When it comes to growing your business, decreasing churn and retaining more loyal customers, having a strong Customer Success strategy is the name of the game. 

Your Customer Success team are the people who will ensure your customers are deriving as much value from your product as possible. They’re in charge of providing your most important customers with white-glove support, training sessions and resources, and taking the time to help them achieve the best results. 

But above all, a good Customer Success strategy should be relationship-focussed - every step of the way. 

To drive real growth, your Customer Success team needs to be actively identifying and understanding each customer’s needs, offering personal advice and speaking in human terms to build trust and rapport with customers - and keep customer happiness at an all-time high! 

This matters because one of the defining traits of top performing companies is their customer happiness score, which average 90% versus an average of 68% for everyone else.

Today, we’re going to break down the three most important attributes of any strong Customer Success team. Along the way, we’ll also explore how the latest developments in voice-first technology - and the emergence of new Conversational Marketing platforms - can help your Customer Success staff deliver on every front. ‍

‍

#1 They listen to, empathise and build relationships with customers‍

A strong Customer Success team will do more than just train. They’ll build real, lasting relationships with customers, and take the time to make customers feel heard, understood and valued. 

There are buckets of reasons why listening to and empathising with your customers is a must - not least that people stay more loyal to companies they perceive as genuinely caring about them. In fact, according to Salesforce, 84% of buyers see being treated like a person as a crucial element of winning their business. 

When you let your customers feel that they are truly being listened to by someone with the intent to understand, they’ll view your company in a significantly more positive light, because they’ll appreciate that someone is taking the time to genuinely listen and help. 

On top of this, building authentic relationships with customers is the best way to understand how and what they think. And understanding your customers is the key to good product judgment, which can help you create a product or service that people will genuinely fall in love with. In fact, HundredX recently surveyed more than 500 Business Executives and found that 94% believed the following statement: “Listening to customer feedback is increasingly critical to the bottom line.”

So, how can Customer Success teams build authentic relationships with customers?

At telbee, we believe that speaking to the customer - person to person - is key. After all, it’s no secret that as humans, voice is our most powerful relationship-building tool - and has been for millennia! 

When we listen to someone speak, it’s far easier to put ourselves in their shoes and understand their problem than when we simply see it written down. 

Think about this in terms of your own personal relationships. When you’re feeling upset, worried or overjoyed about something, you don’t just want to text your friends about what you’re feeling. You want to have a proper catch up with them, person to person - or at least have a phone call - as talking is ultimately so much more emotive and meaningful. It’s the same for customers when they talk with your business! If something is important to a customer, they want to be able to talk to a real person about it. 

Tools and platforms such as Zoom, our voice messaging platform for business or conversational scheduling software can help Customer Success teams build rapport with customers faster, as whether a customer has an idea for an update that might really help their company out, or needs a little help learning how to use your platform’s newest feature, customers love to feel that their opinions - and voices - matter. 

As well as helping you listen to and emphasise with your customers, voice technology also provides Customer Success agents with a way to get back to customers in a way that feels far more personal than a standardised written response. 

And, as we touched on earlier, personalised experiences are extremely important to your customers. In fact, 44% of shoppers say they are more likely to become repeat buyers after having a personalised experience with a brand. What could be more personal than reaching out to your customers directly with your voice? 

‍

#2 They work closely with Sales and Marketing‍

A strong Customer Success team should work in strategic partnership with your business’ Sales and Marketing teams. 

Why? Because the modern customer doesn’t make a distinction between these three groups - they only see the one company. As a result, when one of those teams is out of alignment with the others, it’s the business as a whole that suffers.

According to one survey by Act-On, who investigated companies that reported a lack of alignment between Sales and Marketing, only 37% met their revenue goals, and only 7% exceeded them.

To avoid this happening to your business, your Customer Success, Sales and Marketing teams should be organising regular collaborative meetings to keep each other in the loop, ensure they’re measuring against shared goals and using the same terms when speaking to customers. 

This way, you can ensure you’re getting more from your prospects, accelerating your pipeline, and making sure you’re not missing opportunities in the acquisition process. 

Here are some questions your entire team can ask themselves to gauge Customer Success, Sales and Marketing alignment:

• Do we communicate clearly?
  ‍
• Do we collaborate effectively?
  ‍
• Do we speak a common language? Are we using the same terms? 
  ‍
• Do we employ integrated business processes?
  ‍
• Are we measured against shared goals?
  ‍
• Are we working towards a common goal?

#3 They provide fast, reliable and efficient support‍

As we touched on earlier, your Customer Success team’s priority should always be to make your customers feel valued, important and understood. 

And as well as speaking to them personally, this also means getting back to them quickly. In fact, one of the worst things you could do as a Customer Success agent is leave a customer waiting for days on end for a resource, response or call.

In today’s always-on culture, time is absolutely of the essence, and it will likely come as no surprise to you that 66% of customers say the most important thing to them when dealing with companies online is feeling that their time is valued. 

The good news is that modern voice technology enables you to answer questions and solve problems for your customers in a way that’s as efficient and speedy as it is personal. 

How? For starters, rather than having a customer wait on hold for hours while waiting to get through to somebody who can help, voice technology allows customers to explain their question or problem in one recorded message and wait for the right person to get back to them with the answer.

With some voice AI platforms, customers can then choose to schedule a call-back from their dedicated Customer Success agent when they are ready with answers. Or, with telbee’s voice-first messaging platform, customers can simply leave a voice note directly via the company’s website and wait for their agent to respond with a voice note of their own. 

Essentially, voice technology helps make sure that every member of your Customer Success team interacts with the same customer via a personal means (voice), helping them build a genuine, long-term rapport with your team and your business. ‍

‍

The takeaway‍

Ultimately, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to Customer Success. It’s a new concept for many businesses and one that’s still taking shape for most industries. At every company, the Customer Success team will look slightly different – tailored to the needs of their business, customers, and Sales and Support teams. And it’s this variety that makes the job so exciting, challenging and rewarding! 

The one thing all strong Customer Success teams will have in common is a focus on relationship-building. Wherever possible, ensure that your Customer Success team are speaking to customers personally - and letting them choose how they want to be heard. Because as different as every customer’s needs may be, there’s one thing that will unite them all: their appreciation for a personal touch. ‍

‍

To find out more about how our voice recording and messaging platform can help add that personal touch to your business’ Customer Success strategy, get in touch with the team at telbee today. We’d love to hear from you!