While customers purchasing your products is thought of as the endpoint of a transaction, there is more to it. For them to be fully satisfied with the transaction, they must be satisfied with the product in use. This is where customer success comes in. Let\’s explore what it is and how your startup business can better provide it.
Why Customer Success Is Important For A Startup Business?
Customer success refers to the process of ensuring that your customers get their desired outcomes by using your product. The term initially originated in the business-to-business scene. But it has since been adopted by business-to-customer companies as part of their effort to increase their reach.
Your goal here is to anticipate the possible challenges that customers might encounter when using your products and provide them with solutions. This ties it closely with regular customer support. However, what differentiates customer success from the latter is that it is geared more towards building a long-term relationship with customers. There are several important reasons why you would want to take this direction.
It Improves The Renewal Process
By ensuring that customers can use your product to the fullest, you convince them to purchase more of it. This is especially vital for startup businesses running on a subscription model. But it can also apply to selling support products for your main goods, as people will be better encouraged to buy these to get more out of the latter.
It Reduces Churn
Customer churn refers to the rate at which people stop doing business with you. That rate often increases if customers find that you can\’t offer any more value to them. Or it might be due to a negative experience they have with your product or service. By creating a customer success program, you reduce churn since people get to overcome the challenges and use your product more.
It Drives More Revenue
Ultimately, the goal of any business strategy is to increase revenue streams. Customer success helps here by encouraging more purchases. It is even noted that such strategies can provide as much as 90% of the total revenue that you can generate. With that, it also helps stabilize your revenue stream as it delivers a steady flow of paying customers.
Building Your Startup Business’ Customer Success Strategy
To have a strong start when building your customer success program, you first need to understand what customers’ goals are. Luckily, much of the groundwork has already been laid out from your earlier customer service research. But there are some more things that you would want to look into at this point.
One of these is their long-term goals beyond their initial purchase of your product and how it is supposed to help them. For this, you will need to do another round of consultations. You would also want to learn more about the exact challenges that they encounter.
Assessing Your Startup Business\’ Capabilities
Another important part of building your success strategy is determining whether you are capable of helping customers reach their goals. This is even more critical for startup businesses, as your limited budget can affect what you can provide.
In this situation, look for a way to balance customer needs with the resources that you have at your disposal. Developing a roadmap of your customer success program will help you better see how you can achieve that balance. One good example is this simple one provided by Custify.
Begin building that roadmap by categorizing your customers based on such factors as revenue and types of purchases. From there, you can determine what kind of success journey each will go through. This also helps you determine the resources that you will need to provide.
Once you have these, go over the customer success components that you have built up. Review to see whether these are adequate or if there are still gaps that you need to fill in. Here, you will need to look for a cost-effective solution to fill those gaps.
Outsourcing Your Startup Business’s Customer Success Efforts
As mentioned above, one challenge that startups face when attempting to facilitate customer success is their limited resources. Outsourcing can be a helpful move for overcoming this challenge. It will provide you with the needed reach without you having to spend more than what your budget can handle.
However, you need to carefully plan how you will implement this move. Customer success is all about building a long-term connection with patrons. As such, you want an external team that will be as invested in it as you are.
In this case, it would be better to get dedicated services like that provided by Virtua Outsourcing Solutions. These services focus only on a small number of clients at any given time. That gives you a greater amount of resources and lets you provide a more extensive form of support.
Deciding How To Outsource Customer Success
Once you opt to outsource customer success, you need to determine which parts to send over. Note that the strategy can be quite complex. With that, you should choose the sections that would benefit the most from the move, such as:
- Initial setup: Since you might not have the expertise for developing a concrete CS program, third-party consultants can help you conceptualize it faster.
- CS tools: Another area that requires a good amount of expertise and time. Doing the development in-house can also cause you to lose focus on core tasks.
- Operations: Note that you should ideally outsource it during the early implementation of your customer success program. You will eventually have to bring it back in-house to fully realize your efforts.
- Optimization: Outsourcing some of the optimization work will allow you to focus on delivering your customers; needs without worrying about gaps in the system.
As you outsource these tasks, make sure that your internal and external customer success teams closely work together. This way, customers can enjoy a smooth flow for their success journey, ensuring retention.
Start Strong By Outsourcing Customer Success Today
As you can see, your startup business will get a strong start if you have a customer success program in place. To achieve that, you need the right team to assist you. Sign up with us at Virtua Outsourcing Solutions and we will help you help your customers succeed.