A customer success strategy provides your business with a framework for how you can maintain a happy client base, while also ensuring that your products or services are up-to-date. Customer success, where the customers achieve the expected outcomes of a product or service, is integral to your success. 

If you are running a course business, or offering training to other businesses, you need to ensure that your course participants are happy. With a customer success strategy in place you can achieve exactly that. 

What is customer success? 

Customer success is a business strategy that is being deployed to ensure the products that customers buy provide the expected outcome. It is an integral part of any modern business. You use customer success as a strategic method, meaning that you use your own products or services to help customers achieve their goals. There is a continuous improvement of your products to ensure that the goals are met, which is based on the feedback you receive from your customers. 

Customer satisfaction is key to success 

Parallel to the emergence of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) companies, customer success has become a vital part of running a business. At its core it is about retaining customers and ensuring that there is an ongoing renewal of contracts. For that reason, a customer success strategy becomes part of the solution to maintain profitability in the company. 

Customer success in practice 

Customer success focuses on the key goals of your customer as opposed to customer experience and service. Customer success is always tailored to the organisation and the products or services, and the efforts put into practice will always depend on the customer objectives. As a company who provides a product or service, you use the customer success strategy to ensure that you achieve the goals of your client. The product or service is your contribution to achieving the goals as soon as possible. 

A selection of customer success activities 

Outward activities

• Proactive engagement, like customer service that identifies areas where clients are unsure or need assistance. 
• Personalised support, like sales associates who develop deep client relationships.  
• Ongoing assistance, where clients have a key contact person who will help them ad hoc. 

Internal activities 

• Technical enablement, like onboarding of employees in a new product or customer base.
• Knowledge enablement, which is related to technical enablement, but rather linked to formal or informal learning and general knowledge.  
• Identifying growth opportunities. 
• Identifying churn risks.  

Ensure good collaboration internally in order to produce customer satisfaction.

Why do I need a customer success strategy?

If you are selling something and if you have customers, you need to have a customer success strategy in place. The customer success strategy is there to ensure that the customers receive the desired outcomes of the product or service provided. And remember, if they achieve their goals, they are more likely to renew their contract and continue to use your services. They might also recommend you to their network. 

Example 

Let us say you are running a course business. Then you will use customer success as a method to help customers achieve their internal upskilling goals. Your courses – the service and product you offer – is tailored to their employees’ needs and is targeted to the skills gaps that exist within their company. 

How to build a customer success strategy

1. Make a plan for success 

You need to outline how your company intends to build and maintain a meaningful and long-lasting customer relationship with your customers. Start with defining a goal, which is to ensure that they are satisfied with your products or services. Additionally, you need to make more specific goals related to your exact product or service and customer. This entails getting to know your customers, like their demographics or characteristics within the segment. Use this insight to develop targeted goals to attract and retain customers.

2. Onboard your customers 

A key factor to a successful customer success strategy is the onboarding of new customers. They must be familiar with your products or services, and when they are comfortable with how to use them, they are more likely to engage with them and enjoy them. By investing in onboarding, you ensure that your customers explore all the features that give them value. This eliminates the possibility of them overlooking a key selling point and churning because they did not get access to what they were promised. 

3. Ensure ongoing communication

Continuous communication that is clear and compassionate is key to the customer feeling heard and seen. When they feel understood, they also feel like they are being made a priority. When customers experience that they are valued by you, they are more likely to continue using your services or products. 

4. Train you staff 

To ensure good communication, your team must be able to deliver confident and competent services to your customers. When they have the necessary skills and a high level of knowledge, they can provide trustworthy guidance and exceptional service. A strong relationship built on trust is a key factor to customer success.

Read also: Barriers to learning that might appear when doing internal training  

5. Measure effects and make data-driven decisions 

Use customer success metrics and let them be the foundation for your continued improvement. These are calculations or measurements of how well you are handling the client relation and how your customers are experiencing your product or service and your team. You should also monitor key metrics internally and gather feedback and data from customers as well. These two insights will help you make informed decisions and improve the customer experience. 

What are customer success metrics? 

Customer success metrics are tools you use to measure the success of your customer relationships. The metrics are the foundation for how customers, especially leaders, make data-driven decisions. There are many different tools, which measure customer success differently. 

Get an overview of the 6 most common customer success metrics below: 

Summary of the benefits of having a customer success strategy

• It helps retention of existing customers: When you feel valued, you want to keep collaborating with or continue buying the company’s products or services. 
• It saves you money: Retention ensures stability in the customer base, so that you can focus efforts on attracting new clients and drive revenue growth.   
• It improves word-of-mouth: Good customer relationships increase the probability of clients recommending you to other potential customers. Additionally, a good reputation is valuable for brand awareness.   
• It reduces customer churn: Customers retained are customers who do not churn. A low churn rate is essential for a thriving, healthy business. 

Improve customer success with proper onboarding and internal training 

Earlier when we talked about how to build and establish a customer success strategy, we mentioned how you should onboard your clients and ensure the proper internal training for your employees. These are two essential components to a successful customer success strategy. Let us delve into why that is. 

Cultivate success with onboarding 

You should always onboard new customers to ensure that they are comfortable using your services. If you sell software like we do in FrontCore, then you should ensure that they know all the features and have an opportunity to ask questions. 

Additionally, you should always be proactive in offering support to your customers. This entails giving them what they need before they have the time to ask for it – or better yet, before they even know they need it. Provide help, exceed expectations, offer advice or tips, and assist them before they request something or complain about something. 

Proactive customer service takes shape in many different ways. It can be a phone call or an email where you check-in. It can also be an online course or a webinar where you introduce the service. Let us take us in FrontCore as an example again. We offer demonstrations in the TMS and LMS to ensure that all customers feel comfortable with using the software before acquiring it. This is also a great way for us to share best practices, but also get feedback from potential customers on how intuitive the system is to use. 

Read also: Understanding how a LMS works 

Ensure streamlined communication with internal upskilling 

A prerequisite for a successful onboarding and a deliberate communication with customers is competent employees. Your employees must have the communicative skills to handle customer questions and answer these competently. In addition, they must be able to spot the areas where they can expect customers to ask questions. This enables them to be proactive and provide them with the necessary information before they ask. 

A great tool to achieve the necessary alignment across your team is to do internal upskilling. You should set up courses that your colleagues can take to one, be up-to-date on your product og service, and two, to ensure that their communicative and project management skills are up to par. We recommend that you use an online course that is accessible to them anywhere, at any time. That way they can access the course while commuting, working remotely, or if they want to fill an open spot in their calendar quickly. 

Read our guide: How to create an online course 

A commitment to proactive communication throughout will produce happy customers.

Integrate it with a LMS 

Not to mention that you can integrate it with a learning management system (LMS) that you organise the actual courses on. The LMS allows you to design upskilling or onboarding courses that you can share with employees or customers. They can take the course whenever or wherever they want. 

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