Automating like a human: build a human centered customer success strategy

customer success strategy

91% of companies without a defined customer success initiative believe that their clients suffer from issues that can be prevented or reduced with a customer success program.

Digital business and customer success exist side by side. Gartner predicts that by the end of 2019, more than 50% of organizations will redirect their investments to customer experience innovations. And from the 1000 famous companies surveyed by New Vantage, 97.2% are investing in big data and AI. It’s considered that big data technology makes predictive modeling of customer behaviour possible. Customer success has become quantifiable and analytics-driven.

Besides, according to the Edelman Trust Barometer, people switch their trust to relationships within their control. So what does this mean for consumers?

They believe they aren’t able to protect their privacy.

So now, the average customer is switching their attention from the standard business manipulative practices to the trust focus. Trust is becoming the new trend.

For example, Netflix sends courtesy emails to those who have spent a prohibitively large amount of money on their platform. Google launched wellbeing tools for those who tend to lose track of time while being online.

Regardless of the fact that all the data mentioned above was calculated in numbers, human intelligence is a value. Let’s look at what is important for staying current on the market: actionable KPI, income statement measures, generated leads, reviewing employee performance and customer satisfaction.

The point here is that the last one often becomes a hard truth concerning customer retention.

 

Why is that happening?

Numbers always include biases. The streetlight effect is inherent in many types of scientific research. But when talking about customers, we’re talking about humans. So let’s put numbers into the brackets.

We get a simple test of a few questions:

How frequently do you use your product?

When was the last time you watched your customer do this?

 

Educate yourself to do research

A customer oriented culture doesn’t only mean that the customer goes first. For every customer complaint, there are 26 other unhappy customers who have remained silent. The point is to understand how your customers use your product and why.

It’s not only about the customer journey, but also about how they think and what they do in daily life. And this is where even a simple conversation can be more useful than metrics.

 

Mix quantitative and qualitative data

Building customer experience metrics relies on quality, satisfaction, loyalty and advocacy. But what does it mean to be qualitative?

There are 3 basic components:

1. Understanding:

  • who are your users?
  • what motivates them?
  • why did they stop using the product?

2. Emphasizing:

  • how do they currently solve X problem
  • where can we add differentiated value?

3. Hypothesizing:

  • we believe users will benefit if we initiate some action
  • search not for what they like, but for behavior patterns on new users

 

What will you give people in exchange for their time?

Your product compliance. That’s where we took our start with SignNow. We understand that with some pretty shocking or boring statements that we get from people, we can start to see the things that we need to fix.

The things we do first are:

1. Adopting a customer service tool

2. Automating their daily tasks and functions

We can’t do our customers’ job for them, but what we propose can essentially change the whole working process:

The result – lasting relationships and minimized churn. Building a customer success strategy is not that hard. Just learn from your customers. When you learn it, you’ll do it.