are struggling or in danger of churning and achieving their goals for business. Utilizing feedback information gathered by the monitoring of your systems could lead to meaningful changes within your customer satisfaction program in order in order to provide more benefits to your customers.
For example, internal customer-facing departments often wish to serve their customers the most - however, they require a method to prioritize their work. That means that they must know which customers have a healthy status or need help most. The teams are able to pull this information straight through the CS tool and determine which customers they need to be engaging with to help their customers realize the worth of the product.
At the end of the day, each business is hungry for data. At this stage, you've done the work to create your foundation, and then operationalize your internal systems to create important customer information. So, use the data. By doing this, you'll turn your business to a business that is centered around the customer.
Are you ready to begin scaling?
In the same vein, scaling a customer success company can be like cutting one blade of grass each moment. But there are steps organizations can take to better support the teams that support their customers.
It boils down to placing the three building blocks into action by:
- Establishing your base through identifying repeatable processes that can be supported by online learning.
- Implementing your system, so you create an automated feedback loop that allows your clients to be able to begin self-serving.
- Driving a customer-first mindset using the latest data to establish a feedback process in your business.
With the correct components and technologies to help along the way You've got an efficient machine that will effectively serve as many customers as is possible.