Setting Your Customer Success Vision – Part 1 of Three Part Series
There are three elements that I have defined as part of a strategic vision for a Customer Success model:
Customer Success Corporate Climate Shift
Go To Market Strategy by Target Market
Customer Life Cycle Model
The first part of a Customer Success model is the Customer Success Corporate Climate Shift in which a company makes the strategic decision to put Customer Success in the center of their strategic vision for growth.
Building a Customer Experience Framework embodies all things oriented to servicing and delivering a high quality, consistent and valuable customer experience to all of your customers. This framework becomes your Company Way of Life and the center of your strategic and operational plan for the entire company.
Customer Success is not achieved by creating a team or department of Customer Success Managers. It is achieved with all departments collaborating and contributing to making the customer’s experience the best in each target market. This comes from the Executive Team down to every employee in the company thinking about how to create the ultimate Customer Experience from the first touch point a potential customer has with your company all the way through the long term relationship that will be built in creating a Customer for Life.
There is a perspective I share with my team to help them understand the perspective we need to have when working with our customers:
The Customer’s Perception is Our Reality
This will help the team members take a different approach to servicing customers. When a customer engagement goes sideways, instead of trying to prove to management that they did everything right for the customer, the team focuses on checking in with the customer to ask a different set of questions to understand what their current perception is of the company, product and services and why. Instead of going through a series of excuses, they focus as a team to come up with an action plan to provide all the options possible to help address the customer’s issues and concerns to ensure they can turn the customer’s perception to one of value and loyalty. The CS team will ensure the right perception is created for all customers in every aspect of the Customer’s Life Cycle with your company as part of your Customer Success vision.
Knowing the Company has adopted the right corporate climate to focus on creating Customer Success as a Companywide strategy, the next element to focus on for your Customer Success vision is your Go to Market Strategy by Market Segment. Stay tuned as I will go into this in detail in my next blog.
I welcome your thoughts and comments.
Jackie Golden