What is Customer Success: Short and Simple Guide

In the world of SaaS, customer churn can feel like a constant threat. But what if there was a secret weapon to turn happy trials into loyal customers? Customer success is what you seek, it’s a strategic approach that goes beyond basic support to ensure your users achieve their goals.

If you wish to learn what is customer success, how it works, how to implement it, and why it is important in the SaaS industry, stay with us.

What is Customer Success?

Customer success is a set of strategies you implement to build long-term customer relationships. One of the prime customer success goals is to retain customers by giving them what they need throughout their entire customer lifecycle. 

The customer success team and managers should perceive each interaction with the customer as an opportunity to bond with them on a deeper level. Also, customer success boosts customer satisfaction, which increases customer retention and loyalty.

How Does Customer Success Work?

To understand what customer success does and how it works in SaaS, we will show you a typical customer success process step by step:

1. Onboarding
   • The process starts with onboarding. A customer success team helps new customers get started by providing training, support, and guidance. They should ensure that customers understand the product’s main functionalities and features so that they can use it successfully and achieve their desired goals. 
2. Support
   • Customer success teams provide ongoing customer support throughout the entire customer journey. This includes providing guidance, and training, answering various questions, and resolving issues as soon as possible. Also, it’s always a good idea to reach out to customers who have difficulties using the software. It’s crucial to understand customers’ needs so that you can offer an adequate solution. 
3. Health monitoring
   • By tracking usage metrics, gathering feedback, and checking on your customers, you can predict and prevent churn. Customer success software allows you to monitor each account’s health status, set automatic triggers for at-risk customers, and react proactively.
4. Tracking key metrics and KPIs
   • By tracking customer satisfaction scores and retention rates, a customer success team can assess the effectiveness of a certain customer retention strategy. Here is information on retention strategies for SaaS companies.  
5. Upselling/Cross-Selling
   • In Akita, you can perform customer segmentation properly, and you can easily identify opportunities for upselling or cross-selling based on the existing customer’s preferences and usage patterns. 

How to Build a Customer Success Strategy?

After you build a customer success team that comes with the necessary skills and knowledge to support your customer success efforts, you should define precise goals and focus on customer satisfaction and retention. 

Before we go any further, let’s give answers to the questions, “ What is a customer success manager?” and “ What is customer success management?” to understand their roles in the customer success team. So, the customer success manager is responsible for ensuring that customers achieve their goals while using the software. It is his or her main goal to drive customer satisfaction and retention. Related to that, customer success management is a business strategy that managers implement to achieve the given goals and build strong, long-term customer relationships. 

To get in-depth knowledge of your customer’s needs and preferences, you should consider using customer success tools and software to automate as many processes as possible. It’s important to get precise customer data and metrics so that you can rely on them and based on them build customer success strategies. You can use Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software or Customer Success Software like Akita to track customer interactions, monitor customer health, identify patterns and trends, and create effective strategies. 

It’s crucial to develop standardized customer success processes for key points like onboarding, retention, and engagement. However, you should stay flexible and modify the process whenever it doesn’t work. This is why you should track your customer’s behaviors regularly.

Customer Success and Similar Industries

Now,  let’s go over how customer success differs from other essential customer-centric terms.  

Account Management and Customer Success

CS teams focus on helping the customers achieve their goals and success with the product, while account management teams focus on growing and managing the existing customer base. 

Customer Service and Customer Success

Customer success teams aim to help the customers achieve their long-term goals, while customer service teams focus on providing immediate help and support, and resolving the issues as they arise. 

Customer Experience and Customer Success

Customer experience strategies aim to ensure customers have utterly positive experiences and interactions throughout their journey, while customer success aims to help them achieve success with the product they use. 

Sales and Customer Success

Customer success and sales are two sides of the revenue generation coin but focus on different stages of the customer journey. Sales convert leads into customers, while customer success ensures those customers find value and stick around for the long term.

Customer Success Tips

Now when you have a clearer picture, let’s see some of the customer success best practices and tips you can implement, and increase customer satisfaction.

First and foremost, it’s paramount to understand your customers to the core. Perform customer segmentation and tailor the customer strategies to fit the cohorts’ needs and preferences. If you manage to create an impeccable onboarding process, you have already done a lot when it comes to customer success. Best practices when it comes to customer success are personalized communication, and sending targeted messages and offers based on customer’s preferences and needs. 

Lastly, evaluate your customer success efforts regularly by tracking metrics and gathering feedback to assess the effectiveness of your strategies. Don’t hesitate to experiment with new approaches and make sure to always adjust the given strategies to the customers’ needs to maintain their effectiveness. 

Why Is Customer Success Important? — Conclusion

Besides driving customer retention, customer success strategies can increase revenue and business growth, as satisfied customers are more likely to spend more money. 

If you manage to provide an excellent customer experience, that will surely give you a competitive edge and set you apart from others. Customer success allows you to gain valuable insight into customer behavior and preferences, which you can use to develop effective marketing strategies. Use Akita as a hub for all our customer data, perform customer segmentation and remain informed when it comes to customers’ needs, preferences, and challenges. The main goal of customer success strategies is to build and nurture long-term customer relationships, which are the foundation of your business’s health and growth.