Editorial
The Gist
- Focused reallocation. Companies are shifting resources to customer success and customer retention strategies in a changing economic landscape.
- Cross-functional approach. Customer success should collaborate with product and marketing teams to create a unified customer experience.
- Automation balance. Efficient use of automation while maintaining personalized customer interaction can scale customer success efforts.
Though the US continues to make strides away from a recession, companies are still navigating the complex changes to business practices many were required to make in the first half of 2023. In many cases, traditional longer-term forecast and budget cycles have been replaced by shorter, more agile reviews and adjustments.
Part of that activity is definitely related to cost savings, but a significant portion is related to reallocating funds toward programs and technology that is driving the right outcomes. In fact, Gartner reports companies are increasing their IT spend — anticipated to grow to $4.7 trillion before the end of the year — on automation software specifically, prioritizing optimization, productivity and efficiency gains above all else.
Let's take a look at customer success and customer retention strategies.
How can your customer success (CS) team continue to drive retention in this environment? Get clear on how your customers can meet their goals with your technology or service and make sure they know when they’re achieving them.
Customer Success: A Cross-Functional, Customer-Centric Approach
In order to retain your customers, you have to chart an intentional path to value. Study your healthiest customers and partner with your product team to identify key behaviors associated with customer success across the lifecycle. Translate those into profiles that take into account the jobs that they're looking to do with your product, their definitions of success and the friction they may encounter.
At its core, the customer experience is the sum of all the touchpoints a customer has with your company — not just customer success. However, customer success can play a key role in helping your company design an integrated, cross-functional, customer-centric experience around the critical milestones at the right times. Building a strong partnership with your product team will help them iteratively design in-product experiences to guide users to the key moments of value quickly. Working together with your marketing team will help them create more customer-centric automated nurture campaigns that focus on those key milestones. Your customer success teams can then layer coaching, training and guidance through 1:1 and 1:many engagements. The goal here is to create a cross-team experience that is working together to lead your customers to success.
As you get a clearer picture of your various key customer profiles, you can start to create versions of that cross-functional experience to more effectively help them. Be careful to not splinter your focus too much — having a clear picture of who your key customers are is important.
A big part of a customer success leader’s responsibility is to drive customer-centricity and be the voice of the customer internally to shape how all teams think about their work. Driving cross-functional awareness and incorporation of your actual customers’ needs into product, marketing and other teams’ work is critical to retention.
Related Article: Building the Best Customer Success Team
Use Automation for Efficiency While Preserving the Customer Experience
A study from McKinsey & Company found that companies that focus on good user experience design benefit from greater customer loyalty, increased revenue and a higher market valuation. Pairing personalization with automation can strengthen the relationship with your customers at a greater scale than solely relying on 1:1 conversations.
Using your cross-functionally charted path to value, determine the key moments at which a customer success manager is uniquely positioned to add value. For any other moments — notifying of product releases, delivering general best practice tips, or offering trainings on product fundamentals — increasingly rely on scaled methods of delivery. These can span automated emails, in-app messaging, and a program of 1:many training options through which your customers can help themselves.
Using a thoughtful blend of automation and face-to-face engagements will ensure that you’re both reaching as many customers as possible while still developing deeper relationships with those that are of your highest focus.
Related Article: Gathering Consumer Data That Matters for Measuring Customer Success
Invest in the CX-Sales Relationship to Drive Retention and Growth
The strongest customer success teams are those that understand sales and customer success are better together. Investing in developing trust and collaboration between your customer success and sales motions is critical to finding the right opportunities for account growth that are beneficial for both your customer and you. Aligning the sales and customer success motions intentionally across the lifecycle will ensure that your customer success team has the space to nurture and bring customers to value and that your sales teams are then ready to consult and guide them toward growth. Waiting to do this until your customers have realized value is critical to preserving trust.
Each team member sharing their expertise can also drive overall account growth. Sales teams are consistently vetting leads, engaging with prospects and determining why your product will — or, more importantly, won’t — make it through the buying process. These “behind-the-scenes” insights will come in handy for customer success teams as they can lean on their sales partners to better navigate challenging circumstances in account engagement.
Chances are that your sales team has seen it all. In the cases where the sales cycle closes successfully, your sales team’s deep knowledge of the customer and their learned pain points will guide the strategy, approach and definition for success to keep the customer on a path to renewal.
You should also partner with sales to define the clear criteria to signal customers that are ready and would benefit from growth through expanded scope or products. Look to new tools such as AI-powered health scoring to help. Bring your data together and create actionable dashboards so you can focus your efforts where they’re most likely to pay off.
Related Article: The Third Eye: 6 Ways to Make Customer Success as Strategic as Sales and Marketing
Customer Success: A Predictable, Consistent, Delightful Customer Experience — Always
Providing a predictable, consistent, delightful experience for your customer should remain your North Star, regardless of the ups and downs of the economy. On average, repeat customers spend 67% more on your business than new customers, so ensuring that your customer success, product, marketing, sales, and other teams are making positive, intentional impressions on customers is crucial for driving revenue for the business. It’s your team’s job to make sure every interaction with customers, from connecting together live in a meeting to ensuring they’re engaging with content across your properties, will reinforce their decision to partner with you.
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By intentionally orchestrating a journey through meetings, content and campaigns that articulate value, and leveraging the most of the sales-CX relationship, you’ll create a strong, scalable framework for driving growth through customer success, retention and expansion.
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