Customer Success | 7 min read | Published March 10, 2021

Part 3: Three Ways to Achieve Success for Your Customers…and Your Bottom Line

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Seek to understand data and metrics so you can build actionable strategies to make a positive impact. Otherwise, it becomes reporting for the sake of reporting.

While virtually all customer success management initiatives start out as “churnfighters,” you can’t stop there. The challenge is to gather and use the data from every interaction to move your team out of reactive mode and into far more effective proactive stances.”1

That’s part of the definition of Customer Success as given to us by the Customer Success Association. In Part 1 of this blog series we introduced the new imperative for customer support and customer success—achieving success for your customers…and for your bottom line. The first way to do so is to ensure product adoption and use. The second way is to use B2B customer support tools to proactively strengthen your customer relationships and reduce churn, which we explored in Part 2.

 

In Part 3 of this series, we address how to analyze and use data to ensure success and drive recurring revenue.

Asset 2@2xUnify your customer data to mitigate risks and identify opportunities

Reports. We all have to run them, and read them, and receive them, or submit them, and definitely explain them. But sometimes we get so caught up in the actions surrounding reports that we neglect to actually understand them.

As a customer service professional, you have all sorts of data at your fingertips. From time to first response to hourly ticket totals to the number of chat sessions per day and everything in between, a good customer service system can provide you with the metrics needed to improve your service operation. But if you don’t understand them, you can’t build the strategies and appropriate actions to make a positive impact. Then it becomes reporting for the sake of reporting.

For a long time, customer service leaders focused on one conversation or resolving one ticket at a time. They recorded calls between a rep and their customer, and this was the primary driver for improving their operations. Now, customer service has evolved so the conversation is just one small component of a broader customer experience as B2B companies focus on a holistic approach to the entire customer relationship. And they are using innovative software solutions that help the effort by automatically determining message sentiment and providing detailed product tracking and analysis, as two examples.

When businesses look at trends in their support operations, such as why customers even contact the service team in the first place, they can not only use the information to streamline operations to make teams more efficient, but they can stay current with, even ahead of, industry trends to improve the value of the conversations that actually happen.

With an advanced reporting tool like TeamInsights, you can analyze everything from the strengths and weaknesses of agents to the health of your support ticket backlog to overall customer satisfaction. 

One example?

Ticket open and close times: Monitoring the number of tickets your team is opening, the time to first response, and the length of time to close them gives you a window into trends that may be developing behind the scenes.

What it means: Long delays for an initial response can set the tone for your customer. If it takes hours or even days to acknowledge the ticket, it starts off that interaction on a negative note that you may not recover from. Couple that with long close times and the customer’s frustration heightens as the process goes on. Even when the issue gets resolved, the lost time and annoyance remains.

Strategies: Set a standard for an initial response to a ticket and put systems in place that enable support teams to meet the standard. For example, MachMotion’s standard is to first respond to a ticket within four hours. Once you master that and get off on the right foot, develop similar standards for resolution times.

Determine if the trends indicate a development issue—such as multiple tickets regarding the same technical problem—or a customer agent training issue that can be helped with some one-on-one coaching.

For more ways you can use tools like TeamInsights to interpret data and set actionable strategies, read our 3-part blog on the topic.

1The Definition of Customer Success, Customer Success Association, retrieved Nov 16, 2020, https://www.customersuccessassociation.com/library/the-definition-of-customer-success/

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With increasing revenue as its primary focus, TeamSuccess boldly repositions the role of B2B customer success software in the industry. TeamSuccess allows customer success teams to easily monitor, automate, and streamline the customer lifecycle, creating more upsell opportunities, reducing the risk of churn, and ensuring that as customer relation­ships grow, so do contributions to the bottom line. Learn more at TeamSuccess.com.

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