Last Updated: April 2024
The E-commerce industry is scaling at a rapid pace. New brands are taking over the market by storm, and newer technology and innovations are changing the horizon of how businesses are being done. This is also scaling the competition between rival brands.
With so many companies offering similar products to a similar target audience, how do you stand out? For one, you have to create a remarkable product. Next, you have to offer an incredible customer experience. However, in today’s era, the latter is quickly rising on the consumers’ priority chart. In fact, a study by Walker reports that customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator in 2020. And this is already happening.
Understandably, brands are shaping their customer experience tactics to help the customers get the desired result from their products or services to encourage them to shop from them again. In simpler words, brands are now focusing more and more on the customer success approach.
What is Customer Success?
According to Forrester Research, 72% of businesses say that improving customer success is their top priority. But what is customer success?
According to The Customer Success Association, “Customer Success is a long-term, scientifically engineered, and professionally directed strategy for maximizing customer and company sustainable proven value”.
However, a common misconception is that customer support and customer success mean the same thing. While customer service is a reactive tactic that focuses on fixing problems faced by a customer, custom success is a proactive strategy that tries to understand and simplify the customer’s desired business outcomes and help them achieve that easily.
Customer support starts on Day 1 of the customer making a purchase, but customer success activities begin much before, right from the development stage of a product to marketing and selling it to providing solutions long after. Thus, in practice, Customer Success integrates the functions and activities of Marketing, Sales, Professional Services, Training, and Support into a new customer-first policy.
EIGHT Customer Success Strategies That Truly Work
An effective customer success strategy involves providing assistance and support to the customer at every stage of their journey with your brand so that they can get the result they want.
Here we will discuss EIGHT effective customer success strategies that your business can start implementing from today.
1. Brand Awareness
Putting the customer success model into action begins way before your customer engages with your business. Most buying decisions, especially for e-commerces, are made online by browsing through your company website or app, and social media. It takes about 50 milliseconds (0.05 seconds) for people to form an opinion about your website (8ways, 2019).
Well, that’s quick, and it makes the point. The online user experience is of prime importance to creating a hook, but retaining that prospect beyond a quick scan happens to be the job of the marketing team. You need to ensure that the company’s messaging and content are consistent and aligned, so as not to let a buyer drop off.
This stage is further important because it is where you nurture potential customers that you sure can help. So, in this step, you should explicitly focus on conveying how your product/service can help the user succeed.
2. Target the Right Audience
Don’t try to sell to everyone. Not everyone who visits your website will get value from your product. So, helping your customers succeed with your product begins with identifying and targeting the right customers.
Begin this process by classifying the potential customers into groups like people who are actively looking for your products, prospects who might need it in the future, etc. This will help you personalize your marketing and sales for each category, and in turn, the consumers will find it more useful.
However, you should include a broader audience during your generic promotions for generating good word-of-mouth.
3. Guided Customer Onboarding
Over 90% of customers feel that the companies they buy from ‘could do better’ when it comes to onboarding new users/customers. But what is onboarding?
Onboarding is the process of welcoming a first-time customer and helping them to get acquainted with your product so that they can successfully start accruing the benefits. If your team doesn’t guide your consumer immediately after the sale is made, it can greatly dampen their experience.
You can empower the customer with all the details about your products/services through free resources on your website or app. Videos and interactive webinars are even more helpful. Also, your support team should personally get in touch with the consumers to ensure that they are not having a hard time using the product.
4. Improving Customer Experience
Perhaps the most important step towards customer success is to provide them a better customer experience during their interaction with your brand. You can achieve that by ensuring the following:
- Deliver enhanced shopping experiences to exceed the growing consumer expectations and benefit yourself simultaneously. Ensure that your website or app is user-friendly and self-communicating.
- Simplify the search, add to cart, and pay features. Adding photos and videos of your products makes the decision-making process of a consumer very easy.
- Devise a mobile-first strategy that would cater to all customer touchpoints, that includes mobile-friendly means in their marketing strategies – chat, email, and SMS to engage with your audience on mobile devices.
5. Product or Service Education
To best support your customers and to attract new ones, you need to anticipate the general queries, apprehensions, and even myths surrounding your products. Don’t let them have a hard time getting their answers. Instead of having them search the internet or wait for a response to their inquiry, use your online presence to educate them.
Build a knowledge base and offer freebies or free content. Make them try your product or service for free, educate them about your company and offerings via use-case driven blog posts.
Use your website and social media platforms to develop a mailing list. Next, send weekly emails to your list to highlight a few use-cases or share case studies with them. Employee interviews wherein they talk about how they designed a particular product to solve a particular problem for the customer will also help.
6. Promote Customer Loyalty
Loyalty is the result of a customer’s positive experiences with your business. If the customer is satisfied with the experience provided by you, they will come back for more. 58.7% of internet users believe earning rewards and loyalty points is one of the most valued aspects of the shopping experience.
So, think about incentivizing their loyalty. Certain tricks can ensure that your loyal customers are getting more value from your product/service. This includes offering premium benefits like special discounts and offers on spending above a certain amount, or VIP benefits to your most loyal spenders.
7. Encourage Genuine Feedback
Value realization is a key step in the customer success strategy. Don’t be nervous about asking your customers what’s going well and what you could do better. Ask them to leave a review after a purchase. Drop them an email or ask your support team to get in touch with them personally. A quick feedback survey on your website is very useful.
It is also critical to assure them that their feedback is being catered to. This is the building block of customer loyalty, as you begin taking steps towards a long-lasting relationship.
8. Provide Efficient Customer Support
Like a pair of gears, customer support and customer success must work in tandem. Since all problems and questions can’t be answered beforehand, equip your service team with reliable customer support resources, training, and implement automation wherever required to make their job of serving the customers easier, whenever required.
Comprehensive customer support includes a healthy knowledge base on your website along with 24×7 live chat or voice call support to help the customers alleviate all issues and queries. If your business is already preoccupied with other operations, it is an excellent choice to outsource customer support.
Helplama is a trusted customer support outsourcing partner for brands in niches ranging from furniture to apparel. With us on your side, you get on-demand support, zero training costs, flexible pricing plans, and lightning-fast deployment.
Furthermore, an AI-powered live chat software like Saufter can help you interact with your customers in real-time. This software also comes with customized pricing plans.
So, what are you waiting for?
