High-growth services companies aren't lucky. They're smart and customer success is their priority. They focus on delighting their customers at every step of their customer journeys. They keep them happy enough to generate a healthy recurring monthly revenue stream and generous profits.
But while pleasing your customers before closing a deal may be sufficient to generate short-term revenue, it may not necessarily be enough to ensure that those same customers stick around for the long haul. This is where inbound customer success strategies come in, minimizing churn rates, ensuring customers continue to get the best possible service, and ultimately turning customers from fans into lifelong advocates.
Customer Success is about ensuring that customers get what they need when they need it. Customer Success is not just a marketing term - it's a strategic approach to managing all aspects of the relationship with customers. Customer Success is about providing value and making sure that customers stay happy. Customer Success is about helping customers achieve their goals, whether those goals are short-term or long-term. Customer Success is about delighting customers, not just selling them something.
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Inbound Customer Success Inbound customer service is the methodology of attracting, engaging, and delighting your customers to turn them into your business' loyal advocates. |
What is the Inbound Customer Success?
Inbound Customer Success is the method of turning your customers into your brand's best ambassadors. You will attract customers through solutions to their problems and help them achieve success using your products or services. Your customers We're will become
Inbound Customer Success is the methodology of attracting customers to your business by providing a superior customer experience. You can attract customers by solving their problems and helping them achieve their goals using your products or services. Your ability to solve problems and provide value will determine whether or not you succeed.
By providing great customer success consisting of education and helpful resources, as well as constantly gathering feedback from your customers to help them succeed, you'll help make them successful. Happy customers are loyal customers, and loyal customers will help grow your sales. So, their success is also your success!
The Landscape of Customer Service Today
Customers have a plethora of choices when it comes to what products and services. Consumers now research online and compare products before they buy. There are so many different companies out there offering similar products and services, and it's getting harder to stand out from the crowd.
The power dynamic has shifted from businesses to customers.
This shift means that businesses need to start thinking about how they interact with their customers differently. Instead of focusing on what their customers should think, they need to focus on what their customers will think.
Social media has also been a major factor in this power shift. With Facebook, Instagram, and Whatsapp ubiquitously available on our smartphones and computers, every customer has an amplified megaphone with which they can speak about a business. If a customer has a great experience, they can tell others about it. If they have a bad experience, they can share their feedback with others as well.
A customer's ability to tell his or her story and turn it into an interesting story for other customers is a uniquely 21st-century concept that has gone really well or terribly for businesses.
Word-Of-Mouth marketing is the most important channel to tap into today. Companies that view their customers as a growth engine will understand that businesses have an ethical responsibility to their customers — not just to answer their questions, but to help them gain real value from their product. As competition grows, regardless of the industry, customer service will quickly turn into a competitive differentiator and edge for those that deliver it well.
It's important to consider this: if a customer tells a friend (or anyone else) about a great experience they've had with a business, then they're more likely to choose that business when they go shopping for something else. Customer service is what makes your business unique, and your satisfied customers can become your most effective marketers.
How to Deliver Customer Success
Customer success is about delivering value to your customers. It’s not just about making them happy, but it’s also about making them successful. This is why customer success is one of the pillars of the modern customer experience.
Build Your Customer Success Strategy
There isn't one "right" way to develop a customer success strategy. Customer success strategies should be tailored to each organization's unique needs. There isn't a single best practice approach to creating a successful customer success strategy.
A customer success strategy depends on your company's needs. Every business knows that the experience and journey that their customers go through with them won't always be the same experience and journey that the competition goes through with their customers. Every business is different. Some companies define customer success differently than others.
The inbound customer service framework for high-growth service companies is designed to provide a clear path for you to follow when creating a solid foundation for your inbound customer support strategy. With a solid foundation, you'll be able to build and develop strategies that help you onboard with the WOW factor, increase customer lifetime value, delight your audience, and create loyal customers.
Map a Customer Journey
Customer journeys are an important tool for gaining insights about your customers. By looking at all the steps a customer takes when buying something, you can get a sense of what motivates them and what keeps them coming back. You can then use this information to create products and services that will keep them happy.
