Customer success is the efforts that brands undertake to help their customers succeed while using their products and services. Delivering an excellent customer success experience is fundamental to the success of any business. Whether you run a B2C or a B2B company, customer success must be your top priority because with satisfied customers coming back to do business with you, there’s a significant chance that your business will survive. Let check out the importance of customer success in numbers:
- 72% of companies say that improving customer experience is a top priority.
- 57% of product management and customer success teams participants felt more aligned in the client outcomes area, 29% felt least aligned to customer health, and 49% felt aligned to customer feedback.
- For every client who complains, 26 clients say nothing. Rather than vocalizing their frustrations to your customer support team, they just cancel their subscription.
- Investing in new clients is 5 to 25 times more costly than keeping existing ones.
Customer success may be a lot to handle, but it’s easier when you take it step by step. Start with the basics and avoid common mistakes that could hurt your customer success approach.
What are the Biggest Mistakes in Customer Service?
Delivering excellent customer service is no longer a choice, it’s a necessity.
56% of clients would stop doing business with a brand if it delivered a poor customer service experience. This proves that not maintaining the standards of customer service can have a negative effect on your company. Alternatively, providing quality customer service always leads to happy customers, improving customer advocacy and retention.
Thus, you must serve customers to the best of your ability so that they can derive value from your products or services and stay loyal to your company for long.
All this can only happen when you avoid making the following mistakes and follow the standards of customer success.
1. Making Promises You Can’t Deliver
We might feel disappointed, betrayed, or undervalued by a friend who breaks their promise to us. In the office, we may feel ignored, misunderstood, or undervalued by a manager or colleague who doesn’t keep their promises.
Businesses and their customer service reps must be mindful of their interactions with clients and the promises they make to them throughout the customer journey.
When a customer success rep makes a promise they can’t deliver, they hurt your company’s reputation and credibility. If you make promises, make sure you can deliver.
Broken promises can damage a business’s reputation, especially if that’s a common occurrence for the customer. The worst thing you can do is make false promises to customers, especially new clients. You want to make sure first-time customers return and making promises you can’t keep can leave a bad first impression, reducing your customer retention rates.
To avoid making empty promises, be aware of your business procedures, policies, and quality standards. This is one of the most effective ways to provide an excellent customer experience and keep empty promises out of the interaction.
As a customer success rep, if you’re unsure how or where to get the tools you need to help customers succeed, consult more experienced agents or your customer success manager. You can even attend coaching sessions with a seasoned mentor to ensure your practices and skills align with your company’s values.
2. Not Listening To Your Customers
Kristi Faltorusso says, “instead of focusing on accolades and labels, focus on embracing your journey and learning from your experiences.” Further, customers have expectations of the brands they choose to purchase from. Often, it only takes one instance of missed expectations to make consumers switch to other companies for what they consider being a better opportunity. A recent study reports that nearly 50% of consumers would switch to a new business after one bad customer experience. To avoid losing that massive amount of customers, it’s essential to listen actively to your customers and review their feedback so that you can remedy the issues that are increasing your customer churn rate.
However, listening to customers isn’t all about hearing about their issues. It’s more than just answering the ringing bell at your customer service desk or picking up the phone.
Listening to consumers is about connecting with them. It entails paying maximum attention to their needs and understanding how you can help them accomplish their goals.
The best customer success managers and employees are excellent listeners. They can remember relevant details mentioned earlier during an interaction with customers and are constantly in tune with customers’ emotions. This saves clients from having to repeat information, which eliminates friction in the customer service experience.
Further, when your representatives listen to customers, their interactions with customers are smoother. Customer success teams and customers will be on the same page, and troubleshooting will be a walk in the park. This lack of friction is crucial because it improves customer retention.
Listening to clients doesn’t just improve customer satisfaction. Also, it’s a tool you can leverage to upsell or cross-sell to your customers.
For instance, if your customer service rep is troubleshooting a problem for a client. When the client explains their issue, they describe their frustration with the usage limits of your product. They keep encountering limitations and need more space to store their data. Your service rep can explain the benefits of your premium package and how it can resolve the customer’s issues. If the customer is interested, the rep can refer them to your sales team to close the deal.
To listen to customers effectively:
- Let them speak, and don’t interrupt them.
- Be patient and humble.
- Engage with your clients in their preferred mediums.
- Maintain positive body language.
- Focus on the customer as an individual and their problems.
3. Be Reactive, Not Proactive
Many companies make the mistake of waiting for customers to report their problems.
This strategy is wrong because 87% of consumers want businesses to reach out proactively to them and ensure excellent customer experiences. Thus, a lack of proactive support means that you’re not going the extra mile to solve customer-service related problems for your customers.
Being reactive means your customer success employees and managers allow customers’ problems to fester further and become pain points. This can affect customer experiences immensely.
The following practices can help you deliver proactive support:
- Chatbot. Leveraging chatbots can help your brand prioritize customer service by automating customer support and ensuring customers get answers to their questions, even when your customer service reps aren’t available.
- Co-browsing. Web visitors may leave your site if they don’t find what they’re looking for quickly, but you can leverage the co-browsing feature to deliver real-time support through their web browser.
- Video chat. Successful companies leverage video chat to make interactions with their customers more interactive, provide customized experiences, and keep response times low.
Eliminate Mistakes, Deliver Experiences
Consumers will stay loyal to companies that provide them with better experiences. If your customer success employees can eliminate the three customer success mistakes discussed above, you can improve customer trust and loyalty. The goal is to listen to customers and practice proactive support to help your customers succeed.
Further, avoid making false promises to improve customer trust, and ultimately improve customer retention. All these will help you deliver great customer experiences that will help you scale your business.
Zight (formerly CloudApp) is an all-in-one screen capturing tool you can leverage to capture and embed HD videos, screencasts, screenshots, GIFs, marked-up images, and screen recordings throughout customer interactions. The customer support team at Buffer saves 24 hours every week while eliminating customer frustration. Zight (formerly CloudApp)’s visuals help Buffer communicate successfully and personally with its customers at every step of the customer journey.