Driving customer success acquisition to grow your enterprise

13 Nov, 2020 - 00:11 0 Views

eBusiness Weekly

Robert Gonye

If you ask a group of customer professionals what their job is, you’d probably get a handful of wide-ranging answers from its about building “more proven value faster for both the customers and your company”, or about ensuring that customers will achieve success with the company’s product.”

An organisational function that helps customers get the maximum value out of a product or service is the best form of Customer success.

At nearly every company, one of the top goals is growth. When you take a step back and think of customer success as “growing the company,” you realise that your success team has the potential to make a significant impact on your company’s short- and long-term growth.

Customer acquisition vs customer retention

Customer acquisition is about bringing new customers in. Customer retention is about keeping those customers around.

One isn’t more important than the other — both are critically important to business growth, and ideally, salespeople and customer success professionals collaborate to achieve both outcomes simultaneously.

You see, once a new customer is closed and acquired by sales, customer success then troubleshoots their problems, provides on-boarding assistance, collects feedback, and partners with them to help them derive maximum value from their purchase. This prevents them from churning or leaving negative reviews due to dissatisfaction. And, if customers stay happy, they’ll continue purchasing from your company, providing customer testimonials, and leaving you positive reviews on social media.

So really, customer acquisition and retention go hand-in-hand, and one isn’t possible without the other. Next, learn more about how customer success professionals can directly improve customer acquisition and retention.

How to improve

customer acquisition

1. Increase customer referrals

Referral marketing is one of the few customer acquisition channels that can scale infinitely, and a customer success team can play a big role here.

The secret? Proactively reaching out to customers already referring to new business, and thanking them for it is key.

2. Promote customer success stories as case studies

Nearly every business — especially in B2B spheres — uses case studies to drive customer acquisition. Case studies are proof that your product works.

The first step is to find the right case study candidate. The right candidate matches one or more of the following criteria:

• They have in-depth knowledge of your product.

• They have had remarkable results using your product.

• The company is a recognisable brand.

• The company switched from an alternative product.

Who better to identify the ideal case study candidate than the customer success team? Additionally, customer success teams are in a position to help during the creation of the case study, as they know the customer better than anyone else.

3. Encourage

user-generated content

Companies that are successful and popular because of user-generated content most times incentivise to create useful content, which makes their pages rank well in search engines, driving more users who will, in turn, create more content.

If your business uses user-generated content it is the responsibility of your customer success team can help get more.

As it turns out, all actions not only help the business succeed, they also create more user-generated content.

4. Improve your brand’s messaging

Company messaging is key to customer acquisition. It should consistently describe your company’s key benefits, target ideal customers, and highlight points of differentiation between you and your competitors. A brands messaging must also be in the voice of the customer, which is often easier said than done.

The result? A significant increase in conversion.

Customer success teams know the customer better than anyone else. To make the most of this, set up a time for your customer success team to critique, read through email sequences, or listen to sales calls. Have them give feedback, focus on mismatches in how the company is communicating and how customers communicate.

5. Respond to customer feedback

Nowadays when one person leaves your business, there’s a good chance they’ll try to take a few other customers with them as well. In fact, 95 percent of people share feedback with other consumers whenever they have a bad experience with a business, and nearly 55 percent of these people will turn to social media to voice their complaints. Since 76 percent of consumers trust online reviews as much as peer recommendations, this negative word-of-mouth can quickly damage your brand’s reputation as well as customer acquisition.

However, while you might not be able to stop the customer from writing a negative review, you can respond to their feedback to prevent additional revenue loss. Next week we continue with the second part of the article.

Robert Gonye is a business growth expert and influencer. He writes in his personal capacity. For comments and views: [email protected]

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