When you look at how your customers interact with your website, you might notice that they spend a lot of time looking around, but then leave quickly. Or maybe they ask questions but never return. You may wonder if there is something wrong with your site, or if they just aren't interested in what you offer. But mapping out the customer journey can help you understand why they're leaving. By identifying patterns in user behavior, you can gain insights into why users engage with your product, and what motivates them to stick around.
Customer journeys are often complex because customers are now using multiple channels to interact with your brand. Customers may also change their behavior at different points along the path. For example, some people who start by searching for a product on Google end up purchasing it. Others may visit your store for a quick purchase only to buy online later. And some people may even purchase after visiting your Facebook page. As a result, it's important to understand what your customers are doing when they're interacting with your brand across all touchpoints.
Don't worry if you're not sure how to create a customer journey map. There are others out there who feel the way you do. Many service companies struggle because they don't understand the customer journey. Customers no longer take a standard path to purchase. They do, but they typically go through the same stages of decision-making.
Like consumers, service company customers move through the stages of awareness, consideration, and decision. They become aware of an unmet need they have, they look into potential solutions, and they choose a partner. It provides an opportunity for service providers to break down the customer’s journey into three stages, analyzing each stage to see how they can best engage, and when.
For example, if you think that you provide adequate after-sales service through your website, but a customer journey map shows that it's here where customers struggle, and it is where they churn, then you might be missing out on opportunities to improve your customer experience. Insight such as this can help you target your inbound efforts so that they address sticking points and facilitate an easier experience for your visitors.
Build a Customer-Focused Team
Customer support and customer success teams are critical to any company's growth. If you don't have them yet, it's time to start thinking about getting them going. Customer support and customer success teams help companies stay focused on their customers' needs, while also helping them grow and scale. Strong customer support and a customer success team will help your company become more successful.
Customer Service is not just an individual job. It needs to be a team effort. Everyone needs to understand customers, their problems, and how to solve them. Customer Success is a team sport. Every employee needs to have a customer mindset and empathy. It doesn't matter if you are a single person or a large company. If you have a customer-centric culture, you will grow faster than others.
Implementing Strategies
Developing the right inbound customer support strategy for you is one important thing, but implementing it is something else entirely. You'll need to make sure you have the necessary tools, resources, and software you need to successfully implement any process changes and new methods of working across the organization.
Inbound Customer Success requires an agile approach to change management. If you're not careful, you could end up with a lot of time spent trying to implement a solution that doesn't fit your needs.
Many service companies don't realize that there are many different kinds of customer success tools available, and not all of them are designed to help you get your customers through every single step of the customer journey. Some of these tools focus on generating success during the initial stages of the customer journey, while others are specifically designed to help you keep customers engaged after they've become advocates.
These tools help companies manage their processes, making them more efficient and effective. Some examples include Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Project Management Software, Workflow Automation, Business Intelligence, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software, and Document Management Systems.
As a HubSpot partner and digital agency, we help our customers with HubSpot Service Hub software. This customer service software helps companies manage their customer relationships. It lets them streamline their operations, and provide a better customer experience. As a result, they can spend more time focusing on what matters most - growing their businesses.
Customer service software also allows businesses to automate repetitive tasks, making customer management easier and more efficient.
Tracking Success
Customer success strategies must be implemented and monitored to ensure that they continue to provide value and improve the customer's overall experience. Unfortunately, this is an important part of the framework that most businesses tend to overlook.
One of the biggest mistakes that service companies are making today is that, even though their focus is on attracting leads through inbound channels, they're not measuring success by looking at inbound metrics. For example, success might be measured by how many emails a sales representative sends. Or by how many times they call. But these techniques aren't in line with the inbound approach.
Inbound success isn't about output. It's about creating value for customers and prospects. When you're focused on delivering value first, then you'll see your results naturally increase. You'll also be able to measure your progress because you'll be focusing on what matters most—customer experience.
Service companies should be thinking about what success really means. They should be measuring their success based on customer satisfaction, not just revenue. Customer satisfaction is the key to creating a customer base that's both happy to partner with your company and willing to share their experiences. At the end of the day, that's what you're trying to achieve.
