How Customer Success Drives Revenue Growth

The foundation of any successful business has always been attracting new customers and retaining existing ones. In light of this, many companies are swiftly adopting a new philosophy focused on assisting clients in succeeding. They believe that by developing a successful customer-sales partnership, the business will be unstoppable. This approach is called customer success.

In this article, we’ll provide you with a clear overview of what customer success is all about. Cover how it differs from standard customer service or support. And most importantly, discuss how integrating customer success into your business can help with revenue growth. So, keep on reading to learn more.

Understanding the Concept of Customer Success

Customer success is a business strategy that aims to help your clients be most successful with your products. Its goal is to provide them with the best resources, in this case, your products and services, and help them achieve their goals as your customer.

In action, your commitment is more than just closing a deal and letting the customer utilize your product. You also focus on establishing a strategic partnership with them so that you can build a loyal customer base.

Here are the must-know steps to take to make your customer success work:

• Understand your customer’s goals and objectives
• Conduct data-driven research to know what they think of your product overall
• Give them information about how they can succeed in using your product

More than ever, your business should offer more than just support. Your customer services (CS) teams must incorporate several functions within the company, such as sales, marketing, business strategy, technology, and account management.

What Separates Customer Success From Customer Support?

It may appear unclear to look at both functions, but you must know that what sets customer success aside is its proactiveness. Meanwhile, customer support is reactive.

Simply put, customer success strives to give consumers resources and tools to help them prevent problems or concerns before they arise. Whereas customer support deals with issues as they come up.

To better grasp both approaches, let’s look at their essential functions:

Customer Support

• Answers product-related questions
• Provides customers solutions for their concerns about the product
• Fulfills special requests related to the product
• Follows the metrics that include the time to respond, handle time, first response resolution, and customer satisfaction

Customer Success

• Collaborates with customers to maximize their use of the product
• Enhances customer experience by establishing and preserving strong connections
• Increases client satisfaction
• Educates your customers with regards to onboarding, upgrades, and product updates
• Encourages communication within teams to address customer’s concerns better
• Follows the metrics that include expansion rate, churn rate, average MRR, and customer health

As you can notice, customer support is reactive to the needs of consumers. However, the functions do not go beyond that. Despite that, know that it’s part of the overall success. Along with customer success, they build customer loyalty and make their relationship with you flourish.

How Does Customer Success Drive Revenue Growth?

Customer success significantly affects a company in three areas: upselling, reducing churn, and converting renewals. Let’s see how it influences each mentioned:

1. Customer Success drives upsell revenue.

There’s no question in the thought that company objectives and consumers’ wants are constantly evolving. In light of this, you need to be consistent in evaluating your customers’ needs and helping them accomplish their goals. And that’s what customer success is all about.

Your customer service team must advise your customers on how they can make the most out of your products. Provide them with features or services they need to be successful with your product. This upselling happens naturally, as if you become a reliable partner more than a salesperson.

2. Customer Success reduces churn.

Knowing that your customers have access to your competitors’ pricing and reviews, staying with you is a matter of choice. So, you have to make sure to make their moments with you special.

While your CS team is building relationships with customers to avoid churn, they should also anticipate probable departure by using the customer success approach. As mentioned earlier, customer success has metrics that include churn rate. This metric data will be your basis for knowing the chances of your customers leaving.

From there, plan how you’ll step up your game to win their hearts back. Remember, gaining new customers is more expensive than retaining the existing ones. But if you still plan to gain more customers, follow our digital marketing optimization tips.

3. Customer Success facilitates the renewal process.

More businesses are shifting to the subscription model instead of offering clients large, one-time bargains. Because in that scenario, products need to prove their worth before each contract renewal. Given that there’s nearly always another competitor or variant of the product that customers can select, a renewal depends on assisting customers in continuing to see value in and success with the product. So what’s the role of customer success here?

Following the customer success approach, you assign a team dedicated to renewal. However, it can also be your CS team. Since they are already maintaining the relationship, making renewal negotiations will be easy. The goal is to handle renewal negotiations while balancing out their strategic partnership duties with customers. Accomplishing this will result in successful renewal conversions.

The Takeaway

The cultural emphasis on putting your customers nowadays makes customer success crucial for any company. Incorporating this approach will not only improve your customer satisfaction but may also simplify your existing processes to maintain strong relationships with customers. And by attracting new clients while keeping existing ones, you also increase your profit. So, start employing customer success in your businesses to witness noticeable growth in your revenues.