Customer Success – Best Practices You Can Put Into Action

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.

Why invest in Customer Success?
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:

• Decrease the churn rates and increase the retention rates of your customers, keeping them engaged.
• Facilitate expansions and increase customer-centered growth.
• Increase customer acquisitions and improve brand image through customer advocacy.
• Help bring the necessary refinements and improvements in the internal processes for collecting, analyzing, and utilizing customer data, thus facilitating more effective strategies.

5 Principles of Customer Success
There are essentially five principles of customer success that are vital to understanding and orienting customer success strategies around.

• Value:
  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.
  
• Actions:
  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.
  
• Real-time monitoring:
  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.
  
• Engagement:
  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.
  
• All Customers:
  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.

So, what are the best practices that can be adopted for effective Customer Success?

1. Devise an immaculate feedback loop:
   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:
  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:
  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:
  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.

2. Have a retention strategy:
   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:
   

• Initiate communication with them to understand their reasons for discontinuing their association with your practice.
• Reach out to them to offer assistance in the areas that they need.
• Conduct frequent one-on-ones with them to understand if your service is meeting their expectations.
• Keep a note of their valuable feedback.
• Educate them on the new services that your practice has to offer them.

3. Proactively promote the growth of your 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:

• FAQ guides to answer commonly arising queries
• Demonstrations to raise awareness among customers
• Blog posts with tips that address common concerns in the dental industry
• Personalized emails
  

4. Automate your customer success strategy:
   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:
   

• A platform for customer data platform connects all of the data in one place.
• Real-time monitoring of customer progress.
• A segmentation tool that allows for customized communications with each customer.
• A tool to define and track measurable success goals aligned with your customer’s journey.

These customer success practices will help you improve your business in the following ways:

1. Growing your practice revenue
2. Maximizing chair-time utilization
3. Increase average hourly earnings and new patient numbers
4. Improve patient recall rates and treatment acceptance
5. Reducing the number of failure to attend and short-notice cancellations
6. Eliminate workflow inefficiencies

Conclusion

It is now quite evident that the ultimate goal of Customer Success is to increase customer satisfaction to improve customer retention and customer loyalty. To sum it all up, with the best Customer Success practices in place, not only will you be able to retain your customers but also turn them into active promoters of your service, thus ultimately improving your Customer Lifetime Value (LTV).