Uncomplicate – How to innovate for customer success
Uncomplicate by Freshworks brings you crisp and insightful videos which will focus on answering one tactical question around sales & marketing, support & collaboration, employee engagement, and growth.
Customer success is changing with the times. There is a dire need for companies to adapt and cater to the growing demands. We have Yasasree Nerayanuri, who leads customer marketing at Freshworks, explaining how to innovate for customer success.
Rethink your omnichannel experience
Omnichannel is an often used word. The common perception is—be available across platforms for customers to reach out. But, that really isn’t the way to go about it. You need to take some time to understand your users and target channels that they are present on. Rethink your channels. For example, if your users prefer to reach out on WhatsApp for smaller issues, it makes sense to invest in it. This is smart and also saves you money and resources.
But, while reaching out to your customers via online platforms is great, nothing comes close to a face-to-face interaction. It is always prudent to meet at least your marquee customers face-to-face. It establishes faith and strengthens the relationship.
“Offline will never lose its importance. Even after you have a scalable base of customers, you will really need to see how you can have an in-person connect,” said Yasasree.
Make your product your ambassador
The industry calls it product-driven customer success.
Are there ways for the customer to reach you from within the product, without having to draft long mails or pick up the phone and call?
The logic behind this requirement is simple— your customers spend a lot of time on your product and would prefer to reach out from the product itself. Moreover, imagine your customer has a critical business need, let us call it ‘A’. Are there features within your product to help the customer keep a close track of ‘A’ and check metrics, understand where they are going wrong and figure out how to improve? These features will make customers trust your product as it is helping them figure out core business metrics.
AI to the rescue
A customer success manager’s (CSM) role isn’t easy. Each CSM handles quite a few customers. There might be customers who are happy, some not so happy, or maybe even some who are on the verge of churning out. The CSM might have to give them feature updates, try to make them stay, or work on pricing. Basically, the CSM has multiple things to solve for each day. Can there be an artificial intelligence bot which can help them with a daily to-do list? Imagine if a bot could say ‘Here are 10 things, ranked in order of priority, for today’. This would make the lives of CSMs so much easier.
These are our top tips on how to innovate on the customer success front. If you have any more ideas, please share them in the comments below.
This blogpost was co-written by Vignesh Jeyaraman.
