Customer success involves ensuring your customers are happy and loyal. The goal is to help customers reach their goals, solve their pain points, and see the value of your product.
When you can accomplish this, you’ve reached the pinnacle of customer success. But it’s a lot of work to balance customer needs with business objectives.
Luckily, product managers don’t have to be only people advocating for what the customer needs. Customer success can build customer relationships and gain insights into the product experience.
In this article, you’ll learn what customer success is, how it differs from customer service, and how you can use it to improve your product team.
Customer success is a business method that ensures your product meets customer needs. It’s a relationship-focused approach that puts the customer first. Every customer interaction is an opportunity to increase your customer success.
When customers start seeing success with your product, they’ll continue to use the product or refer it to others. A customer success strategy will ultimately help:
Customer success ensures that you create a product that your target audience needs. An audience that loves your product will increase your growth. If your audience doesn’t like your product, then your business will stagnate or fall apart.
By ensuring you have a customer success strategy in place, your product is well on its way to being a hit. A customer success strategy may have these components:
Any business that has customers needs a role set aside to focus on customer needs. A customer success team aims to support customers from the beginning of the relationship proactively. The goal is to create a long-term and functional relationship with the company’s customers.
Some typical roles and responsibilities of a customer success team may include:
A customer success manager (CSM) is a crucial role that can help bridge the gap between customers and the product. They can help customers use the product effectively, all while also helping teams create a better, more customer-focused product.
Customer success isn’t the same as sales. Although they both have a focus on the customer, they have different focuses and goals.
A sales team’s objective is to close a new deal and often have a shorter time frame with the customer. Meanwhile, a customer success team will take over after sales is over. Then they develop a long-term relationship with the customer.
Customer success and customer service have a similar goal to support the customer. However, both teams provide different contributions to the company and customers. Here are a few key responsibilities of each team.
Customer success aims to support customers in the long term. It involves helping with the onboarding process and driving overall customer satisfaction. Customer success is an advocate for the customer. The results of a customer success team often impact retention rates and customer lifetime value.
Customer service focuses on helping customers when they reach out with problems. Whether that’s through the phone, email, chat, or any other communication method. Customer support helps answer questions, troubleshoot problems, and respond to requests. These interactions are usually quick and resolved in the short term.
A strong collaborative relationship between a CSM and a product manager will build a better product. The two teams will have a hard time reaching their potential without each other. Let’s take a look at how each team can support the other team.
You can view customer success as the customer’s advocate. Customer success has valuable relationships with customers. The unique contact can help gain insights into customer challenges and needs.
Customer success often receives customer feedback which can help guide the product roadmap. The feedback can help product management make informed decisions to improve the product.
High-quality products mean increased customer success. As a PM, you take the feedback you receive from customer success and make choices about user experience, features, or other tasks.
When product management develops customer-centric products, customer success can reap its benefits. Customer success will have an easier time retaining customers and reducing churn. It can also provide opportunities for cross-selling or upselling.
Overall, these practices ensure a satisfying customer experience and increased company revenue.
Myndshift is a healthcare software company. Its onboarding experience involved extensive one-on-one meetings for effective implementation nut Myndshift recognized it needed a way to resolve issues quicker to retain its clients.
Myndshift began using LogRocket to improve its onboarding process and its customer success. Implementing LogRocket made it easier to identify software problems that customers were experiencing. It enabled Myndshift to follow up with the customers and provide solutions.
Creating early success during the onboarding process means customers are happier in the long term. Happier customers drive retention and customer success.
Other examples you can use to implement customer success can include:
The future of customer success will heavily depend on real-time data. Advanced analytics are a crucial part of following the customer journey. When issues happen, companies need to have the tools to respond quickly.
Customers experiencing helpful support may continue to use the product beyond onboarding. When the product helps the customer reach success, then they will turn into loyal customers and vocal fans.
Data-driven insights and proactive customer success strategies are crucial for a customer-centric product. When customer success collaborates with product management, it can increase customer satisfaction and business revenue.
Featured image source: IconScout
LogRocket identifies friction points in the user experience so you can make informed decisions about product and design changes that must happen to hit your goals.
With LogRocket, you can understand the scope of the issues affecting your product and prioritize the changes that need to be made. LogRocket simplifies workflows by allowing Engineering, Product, UX, and Design teams to work from the same data as you, eliminating any confusion about what needs to be done.
Get your teams on the same page — try LogRocket today.
The dynamic system development method (DSDM) was first released in 1994 as a software development method to provide some discipline to RAD.
David Krell, VP of Product at Going, talks about the fallacy that PMs have to be in a position of authority to do vision-led work.
Think of product-led growth as a self-sufficient user experience that leads to business growth by providing value to your users.
Jennifer Musser Metz, VP Product Management — Core Platforms & Expansion at Paramount+, talks about the importance of horizon spotting.
Learn more →
