The Customer Success Bow Tie
Customer success is a vital, yet often overlooked part of keeping and growing a business. All too often, companies struggle with onboarding and engaging their clients in a way that gives the customer maximum value. You put so much work into developing a great product or service a ton of time and effort into marketing and talking to potential customers and clients. Highlighting how what you offer can meet a need. But the ball gets dropped when it comes to keeping and maintaining customers and getting them to renew with you.
The customer success bow tie is made up of two parts, the buyer’s journey, and the customer’s journey. Together, the bow tie holds the key to customer success, customer retention, customer renewals, and ultimately more revenue for your organization.
Consequences of low retention:
The bowtie of customer success is very important, for a lot of reasons. One of the main reasons, though, is based on the cost of acquiring new customers. It is very expensive to get a new client. It can be 6 times, up to 10 times more expensive to acquire and onboard a new client. Then it is to maintain relationships and continue doing business with old clients. This points where if you aren’t renewing your current clients for at least the first year. Your business loses money – and no one wants that. Part of the reason for low retention or low renewal rates is the lack of customer success.
If a client enjoys their process with the salesperson and knows they can count on this person to answer questions and meet their needs. They get a good taste in their mouth about what the company and organization are, and customer success is heightened. However, the onboarding process is just as important and just as crucial. Clients need to be taken through the onboarding steps in a way that makes them feel secure, heard, and excited about your product or service so that they will renew and continue to be loyal to your solution.
The importance of onboarding:
Onboarding is not just one person job. Customer success is not just one person’s job. Teams must work together to provide a seamless journey for their customers, from the time that they first interact with their new clients onward. There is a six-step onboarding process that will help you create great customer success. The elements of this process include: embark, handoff, kickoff, adopt, review, and expand.
This journey is a very important one, and it starts at the very first point of contact when a client embarks on the process of determining. If your service or product can meet their needs. It moves through the handoff stage, where the salesperson connects the new client with the customer success rep. And on through various steps until you are expanding and growing with the needs of the customer, ensuring you retain them for years to come.
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