There are many ways to measure the effectiveness of a marketing strategy. Some of the most important metrics include:
- Customer churn rate (the percentage of customers leaving),
- Monthly recurring revenue (MRR) (how much money you bring in each month)
- Customer lifetime value (CLV) (how much money your customers spend with you over time)
- Customer retention cost (CRC) (how much money it costs to keep a customer)
- First contact resolution rate (FCRR) (how quickly you resolve issues when they arise)
- Renewal rate (RR) (how often customers renew their subscriptions)
Customer success can be measured by asking customers what they think about your product or service. Customer satisfaction is important because customers' needs change all the time. If you don't track customer satisfaction, then you won't know if your current approach is working well enough to keep generating customer success. Tracking customer satisfaction allows you to take action when something isn't going well so that you can adjust your approach to ensure that you'll always deliver great service.
Turning Customers into Advocates
Many businesses think that their customer journey ends when users are happy with their services. However, there is another important step in the journey. After users are happy with your product or service, they may become advocates.
An advocate is someone who promotes your product or service because they love it. They will talk about it online, write articles about it, and spread the word about it. An advocate may also give recommendations to other people about your products or services, or help them understand why you're the best choice for them. They can be found at every stage of the buying cycle, helping you sell your goods or services.
Advocates can be very valuable to your business, and they can bring a lot of value to your bottom line. They can educate your top-of-funnel prospects about your products, or instil trust into those who aren't sure if they should buy from you yet. They can also help your salespeople sell your products or services by giving them feedback on their interactions with existing clients.
There are many ways to get your customers to become advocates. Some customers will naturally transition into advocates because they just enjoy sharing their experiences. Others will need a little extra encouragement. Here are a few ideas:
1. Provide an incentive. Offering incentives like discounts or freebies can encourage customers to share their positive experiences. If you're running a loyalty program, you could even incentivize them to share their loyalty points.
2. Create a platform. Customers love to share their experiences online and often prefer doing so on social media. So why not create a place where they can? A blog or website dedicated to customer reviews can be a great way to collect feedback about your product or service.
Tools and software can also be helpful. For example, if your company uses HubSpot for customer success, it's worth learning how to use the HubSpot Service Hub to ensure you're getting the most value out of the comprehensive selection of features available in the software. Our team of Hubspot experts can help you start and grow on Hubspot.
How Customer Service Will Change
In the next few years, we're going to see a lot of incremental changes in the way customer service works. We're already seeing chatbots and other forms of AI helping us complete our daily tasks, and we'll soon start using them to answer questions and provide guidance.
Conversational websites will become more prevalent, and they'll help us accomplish tasks like booking flights, ordering groceries, and paying bills. Bots will continue to evolve and become smarter, while chatbots will become more useful as they learn to understand natural language. Customers will begin communicating with businesses through chat instead of phone calls and emails, making it easier to ask questions, receive answers, and resolve issues.
Another change you may notice in the next few years is an increase in the amount of time spent on customer service. Businesses will spend more time investing in their customers and less time trying to outsource everything.
Tips for providing Inbound Customer Success
Inbound services can help companies increase their sales by improving customer relations and helping them sell new products to existing clients. If a customer has a positive interaction with a company's customer service representatives, they may be more likely to share their experience with others.
If you are interested in improving your company's inbound services, here are a few tips:
- Recognize or reward people who provide an excellent experience for their customers.
- Make sure that your customers can contact you through different channels, including live chat, phone, emails, and texts.
- When training your inbound customer success team, focus on your customers. Encourage them to focus on your customers when they provide service to them.
- Minimize the time a customer has to wait before they get through to someone by offering a call-back service or having enough staff members available to answer the phone when it rings.
- Encourage your support team to provide feedback to managers on ways to improve the customer experience.
- To ensure that inbound service representatives can provide excellent customer experiences, give them access to the right tools, including easily accessible managers who can help them; a database with detailed product information and answers to common questions; and tips on how to deal with difficult situations.
- Make sure your expectations are clear so everyone knows what you expect them to focus on when talking to customers.
