How to Keep Customers Happy If You’re in Hypergrowth Mode

Customer success, although a relatively “new” function in the tech world has been around since businesses began. High customer satisfaction is one of the primary drivers of growth, referrals and recurring business. Not much has changed since the beginning of time; it’s people working with people. Whether you are in a B2C or B2B organization, you’re working with people, and people come to expect world-class customer experience and support. Embodying the mindset of “what would I expect, if I was receiving this service?” can go a long way when framing out your customer success process. In this article, learn how our world class customer success team provides white glove service without going over budget or overtime.

Understand your customers goals and objectives at kickoff

Now that you’ve acquired your customer, thanks to the amazing efforts of your go-to-market team (which includes PR, marketing, sales, expansion), it’s important to understand why your customer is here and what’s going to get them to stay.

A kickoff meeting or survey is a great way to get to know your customer and understand their goals and objectives. This will inform your customer success team with the best resources to provide your customer so they can effectively hit their goals and objectives. It also serves as a training ground for how your customer interacts with your team. You should train your customer on how best to get support, whether it’s contacting their customer success manager, going through your support channels, or how to fish and efficiently search when it comes to self-service.

The key here is to put in the work upfront which will pay long-term dividends down the road. By enabling your customers with the right tools to be successful, this will minimize escalations, support inquiries and questions that could be answered via self-service if they knew where to find them.

Conduct quarterly business reviews

A quarterly business review can be in the form of a survey or a meeting depending on the size of your account. This critical review should provide your customer with meaningful data that shows they are making progress toward their goals. Make sure to recap what was covered in the kickoff and see if they’re progressing. It’s important at this time to understand if they are facing any roadblocks, feature gaps, resource constraints, or any lack of enablement. Your customer success team should have a playbook on how to address roadblocks to get your customer back on track. For example, if your customer is facing a resource constraint, if available, you could tap into your partner network to supplement their development efforts.

Keep a pulse on your customers’ implementation. If you wait until your renewal time (a year out) and you then discover they weren’t successful with your tool in any way, your chances of recovery are cut by 90% because time is no longer on your side.

Empower your customers with self service through clear documentation and resources

Regardless of our industry, self service resources are key to efficiently scale your customer success org. When you’re first starting out, basic feature documentation will get your customers going. Acknowledge that some people consume information better via reading comprehension, while others consume better as a visual and auditory learner, so make sure you have a good combination of written documentation and supplement with short digestible videos.

Confirm your documentation is clearly segmented for your target audience by user personas. Also have a powerful integrated search. Community can come at a later stage but can be a powerful tool and resource for your customers to work with their peers versus having to work 1 on 1 with your internal teams.

Find patterns with customer success and product with 360 degree support

Whether you have implemented chat bots or have real human support, tag your common requests. I recommend a monthly or quarterly review based on ticket volume to understand any gaps in self service resources. If you find a theme in similar requests, assume they will continue to come until you deal with them.

Make sure to add these common questions to your FAQ’s on your documentation and/or community sites. This is a continual process that will likely never have an end but is critical to keep your content fresh with the goal of reducing support inquiries to help you efficiently scale. It’s also important to monitor your common search queries and optimize your search results on your documentation.

For example, searching “API” in the documentation shows up last in your results but is, in fact, the top query, so it should be moved to the first position. Findability is key to scaling and people are used to the Google experience so mirror this if you have the means.

Additionally, have an intake process for feature requests or bugs and make sure your customers are sharing business impact. Customer requests should be tagged by the requestor so your customer success manager keeps a close eye on these and also reviews them with the customer in your next review.

And one last thought

We are at another inflection point in business today as we start to see our world and our customers adapt to a hybrid life. Amidst this far-reaching shift, providing consistent, world-class customer service becomes more important than ever. It’s an investment that pays off for everyone and ultimately enables deeper relationships and more meaningful connections between individuals and businesses in a world in which we must continue to expect the unexpected.