Customer Success

What is customer success?

Nurturing and growing relationships with your customers is critical for boosting your bottom line and building brand loyalty. But what’s the secret to a highly effective customer success strategy that optimizes customer retention and satisfaction? In a word (or two) - customer education.

With the cost of customer acquisition steadily increasing over the last decade, investing in customer success has become mission-critical for businesses.

Now more than ever, organizations need to focus on nurturing and strengthening their relationships with existing customers. This means proactively anticipating customer challenges ahead of time and swiftly responding to them whenever they occur.

“Focus on improving the customer or partner experience to help them achieve the value gains they are seeking should be your first priority,” says Yves Pahud, a senior marketing executive and Oracle partner advisory board member. “Revenue growth is the by-product…Add value; revenue will follow.”

In other words, helping your customers make the most of your product and achieve their goals, boosts customer happiness and retention, as well as the bottom line.

It’s clear that enabling users to maximize the value they get from your solution is critical for customer success. So how do you make that happen? The answer is customer education.

Why customer success matters

It’s crucial to think of your company’s approach to customer success as a dynamic, rather than static, aspect of your overall business strategy. Since customer needs typically change over time, you’ll need to regularly evaluate your product and make changes accordingly.

By being responsive to the evolving desires of your clients, you can create a solution that will best fit their unique needs and will resonate with customers for years to come. This, in turn, builds customer loyalty and transforms your clients into advocates for your brand.

Customer success is also critical for your company’s bottom line. It can dramatically reduce churn rates and improve renewals, leading to higher revenue for your organization.

“I’ve always believed that a Customer Support Department should be renamed as the Revenue Generation Department. If the agents handle the customer well, they will come back, [and] spend more,” says Shep Hyken, a prominent Customer Service and Experience Expert.

But providing lightning-fast responses to customer concerns and adjusting your product accordingly is only the first step. You need to teach them how to make the most of your product.

It’s time to embrace customer education platforms and customer training as a key part of the customer success role. This provides your clients with detailed guidance on how they can best leverage your product. At the same time, it teaches them how to maximize the value they can derive from your solution.

Customer education is no longer optional. Training your customers on the concepts behind your products and the best ways to use them can make the difference between top-tier customer success and losing a client.

The numbers speak for themselves. Data collected by TSIA shows that 68% of trained customers reported using products more often. In addition, 56% said they use more product features, and a further 87% stated that they are able to use the product more independently.

Customer education is a transformative tool for customer success. It enables your business to proactively manage the client experience, by guiding customers directly to the benefits and features of your solution that they’ll love.

3 elements of effective customer success

When developing your customer success strategy, there are several fundamental elements that must be part of your plan:

Implement a customer success solution

Leverage a third party tool that will help you analyze and keep track of your customer success team’s victories and weak spots. Seek out solutions that will help you and your team gauge the efficacy of your customer outreach and responses to inquiries.

Expertly train your customer success team

Customer expectations are higher than ever, and your team should be made aware of that. Set the bar sky high, and make it clear that your organization considers customer satisfaction a top priority. Make sure your team understands that both strengthening your brand’s relationship with its clients and customer enablement is of paramount importance.

Create a customer success strategy for your team

In order to ensure your customer success team is able to provide stellar service, you’ll need to develop a game plan for them to follow. That means setting KPIs which can let them know if they’re up to par or need to improve, establishing concrete goals and best practices, and fostering a culture in which long-term customer success is a core company value.

This is where Strigo comes in!

Strigo’s powerful Product Education Platform enables software/SaaS companies to provide highly engaging learning experiences at scale ensuring success for your learners, your company and yourself. By delivering hands-on interactive educational content, you can support the entire customer success lifecycle — onboarding, certification and ongoing training, as well as support, marketing, sales and POCs.

With our hands-on training platform, companies can provide their learners with:

• On-demand customer training - Interactive self-paced learning sessions that drive learner engagement and ensure knowledge retention.
• Virtual instructor-led training (VILT) - Immersive learning experiences that maximize customer engagement while empowering trainers.
• Virtual hands-on labs - Practical hands-on learning labs where customers can train on any software product in their own cloud-based environment.

Our platform supports your customer success strategy by empowering both the trainers and the trainees and providing all the tools needed to achieve optimal learner engagement. We have helped our customers ramp up their customer success programs while significantly improving their learner engagement and completion rates, leading to far better time-to-value, customer retention and account growth.