Another insightful post from guest Regi Publico, looking at how technology can drive your customers' success and therefore business success

As competition continues to get tougher, businesses look for new ways to stay ahead of the game. Thanks to technology, businesses of any size have access to tools that can help them on their path to success. Technologies push companies forward by focusing on the parts of their business that need the most help. And for most companies, it’s customer success.

Customer is king. This mantra may be as old as time, but it still rings true. Businesses that thrive are ones that are customer-centric. Those that understand that customer experience is key and focus on customer success will be the ones who will lead the pack. And if you want to be part of the group of businesses that thrive, then you should start building a technology stack for customer success.

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What is customer success?

Customer success may be confused with customer support, the latter being reactive to customer complaints.

Customer success is what a business does to understand the customer journey and ensure that the company’s products or services help customers achieve their goals, or to put it in even more simple terms, success. Customer success is essential for any customer-centric company. While customer success teams contribute to the bottom line (i.e. revenue and cost-savings), it’s best to measure them using more specific metrics, or KPIs. Some of the more relevant customer success metrics include:

1. Customer lifetime value, or CLV is the total revenue or value that a business expects from their entire relationship with the customer.
2. Repeat purchase rate is a good indicator of whether customers had a satisfactory experience with your product or service enough that they decide to repurchase or extend their contract.
3. Churn rate is measured by looking at the number of customers lost over a specific period of time. You would want to aim for as low of a churn rate as possible, as high churn rates can mean you’ve lost your customer’s business or they’ve moved to another vendor.
4. Customer retention rate or CRR represents the ratio of existing customers the company has retained over a specific period. A high CRR is a good sign of customer loyalty.
5. Net Promoter Score, or NPS, is usually measured using a single-question customer survey and then by deducting the detractors from the promoters.
6. Customer Satisfaction Score, just like the NPS, is based on customer feedback. This can provide important and actionable qualitative information direct from the customers.
7. Customer effort score or CES - much like the NPS and customer satisfaction scores, CES is based on customer feedback. Low effort from customers can mean that they find transacting with your business easy and convenient.
8. Customer retention cost, or CRC, helps you measure if your investments made on retention and customer success are justified or if you need to rethink your budget spend.

To help your company get flying colors with these customer success metrics, you will need to build your Customer Success (CS) Technology Stack.

Building a Technology Stack for Your Customer Success Team

Think of every super team in history, and you’ll find that they’re made up of members that are committed to doing their roles and doing them well. The same goes for building a technology stack.

Much like a data stack with its data source, data analytics, and ETL tools, a customer success technology stack also consists of a suite of tools or software that helps the team manage the total customer journey. Here is the basic foundation of your technology stack:

Customer Onboarding: First impressions matter in everything, especially in business. You can only have the customer’s attention for so long before they stop looking or start looking somewhere else.

Helpdesk or Customer Support: In an ideal world, your customer wouldn’t have any concerns or issues with your products. But when they do, robust helpdesk software is your best bet. Your helpdesk or customer support software should be able to automate essential tasks like ticket management, reporting, chat solutions, etc.

Subscription Management: Your tech stack should include a subscription management software that will help you streamline the whole billing, customer management process and manage churn. A great subscription management software should also be able to provide reporting with analytics on billing, recurring payments, and accounting, and eventually retain the right customers.

Customer Feedback: Feedback from customers is valuable information that, when used correctly, can become actionable items that will improve pain points across different parts of the company, from product development to customer experience to website management. To get timely and quality customer feedback, your software should be user-friendly and accessible to your customers throughout their customer journey.

Conclusion

There are plenty of SAAS (Software As A Service) companies that offer the software that you need to build your customer success technology stack. Once you have clear goals of what you want your tech stack to do for you, you’ll be able to correctly select the right software that works for you and your business needs. A gentle reminder, though, that since software is cloud-based, you will also need to invest in measures to ensure cloud security and data integrity. It is essential that the valuable information that your customer success tech stack holds be secured for both your company and clients.

You should invest in technology that will push your customer success team’s performance to greater heights. Because customer success equates to your overall company’s success as well.

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