Digital Customer Success: What is it, and why should you care?
Customer Success ensures that customers have found value in their purchase and will continue using the product or service. It also encompasses the steps needed for a company’s product or service to be used by customers as intended.
With many efforts on scaling Customer Success, this business function now takes over opportunity management, upsells, and cross-sells, driving more revenue growth for organizations. From the focus on Adoption, Expansion, and Retention in Customer Success for the past few years, the challenges and difficulties drove Customer Success leaders to consider implementing more automation services to increase customer-facing time for Customer Success Managers. However, it is essential to understand what Customer Success is, how it relates to customer service, and how a company can measure its success.
What is Digital Customer Success?
Digital Customer Success is a new way of proactively reaching out and quickly responding to customers’ concerns regarding their value realization capabilities. It’s not just about answering the phone and solving problems. It’s about understanding the customer journey and delivering personalized, proactive support that leads to more satisfied customers and happier employees through a mix of automated services and Customer Success Managers providing the human touch of value realization.
The idea of digital Customer Success is to be available for your customers anytime, anywhere. This means being on social media, messaging apps, and emailing them back within minutes or hours instead of days or weeks. It is all about taking a holistic view of your customer experience so that you can provide the best possible service and make sure they’re happy with their experience, no matter where and when they interact with you.
Some of the benefits of digital Customer Success Management include:
1. Time to Innovate
It helps enterprises to focus on innovation while they still need to be able to serve their customers. It also helps them to retain more customers, as they can find out what the customer needs and provides it promptly.
2. Cost reduction
Digital Customer Success Management has helped businesses reduce their cost by 75%. This is because no human resources are needed, and it requires less time to train employees.
3. Customer retention
Digital Customer Success Management has helped businesses increase their retention rate by 30% by providing a personalized experience for each individual and ensuring they are satisfied with the product or service.
How is Digital Customer Success the Future of the Industry?
Automating Customer Success has always been a topic where its benefits and costs are debated whether necessary or not. Digital Customer Success is a booming industry set to grow in the near future, allowing companies to take a customer-centric approach to business. This strategy helps businesses to prioritize customers’ needs and make them feel appreciated by providing them with personalized, relevant, and timely interactions.
It improves their customer experience wherein organizations:
- Identify the customers’ needs and expectations
- Ensure that the company has the right resources and capabilities to meet those needs
- Translates those needs into solutions
- Implements those solutions
- Evaluates which solutions work best for each type of customer; and
- Repeating this cycle.
According to a study conducted by TSIA, The State of Customer Success 2022, Customer Success is now responsible for transitioning 16% of free users to paying users, indicating the department’s important role in revenue growth. To support their dedicated Customer Success teams, many organizations are using adoption frameworks to incorporate the customer journey into their strategies, and 54% of companies in TSIA’s survey have reported that they have done customer journey mapping with the help of automated software. We’re seeing a shift in how our clients think about digital transformation. They are now incorporating digital transformation into their journey maps, and Customer Success Managers interact with customers only on “Moments that Matter” (MTM), combining the best of both the digital and human-made Customer Success journey.
In short,
To be successful, businesses need to be able to provide their customers with the best possible experience. This is not an easy task as many different aspects must be considered. A Digital Customer Service (CS) Strategy is a business approach to delivering an excellent customer experience towards expected outcomes across all channels, such as email, phone, chat, and social media.
Should you wish to learn more about what can be automated and what to consider before automating Customer Success, check out: Automation in Customer Success.
Read the report, The State of Customer Success 2022, by TSIA.
