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ToggleCustomer experience is at the heart of any successful business, and customers are at the center of every product and service. Brands are shifting their focus from just selling to providing an experience.
SaaS companies like us are re-defining that experience like never before. And the credit goes to our customer success teams.
Very early on, when customer success was still a buzzword, it was taken to mean that they help with reducing customer churn. But now the tables have turned. Customer success teams are the powerhouse that enables growth – they are the ones who are positioned to handhold the customer from the time of customer acquisition by providing consultative solutions and therefore enhancing the customer’s lifetime value.
What does this mean?
Customer success teams are privy to a whole world of operational tactics, common problems faced by customers, possible bottlenecks, and such.
We cater end to end sales automation requirements for our clients by utilizing data-driven insights to enable and empower customers to get closer to their goals. In the pandemic, it was our customer success team who took a charge and played the lead role in delivering value. It was no more about putting only the best in place – it was about keeping business running.
The responsibilities and the core value of our Customer Success Team are driven by these words of Don Peppers – “YOUR JOB, if you’re a customer success manager, isn’t to make friends with your client. Your primary job is to CHALLENGE THEM and get them to think, in order to make them MORE SUCCESSFUL.
1. Confident collaboration with customers to drive growth and nurture innovation
Most successful solutions rely on one’s expertise in the identification of challenges and opportunities. At FieldAssist, the customer success team leaves no stone unturned when it comes to understanding the intricacies of the client’s business needs, to formulate the most practical and efficient sustainable sales automation strategies. Starting from a Pre-Pilot meeting with Senior Management to meeting with every single stakeholder whose insights and experience are relevant to the project, these teams work in close proximity with the customer to provide them with the best consultancy and support. Customer Success Team acts as a consulting function to help customers achieve their goals.
2. Consistent training to drive maximum adoption of technology
Successful SFA adoption by the customer is the primary objective of any customer success team. At FieldAssist, product level training, group conference sessions with field sales teams are conducted regularly to ensure that every field agent experiences value in the SFA and is ready to pass the value forward.
3. Support, the success of a good support team, is defined by its irrelevance
The less the customer needs support, the more successful the team is. The customer success team at FieldAssist engages with the customer from beginning till forever. An important practice we follow at FieldAssist in maintaining the constant touchpoints. We have call support and tech support for each level from the time of onboarding process to make them comfortable with any new functionality that we add, to solving current issues and identifying future challenges, this team has re-defined success at every level. Our customer success managers have been the same and they have shaped the journey of the customer which helps customers to build trust.
The Pandemic twist to FieldAssist’s customer success team’s ongoing strategy
1. Community building
As soon as the lockdown was announced, we made it a point to revisit and reinforce our purpose, i.e., creating value for customers. We shifted to virtual engagement platforms, within 48 hours, our team of 30 highly skilled members, who take care of 350 different brands, transitioned the whole customer engagement environment from a physical set-up to a virtual medium. The physical training program was redesigned into an online keeping in the meeting the interest of the sales team, thus making it an effective learning platform to adopt the technology.
From sharing information of lockdown updates to sharing market pulse, review meetings to make customers aware of the industry best practices, refresher training for learning and development of client sales teams.
As all our customers, along with us, we’re working towards the same purpose, it made sense to build virtual communities to be able to learn from one another.
2. Operational Agility
Our customer success team took every challenge as an opportunity to make processes more efficient. We made sure that every support query was answered and resolved within SLAs.
Support means easy access in times of need, and our customer success team made sure of that. As we shifted our entire training base online in the wake of the pandemic, we needed to make additional efforts in making sales representatives comfortable with this environment. Our teams provided them with call-on-click support. They could access the app, click on the support button, and speak with the support team directly.
Various brands including Anmol Biscuits, CapitalFoods, Danone, Veeba entrusted us with empowering their sales teams during the pandemic, for uninterrupted customer service.
To conclude, why do you need customer success teams? We’ve answered this above, but let’s also give you the numbers behind it. Customer success teams not just drive the retention of customers but also treat them as growth engines.
- It is up to 14 times easier to sell to an existing customer than a new one.
- The investment needed to land new customers is between five and 25 times more expensive than retaining new ones.
The final one – by improving customer retention by just 5%, your company’s profits can increase by as much as 95%.
If you are still wondering if this is for you – get in touch with us.
About Post Author
Chitransh Jain
A problem solver at his core, Chitransh is best at identifying strategic opportunities and executing action plans with great attention to detail. His eagerness to take up challenging tasks while upskilling continuously allows him to deliver impactful results.