Customer success is one of the most effective strategies for growing your customer base. But it does require more attention and careful planning to get the best results. Here, creating a separate department within your startup company for this purpose is a good move.
However, you need to think about how to develop that department. You want it to do what it is designed for effectively. Let’s dissect the do’s and don’ts when putting up this department.
The Benefits OF A Customer Success Department
Before going further, you might wonder why you should establish a separate customer success department. You will probably ask “Can’t the customer service team just be the one to handle it?” That question is valid, as you would often want to simplify everything.
But customer success can provide more to all your company departments if it is also a standalone department. There are things other teams can gain from working with it, including the following.
Marketing
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The largest benefit that a customer success department can give marketing is helping it identify potential brand advocates. The CS department can do the work reactively and proactively through the data it gathers during engagements. It can then help marketing capture the story of each customer’s success, which they can use for promotions.
Sales
Your customer success department can help sales discover new opportunities. It reviews the customer engagements and determines additional sales prospects based on those. The department can also alert the sales team about potential non-renewals. Both can then work closely together to recapture these accounts.
Services
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Your services team can gain a lot from working with customer success. The CS team can provide insights into where customers might struggle during the buyer journey. That is useful for determining opportunities for improving training programs. Your CS team will even be able to identify potential areas for managed services.
Support
Surprisingly, customer support itself can benefit from a separate customer success department. It can use the information provided by the latter to prioritize support tickets more effectively. That helps streamline the support process and lets them respond faster. Customer success can even provide the support team with the necessary context for the request.
The Do’s Of Building Your Startup Company Customer Success Team
Because of its importance for different teams, you need to think about your customer success department’s setup. Here are the essentials dos you need to remember right off the bat.
Do no. 1: Ensure That The Customer Is The Top Priority
It might seem very obvious but some companies can overlook it. They often focus so much on using customer success to boost business that they forget its true purpose. Remember, you are doing this first and foremost for the benefit of your patrons.
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Of course, it can be challenging to keep that focus. To help the success department maintain it, you need to build a customer-centric culture. It can take a lot of work, but there are small things that you can do to get started. For instance, ask yourself how a business activity can benefit your customer. This will give you a good idea of how well your teams will take to the new department.
Do no. 2: Go Beyond Expectations
This one might seem like a tough call, But the customer success department needs to be able to provide more to people. Doing that shows customers that you are willing to go the extra mile to see them succeed.
But you might wonder how you can get a better start here. This is where the phrase “under-promise but over-deliver” comes into play. The idea is to set a reasonable level of service quality you can achieve without much effort. From there, you can then deliver beyond expectations.
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Keeping a close eye on your metrics becomes very crucial here. Make sure that the ones you choose match your customers’ needs closely. That ensures that you are on point in meeting their desired results. You also need to maintain a consistent set of internal metrics to help your newly-formed team better track their progress.
Do no. 3: Study Your Startup Company Customer Continuously
Your customers are not static beings. As time goes on, their needs and preferences also evolve. The customer success department must be in constant touch with the changes happening to them. That way, the CS team and all the other departments they work with always get the freshest information about your customer.
Use the different tracking tools to get a better map of customer behavior. You should know how their changing behaviors also influence their definition of success.
Virtua Solutions can help you in all of this by doing the tracking for you. Our team will do this in the background as part of our daily support duties. With that, you get the most accurate information every time and provide more personalized services for customers.
The Don’ts Your Startup Company Should Remember
Of course, since there are the do’s, you also need to pay attention to the don’ts. These will help your fledgling customer success department better orient itself and guide other teams.
Don’t No. 1: Over Engage With Customers
As we mentioned earlier, continued engagements are vital for capturing customer interest and guiding them towards completing their goals. However, over engaging can end up backfiring at you. People will get annoyed when you constantly hover over them with the same talking points.
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Instead, your customer success department should know when it is the right time to get in touch with customers. The team should also know what to say during these communications. This is where working closely with other departments comes into play.
Have marketing review your customer success messages. More than just telling you whether the messages are suitable, they can tell the customer success team when these would be most appropriate. That ensures that your messaging and engagements are on the spot.
Don’t No. 2: Cut Off Customer Success From Other Startup Company Departments
As we have said, customer success departments work best when collaborating with other teams. You need to make that collaboration much easier. Create opportunities where your CS team can freely discuss strategies with these other departments.
When your startup company partners with us for customer success work, we can serve as a liaison between the main CS team and other departments. Our agents are experienced in handling this multi-department communication and will ensure that information exchange is continuous.
Don’t No. 3: Scrimp On Talent
Often, startup companies think of customer success as an extension of customer service. Thus, they often look for people with the same skillset as the main service team. However, customer success team members require specific skills and expertise to do the work effectively.
The challenge is that it can be hard to get the right talent for the job. But we can help you here. And without you going through a complicated hiring process. Members of our customer success team have worked with different companies over the years. Throughout that, they have studied various customer success strategies. We can help you adopt these strategies while also developing new ones.
While it will be a laborious effort, taking the time to set up your customer success department will be a good step for your startup company. And we at Virtua Solutions are ready to lend you a hand. Contact us today and let’s get ready to help your patrons succeed.