As a customer success professional, customer experience is at the forefront of your function. It underlines most of your priorities from day to day. But it’s easy to get laser-focused on your team’s current priorities and KPIs, especially if you’re handling company-wide OKRs as well.
So what do you? In this article, we’re going to explore several ways to keep the customer experience a priority while also juggling more immediate goals, specifically:
- Prioritizing customer goals
- Building seamless inter-departmental collaboration
- Outstanding onboarding
- Using data-driven and empathy-balanced approaches
- Being proactive and predictive with customer engagement
Let’s dig a little deeper.
Prioritize customer goals and success
Amongst all the juggling of day-to-day tasks and project management, it can seem like an annoyance to think about customer goals rather than your own. But as with all things engagement-based, thinking about customer goals will help you to align and prioritize your own.
Focus on what success looks like from your customer’s perspective, not just your own internal metrics like NPS, ARR and CSAT. It’s your role to understand their goals and guide them toward achieving these objectives.
Your main goal should be to act as a guide rather than just a service provider.
Think about your work with a customer-centric approach by starting with the customer's needs and wants rather than just focusing on hitting KPIs and monitoring internal metrics. Oftentimes, you’ll hit these without direct influence if you’re keeping your customers’ goals your top priority.
For example:
Imagine you’re a customer success manager working for a project management software company. One of your customers, a small marketing agency, isn't using the software as much as expected, and you learn that the agency wants to improve project delivery times and client satisfaction.
With this insight, you can begin to tailor your approach to this customer goal, recommending specific features that streamline workflows and improve client communication. Maybe you’ll also be able to recommend a specific customer education learning flow to cater to this need.
As a result, the customer will see tangible improvements and you, the customer success manager, will also find that your own KPIs improve naturally.
Seamless and transparent inter-departmental collaboration
This is a big one. If you’re not working in a customer-centric environment, you’ll likely face more issues when it comes to proving the value of prioritizing customer experiences.
In sales-led or product-led organizations, customer-centricity takes the back seat to revenue goals or product development. In this instance, you’ll end up doing a lot of your groundwork for building a customer success function that supports delivering a good customer experience. This will come from your relationships with individuals in your own team, and cross-functional teams you work most closely with.
To keep that customer experience at the front of everyone’s mind, ensure that the departments you work with (sales, support, product, marketing) deliver consistent messaging and work together to provide a cohesive customer experience.
This will come with building a function that has built-in touchpoints for transparency and communication between teams. Regular communication and discussion with teams will help prevent the perception gap and align efforts.
Creating the right internal culture is a vital step to ensure that customer experience throughout the whole journey is consistent and reliable.
Nicole Birbas, Senior Director APAC Customer Success at Klaviyo, described this correlation best at Customer Success Festival Sydney 2022:
"There's clearly a real link between creating a fantastic culture and environment for people to work and thrive and then deliver great customer experiences, which leads to a reduction in churn and an increase in lifetime value."
This step is also vital because there is a big link between engaged employees and engaged customers. A recognizable goal of marketing is getting your customers to care about your product is a recognizable goal of customer success and marketing efforts, but it’s just as important to get your internal teams to show the same level of interest.
Making sales, marketing, product, and other teams care about customer engagement along the whole customer journey will improve overall revenue, and improved customer engagement and loyalty.
As noted by Nicole Birbas:
"According to Gallup, companies that have a highly-engaged workforce have a significantly higher profitability (23%) and productivity (18%)."
Outstanding customer onboarding
The beginning is a very good place to start - this goes the same for your customer success function. A well-structured customer onboarding process can significantly influence the long-term relationship and engagement with your product.
Make sure customers understand how to use your product effectively and feel supported from the start, either through the use of customer education strategies, community spaces, or strong customer support.
Subash Srinivasan, Head of Global Delivery and Customer Success at Rockwood and Symphony for the Unified Cloud View, describes this concept as 'sipping your own champagne':
"We use our product in everything that we do We use it for our team meetings. We use it as a single source of truth where we get on the same page with the other."
If you can use your product within your own work processes, do so! Whatever your product is, whether it’s something organizational, metrics monitoring, or a gamification platform - you must be intimately familiar with it in order to accurately cater to your customers.
Data-driven and empathy-balanced approach
Feedback, whether it’s quantitative or qualitative, is the golden nugget to ensuring you’re making the right adjustments for the customer engagement responses you want to see.
This will come in the form of data collection and analysis but also focus groups, community outreach, customer surveys and more. When it comes to feedback, use data to drive upcoming and future decisions but make sure to balance it with empathy and authentic interactions.
Understanding and responding to customers’ emotional needs while using data to identify trends and patterns enhances the customer experience from all sides of the user experience.
Proactive and predictive customer engagement
Data is also a useful tool when it comes to predictive analysis and shortening response times to unexpected issues when they arise.
Regular monitoring also means you’ll begin to understand the language of your customers’ specific data. Recognizing patterns in your data, and noticing when the pattern changes is an absolutely invaluable skill to have as a customer success professional.
Making changes before pain points turn into full-blown reasons to churn is also a fantastic way to show your customers that you care about their experience, turning the relationship from a transactional one to a true partnership.
David Collard
For example:
Let’s return to our previous hypothetical.
You’re a customer success manager, and are regularly monitoring user activity data. You start to notice a pattern: most users log in daily during the work week, with activity peaking on Wednesday afternoons.
Then, on a Wednesday afternoon, you suddenly observe an unusual dip in Wednesday logins. Instead of waiting for customers to report issues, you investigate the issue and discover that a recent software update has caused slower loading times during peak periods.
Without waiting for customer complaints to come rolling in, you immediately alert the technical team, who quickly optimize the software's performance.
You’ll then be able to reach out to the affected customers and explain the situation and the steps you’ve taken to resolve it.
This approach accomplishes several things:
- It addresses the issue before many customers even notice, preventing potential frustration and support tickets.
- It demonstrates to customers that their experience is being actively monitored and cared for.
- It transforms what could have been a negative experience into a positive one, showing customers that you’re attentive and responsive to their needs.
- It potentially prevents customer churn by addressing issues before they become significant enough to make customers consider leaving.
So there you have it! Our top five key ideas to help you bring customer experience to the forefront of your customer success priorities.
Have we piqued your CX interest?
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