Great companies know that providing a first-class experience to all customers is achieved by investing both time and money into customer success strategies. The pay-offs from this investment are substantial and growing.
A recent study shows that by 2020, customer experience will officially surpass both price and product as the primary differentiator among businesses. Despite this, it is estimated that only 37 percent of business leaders have a dedicated budget for improving customer success. The time to get ahead of the curve is now.
In other words, value-based customer success will be the game-changer for businesses moving forward. Here are three ways to infuse value-based customer success into your organization and your business relationships:
Let’s use the example of a first-class flight experience. Everyone from the gate agents to the flight attendants are wholly dedicated to the quality of your first-class experience. Your company leadership should similarly be modeling their customer success values and holding themselves and everyone else accountable for reaching customer success goals. The best way to instill customer success as a value cohesively throughout your business is to ensure that executives are both practicing and preaching its importance.
Achieving and maintaining customer success requires an ongoing investment in the right tools, systems, teams, and training. More specifically, it is crucial that your business is allocating enough resources to support team members who are interacting with customers on a daily basis. A great way to do this is to provide teams with playbooks that clearly outline their priorities, the company’s values, and how customer success is at the heart of it all. Priorities should center around fostering those client relationships and improving customer experiences. In turn, they should feel empowered to think two steps ahead, proactively identify risks, and help their customers get to value faster and more effectively.
In order to successfully improve customer experience initiatives and deliver a luxe experience, it is important to reward good relationships by creating a financial incentive. Focus on two key audiences to structure incentives around: Customer Success teams (including sales and customer onboarding) and customers.
Internally, you can create incentives that unlock when a customer reaches their stated outcomes at various points in their journey. Do so by structuring internal variable compensation for your team members around key stages in the customer journey. Your team will associate these incentives more closely with customer achievements–when one wins, they both do.
Externally, the most beneficial incentives for a customer come from giving them even more stake in their own success with your business. Encourage them to hit the ground running through their process by providing incentives such as money back (percentage off or lump sum) or in the form of a free service or training. They’ll be satisfied with the returns, and you’ll have moved them through their processes much more efficiently.
At TaskRay, we know how crucial it is to deliver first-class onboarding and handoff experiences to your customers. Our software makes it easy to enjoy insightful visibility into your processes and gain a step-by-step view of each customer’s journey to maximize their success.
Interested in learning more? Download our free eBook at taskray.com/ebooks/.