If your customer is winning that means your business is winning! If only you are winning that too at the expense of disappointing your customers then I am afraid that your victory dance won’t last long.
It is for this reason that customer success specialists play such a critical role in the organization.
They are the ones who make sure that the customer is having a pleasant experience with the company’s product.
Everything fails if in the end customer isn’t happy with your product.
How does the customer success team ensure this?
Well, they do have some roles to play in order to make sure of this.
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Onboarding
This is a very sensitive role that needs to be handled with attention to detail. One wrong move in this step and you lose an opportunity lead that was implied to be your customer.
In the onboarding stage, the customer success manager has to hold webinars and demos to acquaint the customer properly with the product, resolving his all queries and rather encouraging him/her to ask questions.
At this step, it is also the job of the customer success manager to explain to the customer how to use the company website to find the information they need, whether it is a tutorial or how-tos.
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Training
To set the customer for his success you have got to conduct some serious training sessions. This can mean arranging conference calls so that customers can pick up the pace required for them to learn the tool faster.
The faster they learn, the faster they can utilize the tool to use for their own benefit for which they bought the product in the first place.
Being a customer success manager you have to make sure that the tech support team is responding effectively to customer queries occurring on the chatbot as and when it takes place.
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Gathering Customer Feedback
To improve your product and the service what you need is feedback, preconceived notions aren’t gonna cut it.
Now that you already have a bunch of customers at your disposal it’s time you seek transparent feedback from them.
Deploy tactics like a phone call or a questionnaire where you are asking a bunch of questions that can monitor the feedback. Pick a time that suits them, if you catch hold of them at a time when they are busy then this will leave them with an unpleasant experience or they will answer your questions in a hurry just to get it over with.
And this defeats the purpose of gathering feedback. What you want is honest feedback so that you can use that data to better your product.
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Managing the communication
For a customer success manager communication with customers is nothing short of infrastructure.
It needs to be handled with great care.
The infrastructure consists of how you are dispersing the information. You have to figure out how to communicate to the customer leveraging the repositories, knowledge base, video repositories.
After sharing these assets if the customer still has the same confusion then this should prompt the customer success manager to share the feedback with the content team and tech support team so that the two can help each other to make the asset worth helping the customers.
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Account Management
Customer Success Managers also play a role in managing the accounts of their customers i.e. prompting them if their account is about to expire so that they don’t lose the crucial data.
While at it, the customer success manager has to be meticulous towards the big accounts responsible for driving more sales to the organization.
The feedback gathered from the big accounts is helpful to the whole organization.
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Upselling
Again a delicate role that a customer success manager has to handle with care. If this activity is rushed then it can leave the customer annoyed.
On the other hand, upselling is a crucial role that is aimed towards generating more sales for the organization.
The key here is to first engage and delight the customer with what existing setup he has bought and monitored the satisfaction level of the customer with that.
The CSM can easily upsell a satisfied customer because he is already happy with what he already has. Your upselling to him only helps him increase his bandwidth and the scale at which he does things.
For example, SEMrush can upsell Seller to an E-Commerce customer who also indulges in Amazon SEO.
CSM being aware of this puts the organization in the position to effortlessly upsell this product and beforehand share the feedback of the customers who bought and are having an excellent experience with it.
To Conclude
The role of a customer success manager is not an easy one, the CSM has to be proactive rather than reactive every step of the way.
With CSM fulfilling his role diligently it ensures that the customer is satisfied and would loop in more customers.