Customer Success Managers and the challenges they face - An overview

The process of helping customers achieve success in their buying journey is defined as customer success. An ideal customer success works upon creating good relations with potential prospects and achieving goals through direct client management.

Businesses are highly investing in creating excellent customer success teams to increase their company growth.

Customer success revolves around solving issues and queries of folks who are new to your product or existing users who have issues using the product.

The end goal of customer success is meeting the requirements of each user for customer happiness and long term customer loyalty.

Customer success is carried out by professionals called customer success managers. The main goal of customer success managers is to create long term relationships with prospects to ensure conversion and retention.

This practice helps reduce churn rate, improve customer satisfaction, increase renewal rates and help boost revenue.

But who are Customer Success Managers?

They are people who understand the customer base of your organization with a goal to solve their long-term needs. The Customer success managers guide the customer from the sales phase to the support phase. But, wait! Do not get confused with customer success managers as customer support managers.

These are two different professionals with different end goals. The customer success managers support the customers, by creating a direct relationship with them and solving their queries and providing them timely value propositions.

Customer success managers, help your product stand out from the competitors, grow revenue and build long-term prospects.

Goals of a Customer Success Manager

The goals of a customer success manager revolve around the end result of turning clients into customers, increasing subscriptions and helping create a loyal customer base. The common goals that revolve around customer success managers day-to-day tasks are:

• Advising the customers during their purchase journey
• Increase customer success flow for better renewals
• Up-selling
• On-boarding user journey
• Navigating customer behavior for better understanding
  

The broader goals that a customer success manager focuses upon depends completely on the organization type. In a startup with less to 0 customer support agents, customer success managers work also revolves around resolving support tickets. While in a full-fledged organization, customer success managers work on defining and implementing larger goals to build a relationship with the customer base.

Customer success helps increase word of mouth

Customer success managers help growing brand loyalty by increasing confidence about the product, among the users. Good customer experience is the base of every customer success role. A study found out that over 86% of customers are willing to pay more for great customer experience. While a bad customer experience made 89% of customers buy from a competitor.

These statistics are proof of why customer success is essential for every organization. With increasing brand loyalty and long term company’s revenue, customer success managers also help increase word-of-mouth through customers.

Yes, through customers!

Earlier in the blog, I explained how customer success managers help customers during their purchase journey and maintain a direct relationship with them. When a customer gains success with your product, they market it to other users confidently through word-of-mouth technique.

Research from Nielsen and Edelman shows that over 83% of Americans buy products recommended by their acquaintances.

This technique works as a masterstroke act to gain customer success.

But, what are the challenges that customer success managers face on a day-to-day basis?

Challenges Faced By Customer Success Managers

Handling a huge customer base through direct relationships is difficult, and often customer success managers miss out on a few leads and prospects due to lack of management and monotonous video calls every now and then. Let's look at these challenges step-by-step and ways to solve them!

Inconsistent Customer Nurturance

One of the main issues faced by customer success managers is inconsistency in customer nurturing. This inconsistency can lead to an increase in customer churn rate and draw the graph on the lower side of the scale.

It is important to track customer accounts and activity on your product so that the relationship created between the brand and the user retains.

The most effective ways of customer nurturing can be done by scheduling monthly interactions with customers and understanding their issues. This can help boost your brand value as a customer always rely on brands that are proactive and communicative.

No value for the customer

When a product is complicated for a user to understand, it is bound to become a product that holds no value for the customer. This practice always leads to an increased churn rate and also increases the chances of low word-of-mouth conversions.

Although, win-back campaigns and offers can be quite effective in this case, the best solution is to prevent the customer from reaching this stage. The best way to prevent this is by monitoring the customer’s activities on your product regularly, maintaining a consistent relationship and understanding the queries.

Queries can be resolved by maintaining consistent communication with users through emails and video calls.

Speedy delivery of communication

An instant answer to questions is the demand of customers worldwide. They wish to receive instant assistance or access to online resources for their queries. This has been a challenge for customer success managers for a long time now.

As customer success requires on-the-spot interaction with users for their queries. The work process around achieving speedy communication becomes quite monotonous, as there are times when it is difficult to resolve queries ATM.

The best method to resolve these queries is to access and study customer data and purchase history to frame answers around that. Customer success managers can also create personalized answers and questions that their customer base can face whilst using the product.

The best way to increase communication speed is by creating screen recorded demo videos for various features that your product offers. This helps reduce work monotony and increase customer success.

Videos help customer success managers increase CS rates

Videos have become the prime source of communication and the most considered choice of customers. Brands have been adding video marketing to their marketing cycles as an important aspect of growth.

But can videos only benefit in targeting and retaining users through marketing strategies? Short Answer: No! Long Answer: No, because when a user converts as a customer it is important to give them the same thing that was provided to them while you marketed your product! Yes, I am talking about Videos! Good customer experience leads to higher conversions but a personalized customer experience can draw the line on your graph, STRAIGHT UP!

Let's take a look at how videos can help increases customer success rates

On-boarding Videos

WRITE, RECORD and SHARE x 1000 (as many times you want)

That’s the beauty of videos, time-saving and personalized. You just have to record it once and send it over and over again to new prospects. It cuts-down the writing time for text-based on-boarding, moreover keeps the user engaged for a longer time.

When a customer’s journey with a product starts off on a fresh and personalized note. The process to achieve success will function faster and more effectively. It will create a positive vibe about your product and maintain long-term retention with prospects. This will increase your brand value for the customer and help maintain a positive relationship.

If you want to create a more personalized experience for your prospect, you can record a short video clip at the starting of your video addressing the individual user.

Personalized Demo Videos for Customer education

Demo videos are a quick tour of your product that describe the functions of every feature that your product has to offer. Personalized demo videos for your prospects are a great way to make your product and its features easily consumable to the user.

Once the product portrays relevance and value to the customer, it can help boost revenue and decrease customer churn rate. Demo videos can be used to solve queries for new users and your customers.

Wrapping Up

Customer success is about ensuring the continued happiness and success of the customers. Using strategies and creating customer success programs within the team, for an end goal of customer success can help maintain a long-term relationship with customers and also increase renewal chances.