Tag Archives: happycustomers

What else do you measure when customer retention is good?

I am always asked this question by my peers –

The customer retention is organically good and the churn is below industry standards. What other KPIs can I set for my team to keep them motivated? 

Interesting question, isn’t it?

My immediate response was an applause! A loud one!

Achieving organic customer retention is definitely AWESOME! It shows the team is performing as per the customer’s expectations and the customer objectives are MET.

What further excites me is their willingness to go the extra mile and improve their performance so that they can be exceptional and continue their winning streak!

We always hear people quoting “make hay while the sun shines”. This question is the perfect example of being proactive – the key to becoming a valued Customer Success Manager 

Being proactive is the key to becoming a valued Customer Success Manager

As an answer, I have a consolidated approach –

  1. Create ideal customer profiles – 

Define your best customer! Find the behavioral patterns. Note down the product features or services utilized extensively. Include company size, industry, MRR, the workforce needed. Also include the duration required to achieve certain customer journey milestones like Onboarding, Product Adoption, Upsells/Upgrades, etc.

Once you consolidate all this information, share the ideal profile with your Marketing, Sales, and Executive team. This will help them generate quality leads, increase prospect conversions, and sales closures.

  1. Check customer’s product usage and adoption with a fine comb

Any lack of understanding/usage/inconvenience about the product at the customer’s end is an opportunity to upsell/cross-sell the customer. This can be done in the form of feature upgrades, paid team-trainings, etc. 

For this, proactively interacting with each happy customer on a regular basis is the key. 

  1. Review customer touchpoints post-sale

Check the communication that is sent to the customer during the entire customer journey on all the channels. Make sure the communication emphasizes more about meeting the customer’s objective rather than boosting your company.

Customer communication should emphasize more about meeting the customer’s objective rather than boosting your company.

  1. A Customer Advisory Board

Your happy customers are an asset. They not just love your product/service but will also help you with the information about why they love it. 

Form a customer advisory board and involve as many customers as you can. Collaborate with these champions when launching a new product, fine-tuning your existing products or services, beta-testing new features, or even for initial discussions regarding product roadmaps or customer journey maps. 

  1. Customer Advocacy

Every happy customer has the potential to be your brand promoter! And if requested politely they will happily oblige! Get lots of success stories, case studies, testimonials, video interviews ready with your successful customers. You can utilize these in your sales pitch, marketing collaterals, social media channels, customer onboarding pitch etc.

  1. Search for opportunities to delight the customer

Going a step ahead, check the processes at the customer’s end BEFORE and AFTER they use your product/service and search for opportunities to innovate, digitize, or simplify them.

For instance, if your product requires uploading files in certain format, provide the customers an option to

a. download a sample file in the required format

b. help them convert their file into the required format.

In short, putting yourself into the customer’s shoes and thinking from their perspective.

To conclude, customer retention if done wisely can perform as a separate profit centre for the company. It is essential to continue the retention efforts even when the times are good to maintain the loyalty in the minds of the customers.

With these approaches, I am sure you will stay one step ahead in your pursuit of being an exceptional customer success manager!

Do drop your feedback and let me know if you have any more different strategies that we can add to the above list!

4 Secrets to attract prospects to your brand online

attract-customers.jpg

For any budding entrepreneur, it is natural to feel overwhelmed about following the right marketing strategy to launch and highlight his company in the market.

Also considering the initial financial crunch, it is always better to take your business online and follow an inbound methodology.

Inbound marketing is the most effective way to promote your business online through quality content and pull the right audience towards your company. Of course, the content needs to be in tune with the interests of the target audience.

With the inbound methodology, earning the attention of your customers becomes easy.

To start off, the first step in the Inbound Marketing Technique is to Attract the relevant people and convert them into qualified prospects and ultimately into happy customers. 🙂

And with the availability of various online tools, this becomes an easy job!

Blogging:

“Content is always the king”- educating your visitors about your product or service is the best way to enhance their loyalty towards your brand. And if you have a quirky style of writing, you can keep your visitors glued and convert them into your subscribers!!! A total win-win!!

SEO:

Google being the major vendor to showcase your website and of course your company, your SEO strategy needs to be really strong.

And by this I mean REALLY STRONG! 😉

Pick the right set of relevant keywords, study your competitors thoroughly, create highly optimized pages, build highly searchable content and build links which are easily definable for your buyers. And while doing all this, DO NOT forget to keep your audience in your mind and try to answer their queries through your content in the best possible manner so that you appear prominently whenever they search for something they have questions about.

Website:

Start by developing a multi-page site. The content of the multi-page site needs to be well structured making it easy for visitors to understand. The UI of the website (home banner) should strike the emotional chord of the prospects – through catchy taglines or image or a video!

Add an online Live Chat widget such as Olark to the website. People who are more comfortable to chat and who are at their work desk but need quick answers to their questions without having a call will benefit immensely via the Live Chat Widget.

Another way of grabbing the eye balls will be to have a virtual number on the website. Virtual number helps in call tracking and recording which can be later referred to improve the product quality and customer experience.

And yes if you have more money to spend add a fancy animated video which explains the product very effectively.

Do not forget to make your website browser and device compatible so that a seamless experience is delivered to people who are willing to notice you.

In short, the website should be the welcoming door any visitor would like to enter after he gets familiarized with the brand, product or service through the content.

Social Media:

With the world going abuzz about the major social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Instagram, Pinterest, I bet you cannot ignore them. If the website is the face of your company, I am sure Facebook can be termed as the eyes of your company – the eyes with a sparkling vision!

Social Media lets you put important and valuable content related to your brand and helps engage with your audience.

Facebook for example provides the ocean of opportunities to showcase your brand, conduct live demos, events online, share important notifications across, helps you build an online store within the page and sells your product through beautiful, easy to understand adverts to your qualified prospects – a one stop solution for all your marketing needs.

To build a quality audience and have a good level of engagement, following a content calendar is always a best practice. The content calendar should humanize your brand by striking the emotional chord with the prospects. Your page should be able to entertain, provide vital information, engage and promote the brand and product.

02_8To summarize, the real secret to attract the target audience is to publish the interesting content through various available tools.

The key is to make your content address the needs of your buyers and mind you if there is no “need” to address, you have to create one! 🙂

Wondering about how to create the need? Stay tuned for my next blog!

Meanwhile do drop your comments below….

(Image Courtesy: Google)