An exceptional customer experience requires both customer support and customer success teams working in unison to achieve it. Customer success teams focus on long-term growth and engagement strategies while customer support addresses issues or concerns that could potentially cause subscriber churn.
1. Create a Shared Knowledgebase
Customer support teams offer customers a valuable service by helping them to identify and resolve problems with your products, while at the same time providing feedback to engineering and product teams to ensure your offerings continue to meet customer demands.
Customer success teams work to help customers flourish when using your products and services, building long-term relationships that foster value creation for them over time.
Proactive customer success requires going beyond simply responding to issues and complaints — it includes anticipating their future needs. For instance, project management software companies might host bi-annual strategy sessions with customers to learn how they’re meeting their goals and ensure your product continues to align with them. This approach differentiates customer success from traditional customer support; both teams share some key skills but operate differently.
2. Collaborate with Marketing
Customer support teams need to create an environment of speed and personalization in their teams, such as using artificial intelligence tools like Fin to offload repetitive questions from customer representatives and enable them to focus more time answering unique, complex inquiries while building trust with their customers.
Sharing data among CRM and customer success platforms enables agents to anticipate what their customers may require before they even ask, further improving customer experience while increasing engagement and retention rates.
Customer support involves meeting all the needs of your customers in any way possible, including providing technical support and resolving short-term issues. However, customer success goes one step further by helping your customers meet their ROI targets with your products – this way creating long-term relationships between yourself and them.
3. Collaborate with Sales
Customer success metrics such as ticket resolution rates and customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores are standard measures of customer service quality; however, teams need to look beyond this for additional measures of trust-building such as empathizing with their customers’ situations, setting clear expectations upfront, advocating on their behalf internally with insights and data analysis, etc.
An effective onboarding process is an invaluable way to build relationships and ensure new customers start realizing value immediately. This could involve developing various training methods ranging from in-person meetings to online tutorials that cater to various learning styles.
Additionally, customer service teams can offer product development teams invaluable insight by relaying customer feedback on key features to them. This feedback can then help guide future releases so they meet customer needs and goals – elevating customer voice throughout an entire company.
4. Collaborate with Support
Establishing clear objectives for Customer Service and Support teams to work toward is of vital importance, while opening communication channels and taking advantage of technology can ensure everyone is on board and working toward shared goals.
To address process gaps and disconnection, Customer Support and Support must place priority on building trust. This can be accomplished through empathy, setting clear expectations and advocating on customers’ behalf internally using data and insights.
Meg Palazzolo, Customer Success Manager for Trust & Will, stresses the importance of being personable when engaging with customers to build trust and ensure an consistent experience across multiple interactions.
Integrating customer support and CRM platforms gives agents access to important customer data like purchased items, opened emails, etc. This information allows agents to quickly identify problems for each individual customer and offer tailored solutions – increasing CSAT ratings, retention rates and customer lifetime value in turn.
