Ask yourself this question. Who would you say is the most important person for your company’s success? The CEO? Wrong! The customer? Well, yes surely. But how about thinking beyond the customer –how about delighting the customer’s customer – the end consumer? If your business loses track of this chain, well….let’s just say, you are not in the right path of a services industry. Today, you not only have to align yourself with your customer’s goals but also go further and delight your customers’ end customers.
This is why it’s crucial to deploy customer engagement and relationship management strategies to ensure that customers realize the true value of their investments. This helps reduce churn, boost revenues and influence new sales while improving productivity and delivering tangible outcomes.
So how do you know if your company is providing customers with a delightful experience to keep them happy and hungry for more?
Here are 4 ways to build effective customer success management (CSM) programs:
1. Identify the right customer engagement approach
Brands that are committed to customer success truly believe their customers come first. They see the world and their business through the eyes of their customers. They ensure that their organization’s business culture is aligned with their customer’s needs to identify opportunities and produce high-quality products.
The absolute first place to start is to identify how success is measured by your customer and what is important to their end customer. Then maniacally focus on making sure your company takes all the necessary actions to achieve this goal. Remember to keep in mind that your CSM strategy will depend on the nature of your customers’ issues the value it brings to your organization for end consumer’s, and the costs associated with delivering CSM services. Knowing this, you can rank your customers and decide where to target your CSM efforts to gain maximum results.
2. Deliver long-standing customer delight
While it’s laudable for enterprises to aim for a CSM culture, the process gets more efficient and easier when all employees buy-into it. Along with establishing strong customer relationships, an organization needs to be well supported from the management perspective in order to understand customer business requirements. The key is to analyze and target end-users’ interests to consistently deliver great service and gain end-consumer loyalty.
Organizations that treat customers well tend to succeed! It’s not just about transactions, making high performance sales, or exceeding expectations, but also about building in-depth relationships …and being passionate about it. This attitude helps customers build trust in a brand, resulting in better customer response, partnerships, ROI, and business engagement.
3. Establish long-term commitment
An organization may have the best CSM team in place, but if customer retention is not part of the planned strategy, then it’s time to re-structure the approach. Let’s say a customer, Mr. X, is treated with the best possible service prior to sale and promptly forgotten after the sale. This reflects poorly on the organization. Focusing on the big picture is therefore critical. Not only that Mr. X has to be taken care off but customers of Mr. X have also to be taken care off and that’s when Mr. X can be even more successful. The most successful companies regularly rejuvenate their teams with training in managing not just the relationships with their customers but end-consumers as well.. This helps team members network and develop long-lasting relationships with their target audience.
4. Focus on the customer success through continuous engagement
Get involved with the entire life cycle of the customer, from the time you first sign them up until you continuously transform their business. Customer delight is the only parameter in this world which does not have an upper limit to measure and delight. Work to develop best practices, efficient processes and strategic blueprints that define success, so your trail of customers can fully utilize your products or services. Keep in mind, customers want to talk, express and enquire about anything and everything that a brand/product has to offer. What do they expect? A quick response from businesses through a channel of their choice!
Create a portal or a platform for your customers to interact with your company. A good customer success manager will encourage networking and interaction between customers, and will collaborate with the marketing teams to run customer focused events. A strong online social media presence is also a must to interact with today’s digitally savvy end-consumer. Keeping them updated with the latest trends, market sales, brand differentiators and business events promotes brand uniqueness and eventually gains higher customer response and loyalty.
In summary, delighting the customer is now a norm and is taken for granted.
So ask yourself how you can delight your customer’s customer? How to impact both stake holders in the process?