A list of top tactics sure to boost customer success and retention
CX ideas and tactics to implement in a solid customer success program. How to align your customer success strategy with sales, marketing, product and business development to create an overall smooth customer experience and design a customer journey that leads to retention and advocacy.
2. Customer Success at a
Glance
Customer success means:
• Establishing a relationship with your clients
• Listening and understanding what their needs are
• Supporting them throughout the journey that leads to
their own goals.
Basic elements of a solid customer success program are:
• Competence
• Strategic plan
• A centralized repository to store all the information you
collect at different stages of the customer journey
• Consistency
• Proper tools to listen, collect feedback, create a
feedback loop and optimize the strategy.
3. Proven
Customer
Success
Tactics
that work
Onboarding and
User Adoption
#1
Talk about Benefits, Not Features
The truth is that no matter how many sleepless
nights you spent creating a great product
roadmap, users are not interest in your
product’s features. Users only care about one
thing: outcome!
When presenting features to your users don’t
focus on characteristics. You need to focus on
the results.
People work with your product because they
have a picture in mind of how their current
situation should improve with it.
4. Push Users to Doing Things
Big presentations, video tutorials, and documentation
delay engagement.
Don’t focus too much on the learning process. Lead
users to engaging with the product as soon as
possible instead. Interactive onscreen guidance is
essential to speed things up.
Provide a Visible Checklist
People hate unchecked list items. When onboarding
new users, make sure that they know all the steps they
need to go through in order to achieve first results with
your product.
Communicate Individually
Users who feel guided during onboarding are more likely
to go through the entire process. Onscreen tours allow
you to steer users through all the processes interactively
and comment on each step while rewarding them
individually.
5. Offer Personalized Reports
Personalization plays a key role in modern
transactions. The entire customer experience
needs to be personalized and users need to monitor
their situation and the progress they’re making.
Make sure you tie each achievement to a solution
of an everyday problem users face.
People feel good about their achievements and if
you also encourage and facilitate sharing you’ll be
able to create a loop that leads to reinforcement.
Intervene
If a user seems to be stuck it’s time to intervene. Ask
questions. Try to understand why they stopped the
process. Monitor their behavior and offer to help.
Collect feedback and come up with a tailored
solution.
6. Proven
Customer
Success
Tactics
that work
Activation
#2
Habit Formation
Make sure you implement clear elements that lead to
habit formation.
If users see something new unfold and they see new
results they’ll be more likely to reserve a time slot to
check in.
Create daily quests and follow your users throughout
the journey! People are tuned to look for novelty
elements.
7. Content and Support
Make sure that your users know that they didn’t just
purchased access to a piece of software but that they
just acquired a whole team of customer success
managers, product managers, engineers, project
managers and business developers that from now on
will work side by side with them towards their goals!
Check-in Calls
Follow your customers at the beginning of their journey.
Try to offer help and make sure that they’re actually
following all the right steps to move on with your
product.
Perks
Offer specific perks to your customers in exchange for
continuous engagement. Create some form of virtual
currency you can use for rewarding active users. Create
a series of activities that will add value to your product
and contribute to their success.
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9. Proven
Customer
Success
Tactics
that work
Churn Prevention
#3
Set Reasonable Expectations
Make sure that nobody in your team overpromises on
the potential outcomes.
Their awareness of what the product can or cannot
deliver is essential. Have room to surprise your
customers by over-delivering and allow them to move
from satisfaction to delight!
Take Users by the Hand
Onboarding walkthroughs are beneficial in terms of
customer retention as well. During the onboarding
phase you set the tone for the relationship with your
customer.
Make sure you're in control of what happens when your
users first sign up.
10. Walk in Your Customer’s Shoes
and Ask for Feedback
The customer experience you created may be optimal to
match your own processes, but you need to be aware
that your customers may come from a very different
place.
Keep monitoring their behavior and ask for feedback to
continuously optimize adoption and implementation
according to their needs.
Never Stop Selling
People are emotional beings. They need support when
they make “rational” decisions but they also need to be
constantly reminded that they made the right choice.
Underline your competitive advantages and unique
selling points to make sure they understand that your
competitor is not going to offer them a better solution.
11. Adapt to Changes
Your product will never be perfect or even complete.
Deliver the best possible solution at each point in
time, show where you’re going and adapt your product
to the market in continuous steps.
Customers can be patient if they’re sure you’re working
on making things better. But they also need a working
solution at each step.
Monitor KPIs and Identify
Signals
Customer satisfaction scores and customer success
metrics, together with VOC solutions and social listening
provide great insights into your customer health.
Be sure you put in place proactive measures to prevent
dissatisfaction and reactive solutions to curb the
damage.
Great customer care can often prevent churn.
12. Proven
Customer
Success
Tactics
that work
Brand Advocacy
#4
Differentiation
Create a personality, show your true colors and let
people identify with your brand and be part of a whole
new world.
Don’t engineer a brand personality with the purpose to
resonate with your customers. The process goes the
other way around. Let your brand personality develop
and attract customer who resonate with it!
Leverage Differentiated Drivers
Identify your main brand advocacy drivers and create a
consistent communication throughout the journey.
13. Ask for Support at the right
Time
The best time to ask for support from your customers is
after helping them solve a problem.
They’ll be more prone to drop a review, a
testimonial, refer your business to their peers and
so on.
Enable and Facilitate Advocacy
Customer loyalty and partnership programs can be
useful to enable advocacy. Referral programs can turn
customers into partners and reinforce your relationship
with them especially if your growth also effects the level
of service you can offer.
Personalized services and key account management
can also spawn advocacy and create endorsers.
14. Proven
Customer
Success
Tactics
that work
Human Interaction
#5
No matter what tactics you adopt. The most
important element of a customer success
program is the human being who listens to the
customers, reads their messages, interprets
the data you collect, and fosters the
relationship with your customers.
Fancy tools and measures can bring you up to
a certain point, but customer success tactics
that work and lead to hyper-growth are those
that involve a certain level of human touch.
Keep it human….keep it real!