4 Actionable Ways to Achieve Customer Success — BROSIX

October 9, 2017 Instant Messaging

Your customers are the lifeblood of your enterprise. Naturally, that means offering top notch support in their times of need, concern, and curiosity.

More importantly, though, it means taking persistent and consistent steps to ensure your customers remain successful — satisfied, loyal, convinced at what you can do for them, and willing to share these sentiments with others.

So how can you achieve customer success? Here are four tips to get you started!

1.Be Proactive

Being proactive when it comes to customer success requires a multifold approach — taking measures which not only enhance the customer relationship directly, but also improve your own performance; allowing you to better focus on customer success.

First off, keep in touch with your customers.

• Call them every now and then, inquiring about their satisfaction or asking if they have any questions or concerns.
• Text them just to check in, reiterating what you can do for them.
• Send a monthly email newsletter with the latest company or product news, or just to let them know that you’re thinking of them.

In addition, automating menial tasks and eliminating time-wasters from your routine allows you to more efficiently execute your responsibilities and leaves you more time to concentrate on customer success.

1. Syncing your CRM to your email provider saves you the hassle of manually searching through emails and copying relevant information into your CRM.
2. Tracking your prospects using an email tracking tool actively keeps you in the loop when a prospect interacts with your emails, allowing you to target them in a more timely manner.
3. Establishing times to check email and turning off social media notifications eliminates costly time-waters from your routine which, over the course of a day, add up and kill your productivity.

2. Simplify How Customers Reach You

Establish a variety of mediums for customers and prospects to reach you. Using both traditional methods of communication, as well as more modern channels, allows your customers to connect with you on their level and in way that’s convenient for them.

While instant messaging continues to transform customer support, conventional means of communication like the phone and email remain dependable, easy to use, and accessible by almost everyone.

For you and your customers, the phone allows for a more personal method of contact, allowing both parties to gauge reactions audibly. What’s more, there are times when it’s simply preferable to speak to another human. Email, on the other hand, is convenient when an urgent response isn’t necessary.

That said, relying solely on these methods of communication could alienate large sections of your client base. Thus it’s vital you also support your customers via more modern channels -live chat, social media, and chat apps.

Employing a live chat feature, making your enterprise reachable on social media, or connecting with your customers via their preferred chat app allows you to meet customers on their level in order to reach more relevant and precise solutions.

These methods help you:

• Accommodate customers wherever they are — order statuses can be checked and problems addressed regardless of whether the customer is at their office or the kid’s soccer match.
• Reduce customer wait times by addressing multiple customers simultaneously.
• Provide the customer a detailed record of the conversation via the thread in their application.
• Formulate more appropriate responses — instant messaging doesn’t “put you on the spot,” but rather affords you precious extra seconds to carefully consider your answer.
• Reach solutions that are both real-time and more accurate — customers can share images or screen shots of their issue, while you can share attachments and link to useful knowledge databases, like the company blog or product tutorials.

3. Readily Share Knowledge

Make your enterprise a source of knowledge for your customers on all things relevant not only to your product and services, but your industry.

That includes:

1. A detailed FAQ database
2. Video content
3. A company blog

Customers, both current and prospective, are bound to have questions regarding your product. A comprehensive searchable FAQ database provides better customer service and improves the user experience while saving your team time.

When site visitors can simply search for the solution to their problem or inquiry in one central location, you reduce the likelihood of customers needing your support. Moreover, there’s no need to compose a convoluted email and then wait for a response. Nor is there a need to call, then navigate a phone menu, only to spend time on hold.

Your FAQ database is only part of the equation, though. Today, 85% of internet users in the U.S. consume content through video. What’s more, people don’t want to read long manuals.

Adding video content to your website — tutorials, testimonials, and marketing campaigns, for instance — gives your website a more human feel, shows that you believe in your product, helps build trust among your consumers and prospective customers, and allows you to simplify complex content and communicate it in a way which is consistent with your customer preferences.

Finally, a blog is a crucial part of any knowledge sharing strategy. While having a company blog offers many benefits, it establishes you as an authority among your customer base. And that’s important.

Addressing questions and concerns that your customers have and routinely publishing content that’s compatible with their interests helps you:

• Build trust with your customers</li>
• Educate them on your product, the market, and how you can solve their problems
• Have more relevant conversations with your customers

4. Consider Your Own Communication

Importantly, taking steps to achieve customer success means considering your own communication, as well.

Enterprise instant messengers, such as Brosix, unify communication and collaboration company-wide, so you can focus not only on satisfying current customers, but converting prospective ones.

When team discussion transpires over a private team network and includes text — both one-on-one and in groups — as well as voice and video calls, enterprise communication evolves horizontally and vertically in real time and occurs in one consolidated location; streamlining the dissemination of information and company discourse.

Ensuring customer success doesn’t just require consistent and reliable channels of communication inside the office. You need the ability to take your office with you. Turning your smart phone in a mobile office connects you and your team wherever you are, so you can securely:

• Update management and coworkers on developments from the field
• Receive up-to-the minute news and information
• Send and receive photos and images in real-time
• Relay information to customers in a more timely fashion

Lastly, comprehensive collaboration tools, broad administrative control, and robust security and data protection foster productive and focused teamwork, but without the threat of data breaches, outside interference, and malicious attacks.

Aligning your internal communication and collaboration creates a more transparent work environment and reduces internal inefficiency and ineffectiveness — allowing you to focus first and foremost on customer needs.

The Takeaway

Customer success is a long-term journey. By taking the right proactive measures, making it easy for customers to reach you, actively sharing knowledge, and considering your own communication patterns, you do more than simply satisfy your customers. You can begin to achieve customer success that’s both lasting and sustainable.

Originally published at https://www.brosix.com on October 9, 2017.