Your job doesn’t stop when your sales team has successfully closed a deal. You’d still want to maintain those customers if you want your business to succeed. That’s where your customer success teams come in.

A lot of companies tend to invest disproportionately in their sales team. Proper attention also ought to be given to your customer success strategy. This involves an easy user experience (UX), engaged customer support, easy onboarding, among other things.

A customer success strategy is critical in customer retention. Here are four critical signs that your customer success teams’ dynamics need to improve.

1. Low net promoter score

One of the most critical KPIs for customer satisfaction and success is the net promoter score. The net promoter score measures how likely a customer in your niche market will keep doing business with you.

According to NetPromoter, 0-6 would likely damage your brand reputation; 7-8 are those satisfied but unenthusiastic customers that you’ll likely lose to other competitors, and 9-10 are those who will speak positively about your brand.

Your customer success reps should be on the lookout for this score.

How to Determine Your Net Promoter Score?

There are various methods you can use to determine your NPS.

• Email surveys: Using email marketing software, ask your customers about their experience with you, how satisfied they are with your service, whether you’ve solved their problem, and how likely they’ll recommend you to a friend.

• Call data: This is data from calls taken in by your customer service hotline. You can scour this data to determine crucial metrics such as the time on hold, average call time, and escalation rate. You can also discover which concerns your customers are most likely to call about.

• Public reviews: You can check your reviews for a fleshed-out description of your customers’ experience with your product or service.

You should also be scoring individual customers to the best of your ability. This will improve your customer success strategy by knowing whom to prioritize more.

How to Improve Your Net Promoter Score?

Gathering customer feedback will give you an in-depth understanding of what they are trying to achieve with your product.

Let’s say you’re selling website builder software. Do your customers use your product to build websites for themselves or clients? Knowing these little details will help your customer success team nurture better relationships with your customers. This data will also help you craft better sales emails for warm leads and nurture customer relations.

You should also seek your customer’s feedback about your own customer success team. It’s possible the low net promoter score is because customers aren’t satisfied with your employees. This can be for a number of reasons:

• Customers don’t get the information they need from your team

• Customers find your team members rude.

• Customers get late responses from your team.

If the first situation applies, to improve your net promoter score, you just need to give your team members the proper training.

If the second applies, check in with your team members. Maybe they don’t interact the way they should with customers because they’re stressed at work. Just give them the time to unwind.

Give them the tools they need to relax, too. You don’t need a big budget for these. Even your typical newspaper crossword puzzles can do the trick. Just tell your employees where they can find the answers. You don’t want them even more stressed out because they can’t solve your crossword puzzles in the first place. So, if you gave them puzzles from the New York Times, the NYT Crossword Daily is a great resource. LAXCrossword is the go-to site for people who like solving crossword puzzles published in the Los Angeles Times.

If the third situation applies, read the next section to know what you should do to improve your NPS.

2. Poor response time

When customers message you on social media or shoot you an email, they usually have a concern they’d like addressed.

If you take hours and days to respond, your customers would have likely attributed that to your company not caring. Every second ticking is a customer lost to a competitor.

You can improve this KPI by providing your customer success reps with the following tools:

• Customer success software that organizes leads and customers, just like a CRM. This software also instantly notifies your team of any incoming message, whether on social media, email, or in-app.

• A knowledge base from which they may take information to give satisfactory answers to customers.

• A queueing system to prioritize those who messaged first or have a high-impact issue that requires your immediate action.

• Roll out automated responses in your emails and social media to acknowledge user queries before your reps are assigned to the user. You may also use chatbots for more functionality.

Poor response times can easily be remedied by simply telling your customer that you’ll get back to them as soon as possible. This cost-effective measure can save you thousands of lost revenue due to disgruntled customers.

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3. Reduced customer renewals

If fewer customers renew the service you provide, one of the reasons could be that they’re not meeting the goals they intended with your service. Think of it like Netflix subscribers not being amused with what they see on the platform anymore. If they don’t see the movies and series they want to watch, they will stop paying for Netflix and switch to Amazon Prime or HBO Go instead.

This isn’t just limited to products and services with a subscription model. SaaS businesses may suffer from deleted accounts, ecommerce sites may see fewer return purchasers, and app users might uninstall your app from their devices. The average subscription churn rate varies across industries, but if your churn rate is higher than the average, you might want to take a second look at your products or services.

To reduce the churn rate, you need to gather feedback from the users once you’ve noticed they haven’t renewed your service. This feedback is critical because it tells you why customers discontinue using your product. Use this data for your customer success program and for crafting effective marketing content for your target audience.

4. Mismanaged schedules

You should be fine if you have enough employees to cover customer queries within business hours. You should be worried if, despite that, you’re still getting disgruntled customers unable to reach your customer success reps. Remember, your team plays a critical role in creating an excellent customer service strategy.

If you have enough customer support and success reps, you should see that the advertised open hours are adequately filled. You should also see to it that your individual team members are also strictly covering their shifts.

Additionally, part of managing schedules is properly compensating employees who cover the shifts of those who call in sick to work. You should implement this kind of system to prevent agitated customers. Work with customer success managers in implementing better-managed schedules.

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Wrapping Up

Like there are KPIs of a successful business, there are also signs of a failing one. You should lookout for a low net promoter score, reduced customer renewals, poor response time from your representatives, and mismanaged schedules.

You’d want to be gathering customer success data to improve your customer success program. This data includes the content of customers’ calls and queries, their feedback on your customer satisfaction surveys, and how quickly a concern is resolved. Synthesizing this data will allow you to pinpoint your customers’ goals and help you help them achieve those goals.

Invest in your customer base's success. Building customer experiences, apart from investing in customer acquisition, is the best way to launch your company.

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