Increased sales is not the only way a practice can grow. Customer success and your ability to retain and renew your existing customers are some additional aspects that are crucial to your practice’s growth.
Customer success strategies are proactive plans for guiding clients to outcomes that satisfy their needs. As customers enjoy more value, not only do customer retention rates go up, but your service adoption rates rise as well. This promotes the success of your practice as well as your customers.
Investing in customer success closely equates to investing in your own practice’s growth. This will in turn increase the lifetime of your customers’ association with your practice and develop a mutually beneficial future for both the practice as well as its customers. An investment in customer success can:
There are essentially five principles of customer success that are vital to understanding and orienting customer success strategies around.
Customers are constantly seeking value out of the services they are receiving. It is very important to be consistent in providing value to customers. Value is what fuels customer satisfaction and customer retention.
A proactive approach is crucial to customer success. Warning signs as well as opportunities need to be identified well in advance in order to take the best action.
A practice should keep a close watch on the customer particulars, in the moment; and not when the moment is over. Simply put, customer needs and issues should be monitored and addressed in real-time. This allows us to take actions that bring a high impact on custom success.
Since practices have access to the customers’ particulars, it becomes quite easy to engage them with more relevant forms of communication. This allows the practice to trigger the right actions/tasks at the right time.
For practices, there is an opportunity in every customer. Hence all customers should be treated as equals and should all be listened to with great attention. This will have a huge impact on the customer experience and will influence their decision of continuing their association with your practice.
Feedback is the fundamental data for understanding your customers' journey, experiences, requirements, and problems they face. Hence building responsive feedback loops is a necessity as far as matters relating to Customer Success are concerned. Feedback from your customers will help you understand why they are continuing with you and why they could potentially leave. There are various means of collecting this feedback. Here are a few most commonly used methods:
Interviews, be it face-to-face or virtual, are suitable for initial customer interaction and can help us get an in-depth understanding of what the customer’s needs are.
In-app surveys, such as Net-Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT), or Customer Effort Score (CES), are the perfect means of receiving customer feedback and can add great value to your Customer Success.
Online reviews can be a great source of feedback for the practice. If it is positive, then it helps further expand the customer base and if unfortunately, it is negative, it can help discover parameters that can later serve as means of improvement.
Having a retention strategy will help you retain those customers who are on the verge of churn. This would also target those customers who are potentially considering the discontinuation of their association with the practice. Here are some methods that can be used to retain your existing customers:
Customers constantly depend on the practice for support. As a practice, you can ensure that your customers get the kind of support they expect by curating and delivering meaningful resource bundles, aimed at addressing the needs of customers at every stage of their journey with the practice. This is achieved with the help of:
The strategies you lay down for customer success will function better with appropriate technology to back them up. An ideal customer success technology should consist of the following key features: