Customer success is essential to the long-term growth of your organization for many reasons. Helping customers achieve measurable results by using your product or service has been found to be the best predictor of customer retention. When you boost retention, you increase renewals and drive revenue through upsells, cross-sells, and referrals.
Effectively accomplishing these results goes beyond a single team of key account managers within your organization. It involves everyone who interacts with your customers to drive consistent value to key accounts. The best way to make this happen is by establishing customer success as a guiding principle of how your organization functions.
Shifting the focus of your organization is certainly a process, but how do you start developing a culture of customer success?
Get Everyone on the Same Page
Creating a culture of customer success starts with a change management process like you use when adding new tools to your tech stack. Start by doing things like establishing and communicating objectives, setting clear expectations, providing training, tracking progress, and celebrating wins. Ultimately, it’s essential to get everyone on board to ensure a successful transformation.
Part of this change management process is training. It’s important for everyone in your organization to understand what an ideal customer looks like and what their needs, challenges, and priorities are. Although each customer will have their own unique goals and priorities, there will be similarities across your accounts when it comes to customer success.
This knowledge facilitates alignment around this consistent customer success across your organization in departments like marketing, product, service, finance, and IT. So Sales, for example, can focus on ideal customers and understand what they are likely to want to achieve by using your product or service. This increases the odds of them closing more deals with customers who have a greater chance of success with your product, ultimately increasing retention.
Establish a Repeatable Account Management Process
Customer success is most easily achieved when account managers have an established repeatable process to follow, like Kapta’s KAM process. This gives reps a roadmap to follow so they never miss a step or waste time figuring out what to do next.
This cyclical process includes three main repeatable stages:
- Know: Creating an Org Chart and contact profiles, completing Voice of Customer (VOC) interviews to learn the client’s needs, goals, and priorities, and a SWOT analysis.
- Act: Creating a strategic account plan to help the client achieve their goals and receive value from using your product or service.
- Measure: Tracking progress toward client and internal goal attainment.
Facilitate Internal Communications
Account managers can’t work in isolation, especially when you’re developing a customer success culture. Communication is critical to the success of such a transformation. Here are a couple of ways to facilitate internal communication across your organization to effectively drive and accelerate customer success.
Leverage Purpose-Built Software
Using an account-management-specific platform, like Kapta, across your organization helps keep everyone on the same page as they engage with clients. It acts as a logbook of every insight and fact about each client that’s easily accessible by all team members.
Account managers can document everything they learn about the client during the Know stage of the process, account plans are stored here as living documents for easy reference, and metrics are easily viewable as well. This is where all team members document their engagements and account plan tasks as they are completed, so everyone on the team always knows what is complete or needs to be done.
This platform facilitates communication across your organization so everyone always knows what’s happening with each client and how to proceed at any given moment. This enables all team members to provide the customer with what they need to succeed.
Implement Internal Account Reviews
Documentation is a key element of teamwork when it comes to customer success, but strategic collaboration is essential as well. That’s why you also need to implement routine internal account reviews.
These internal meetings gather all contributors with an interest in the customer’s success to review the latest documented client information. This is when account plans and tasks are discussed and adjusted or updated based on current conditions. And the team strategizes how to best help the customer advance toward their goals and overcome obstacles to achieve the greatest success.
Deeply Engage and Align with Client Executives
Your company’s executive leadership should host regularly scheduled Customer Advisory Board (CAB) meetings. This is the best way to engage and align with your clients’ executive leadership. It’s a chance to gain a deeper understanding of how clients make decisions, and what they care about, and get their input on your company’s potential future developments. The outcome of these meetings is often greater customer success and advocacy.
Measure Success
If you have a repeatable process, you already know that it’s important to track progress toward client goal attainment based on how the customer measures it. Then, keep the client abreast of progress toward achieving their goals, reminding them of the value they’re getting from working with you.
But there are internal measurements that gauge customer success as well. That’s why you need to establish KPIs for each department to encourage the development of a customer success culture.
What you decide to measure depends on your specific business. For example, sales compensation plans drive sales behaviors tied to organizational goals. So, paying higher compensation on deals closed with leads that match your ideal customer profile (ICP) might be a metric you track and reward because ICP clients are easier to retain and have a greater lifetime value.
Another element for Sales to track when developing a customer success culture is the completeness of Sales to Customer Success handoff information since this can shorten a client’s time to value when done well.
Work Together to Achieve Customer Success
The benefits of developing a customer success culture are undeniable. Your organization becomes more effective at helping customers achieve measurable results by using your product or service. This boosts customer retention and increases renewals, revenue, and referrals.
A customer success culture can be developed by getting everyone on the same page. When everyone pulls together across the organization, the account managers adhere to a repeatable process, and effective internal communication is achieved, the team can collaboratively accelerate your customers’ success. And getting executives involved further enhances customer outcomes and advocacy.
To encourage and reinforce this transition, establish KPIs for each department across your organization. It will increase compliance, help you gauge your progress, and enable you to adjust where needed for continual improvement.
Are you looking for a purpose-built tool to support the development of your customer success culture? Schedule time with a Kapta team member.
