Single point experience for customers

Why should you offer a single point customer experience

Customers want resolution to their product issues almost instantly. And they can choose to get in touch with you via any channel such as social media, live chat, email, etc. While you build your omnichannel customer support team to address customers across channels and offer a unified experience, the last thing you want is your customers not knowing whom to contact.

At the end of the day, what stands out from a customer perspective is the kind of experience they have with your support team. One of the best practices successful companies tend to follow is to assign dedicated customer success experts to specific accounts/customers. While the customer success manager is usually proactive in customer relationships, it also ensures the customer knows whom to get in touch with when there’s a need.

The role of customer success manager as the customer’s single point of contact

Customer Onboarding

A customer needs a single point of contact when they are being onboarded to your product. For a customer success manager, it is one of the most critical tasks. It is critical because, the customer doesn’t have to be burdened with complete knowledge of the product at this stage, and needs to be educated on the features that will help them achieve their goals. Being at the strategic inflection point, the customer success manager needs to make adjustments in the onboarding process accordingly, thus reducing the probabilities of customer churn.

Handling customer escalations

Having a customer success manager as the customer’s primary point of contact, also helps in bringing down the number of support escalations. The customer can feel assured that they can reach out to the assigned person for any concerns and it also helps in building a healthy relationship. Success managers also need to periodically do a health check of the accounts in their portfolio to improve the last mile efficiency.

Renewals

The relationship with the customer, gives the customer success manager all the visibility needed and hence carry the responsibility for bringing in recurring revenue in the form of renewals. They need to regularly follow up with the customer for renewals so that there are no surprises at the last minute.

Upselling

One of the key KPIs of a customer success manager is increasing the lifetime value of a customer. Hence, though they don’t carry sales targets, they have a huge role in upselling, cross-selling, and upgrades. Since they guide your customers throughout their journey and help them get resolution to their issues, it makes it easy for the success managers to identify opportunities.

Customer Advocacy

Success managers, given their relationship with the customers, are also responsible for translating the relationship into advocacy. Typically it is executed in the form of NPS surveys, requesting product reviews, case studies, and referrals. Thus, successful customer relationships also results in revenue growth.

Having a focused customer success team can actually take your organization to the next level, and hence it is important to assign the best suited resources to this role.

Next topic- Key questions to ask when staffing your customer support chat team

Mobile customer support and engagement

While being available on every channel is important to enhance the customer experience, it is also important to note that a lot of these interactions tend to happen via mobile devices. So, the customer experience is dependent on how seamless these interactions are, and the mobile experience you offer to enable it.