Marketing and sales tactics play a pivotal role in the success of every business. But in an age where customers are provided with access to countless options, traditional methods are not sufficient to sustain growth. This is where the concept of customer success comes into play. Customer success refers to the practice of anticipating customer challenges or questions in advance and proactively providing solutions, ensuring customers get their desired outcome all throughout their time with practice. The customer success goals should be measurable, achievable, and time-bound. It should also have its primary focus on areas like how to increase customer retention, prevent turnover, build loyalty, and expand satisfaction with the service offered.
Who needs a Customer Success strategy?
The answer is quite simple – if you have customers, you should invest in customer success. In recent times, it has become significantly more expensive for businesses to acquire new customers. That’s why their fundamental focus should be on retaining existing customers and keeping them happy — happy customers become your biggest assets. Some of today’s most successful emerging and growing dental practices are already investing in customer success.
Constantly growing practices are more likely to prioritize customer success in comparison to their stagnant counterparts. These growing practices fully understand that the most efficient way of running their practice is by ensuring their customers are happy and satisfied with the services provided. Hence their prime focus is on working proactively in partnership with customers throughout their time as a customer to help them get more value out of their purchases and share their feedback with you. Following the customer-first approach, drives the customer experience forward and ensures a successful path into the future.
Why does Customer Success Matter?
Customer success ultimately leads to the success of the practice. It improves customer happiness and loyalty; by genuinely helping your customers get their money’s worth ultimately turning them into the biggest promoters and advocates for your dental practice. Customer success helps you boost customer happiness and reduce churn rates, improve renewal and satisfaction, and, therefore, increase your revenue and customer loyalty. Customer success aims at helping users proactively and building long-term relationships with them.
How does customer success work?
There are three fundamental elements needed for customer success to be effective. These include a customer success solution (it could be a tool or software), a team and manager of customer success employees, and a customer success strategy.
Choose a customer success solution.
In order to proactively manage all interactions with the customers, it is necessary for your practice to choose a customer success software or tools.
Hire and train a customer success team.
Every practice needs a team of people working on customer success to proactively assist the practice’s customer base.
Create a customer success strategy.
The kind of strategy that you need to implement purely depends upon the service you sell and the customer’s expectations of your service.
Tips to Helping Customers Succeed
- Implement a customer success program:
An effective customer success program to guide your team to efficiently and proactively assist your patients is very crucial. Customer success strategies are commonplace in every business. Hence while formulating a customer success strategy for your dental practice, ensure that it meets the needs and expectations of your customers. It is also very important to keep in mind to modify the existing strategy as the business grows — the needs of your customers change over time, especially as the dental services you provide evolves.
- Educate your customers:
To best support your customers the best, you need to anticipate the questions that are bound to arise as they make use of your dental service. It is important to empower your customers through education about your dental service so as to avoid confusion on the patient’s end. For instance, with live chat functionality on your site, features and descriptions of what you offer can be listed and in case of any further confusion, the success reps are available to better support your customers in real time.
- Onboard Customers:
Onboard your customers to support them throughout the initial parts of their journey with your dental service. Provide them with the resources and knowledge that they need to get started. Onboarding customers is a great way to get acquainted with your practice— and answer any questions proactively. By onboarding your customers, you set the expectations from your practice and the services you provide, during their time as your patients. - Communicate With Other Teams:
It is very important to keep a strong hold on communication among the various departments at your dental practice which will eventually help you help your customers. Work with the different teams in your practice, effectively creating resources that will further assist all teams collectively, and help your customers better. Communicate with different teams to better understand and target specific recurring issues that customers frequently approach you with. Communicate with the support team to align your practice’s proactive and reactive efforts so all interactions with your customers meet the requirements of professionalism and consistency. Remember, effective communication is key. - Promote Customer Loyalty:
A customer’s positive experience with your dental practice results in the customer’s loyalty toward your practice. The key to this is to get your customers to feel satisfied with the service being provided and a sense of certainty that they’re getting their money’s worth. Customer loyalty is, without any doubt, the best way to increase customer retention rates.
You Succeed When Your Customers Do
It is quite easy to infer that most successful dental practices are those who ensure the continued happiness, growth and success of their customers. By creating an atmosphere where your customers feel supported throughout their time being associated with your dental service, they turn into loyal advocates of your practice. This will allow your practice to grow sustainably while at the same time, building long-term relationships with the people you depend on most: your customers.
