Why customer success is vital for your small business
Enhancing your customer experience is the key to success for any business. It’s not just about making a sale but about keeping your customers happy and coming back for more. In short, it’s about pushing the idea of customer success in your business.
What does ‘customer success’ mean?
Customer success is a holistic approach to retaining your customers. It focuses on the experience of the customer, and how this experience leads to a successful outcome – both for the customer and for your business.
Customer success is about more than just delivering product or service value to customers. It’s about anticipating and meeting customers’ needs before they even know they have them.
To be proactive with your organisation’s customer success you should:
Proactively manage each customer’s relationship with the company, so you can curate their customer journey from beginning to end.
Make sure all your paying customers have a positive experience with the company's products or services (and ask them for their feedback on this experience).
Identify potential problems in advance and provide resources and assistance to resolve these issues efficiently (reducing negative feedback).
Offer technical support to help customers overcome any issues, so your products or services work as expected and deliver the expected value.
Focussing on creating the best customer experience
As any successful business owner will tell you, customer experience doesn’t stop at the point of making a sale. Customers are no longer satisfied just by receiving a product or service; they want to be delighted by it. They want to feel that genuine thought was put into their purchase and that they are being properly taken care of by the company.
Because of this, you need to focus on the entire customer journey.
This means taking care of your customer from their first contact with the brand, through to the point of a sale being made – as well as the after-sales care and long-term value you offer them.
Xero has woven customer success into the DNA of the business with a big focus on education, content and community to increase the skills, knowledge and confidence of their customers.