BY Amanda Levin
Do your clients know, understand and use all aspects of your product or service? Are they staying with you or are you experiencing high levels of churn? You may be suffering from some critical mistakes that are demolishing your customer success.
In a post for Business 2 Community, Burke Adler summarizes a presentation from Annie Tsai, Chief Customer Officer of DoubleDutch, in which she shares 5 customer success mistakes she has made and wants you to learn from.
- Don’t ignore the sales handoff.
You worked hard to land that customer, so the last thing you want to have happen is the customer getting upset or leaving due to a poor handoff. If you don’t have a proper handoff or onboarding process in place, it’s time to get one! During the sale, you gleaned a lot of information about your new customer that MUST be passed on to your customer service and other teams. These include goals and milestones, preferences and quirks, concerns, best contact times, etc. The list goes on and on!
In addition to the knowledge transfer, it is important that the handoff includes the development of internal goals and objectives that match with your customer’s goals and milestones. With a well-executed handoff, you’ll be setting yourself and your customer up for a touchdown.
- Don’t just listen to your customer.
Throughout your customer’s journey, it is important that you ACTIVELY listen to them. This means looking for signs that something is awry or worrying your customer. Tsai uses the analogy of an iceberg. “While it’s critical to thoroughly listen to explicit customer feedback,” states Adler, “that represents only about 10% of the information. As a customer success leader, you need to search for implicit feedback in the form of product usage and drop-off, brand engagement levels both via digital and offline, and correlated customer health from onboarding and beyond.”
If you want to improve your customer success, start by fixing these two mistakes. And then check out the rest of Adler’s article for a discussion of Tsai’s 3 other customer success mistakes.