If we say that your customers are the heartbeat of your business, would you consider it an exaggeration? Never! This is because the relationship between customer and business is directly linked to sales and revenue. No wonder that businesses are investing in developing and maintaining healthy customer relationship.
Today we would be discussing about customer success from the perspective of a software development company; what it is, why it is crucial and how AI can ensure better customer success. So, let’s get started!
What is customer success?
Customer success in general meant doing whatever that made the customers happy. But today it has become an industry term. In the IT industry it means helping your customers to adapt to all the products or technologies that they buy from you. It means expanding the usage of these software assets with more features and capabilities in order to help them get the value out of what they have brought from you.
In other words, customer success is all about fulfilling the promise that you have made to the customers when they purchased your products. Although, it has its roots in the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) space, other companies have also started to recognize its potential and embrace it.
Three key metrics of customer success
Here are three primary metrics that can help you measure customer success:
1. Usage of product
You would need to find the answers to these questions. Who’s using the product? When are they using? What features of products are they using? What percentage of the people is using those products?
2. Customer satisfaction
Customers communicate with you frequently, through social media, support forums, or through any interaction you can now easily measure the sentiment of your customers.
3. Retention and revenue
It can be measured by two metrics – (i) churn and (ii) dollar retention number. Churn is the measure of customers that are staying with you or leaving. Dollar retention number is about whether the dollars are growing or not growing over a period of time.
We get the most pleasure when our customers reveal that their interaction with us was much better than they had expected. Our team of software development experts has often rejoiced when our deployed products have exceeded client satisfaction.
Why is customer success important?
Unlike traditional business model, the role of marketers today does not end with closing a deal. Their responsibility, however, extends to making it sure that the customers are getting the promised business benefits.
This business strategy is known as customer success and it is important because if you ensure customer success then it brings a positive impact on your business.
Happy and successful customers not only perform repeat purchases but also bring new customers via referrals.
Furthermore, customer success is crucial to the success of your business because it brings the following benefits:
- Customer retention
- Profitability
- Customer acquisition
- Churn reduction
- Brand promotion
How AI can play a crucial role in customer success?
By now you would have understood how significant customer success is for your business and how the success of your business is highly dependent on it. Therefore, businesses are deliberately getting aggressive in order to compete for customers. Thanks to the emergence of Artificial Intelligence! Enterprises are leveraging AI for gaining efficiency in various business functions; you can also incorporate this technology to ensure better customer success and harness the following benefits:
Target customer experience effectively
The advances in technology today ensure that every customer action is captured as data, right from lead generation to purchase or abandonment. These data is used to analyze purchasing patterns, inclinations and behaviours of customers.
Utilizing machine learning, AI can deliver more reliable results as you fed more data into it. This pile of data can also be transformed into a system of intelligence that facilitates in enhancing customer experience.
Once you identify the areas where you receive the most and least interactions, you can enhance the outcomes by providing personalized experiences to the weaker areas and nurturing the prolific areas.
AI can help you to augment the experiences of your customers by selecting the best data it gathers in the course of its daily operations. And you know that focusing on customer experience is critical for achieving better customer success.
Achieve customer success with AI-enabled CRM
You can say that customer success is an integral part of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and the advent of AI in CRM platform can help you achieve greater customer success. Here’s how AI-enabled CRM can aid in customer success management:
- It helps you to streamline procedures related to customer service by organizing them and thus ensuring effective handling of customers and prospects. AI makes sure that data that used to be ignored by traditional CRMs is properly utilized to generate new ideas.
- AI-enabled CRM would unlock endless opportunities for customer success and it is apparent with the availability of higher level of competence showcased by AI in terms of advanced algorithms and computing abilities.
Shift from customer support to customer success with smart chatbot
AI-powered chatbots are redefining customer experience in many industries and are playing significant role in the transition from customer support to customer success. Here’s how:
- Chatbots can extend omni-channel support by unifying conversations across various platforms that customers use during their customer journey.
- With chatbots you can deliver customer service that is always “On”, that as AI-powered chatbots can provide consistent service, 24/7 thus ensuring customer success round the clock.
- As chatbots take care of trivial issues, you can better utilize your customer representatives for solving complicated issues.
- You can monitor the entire customer journey right from the beginning till the end without any interference as chatbots carry out their assigned tasks.
Smarter knowledge-base management
A rich and adaptive knowledge-base is highly crucial for better customer success. AI tools can enhance the effectiveness of you customer success management team by supplementing knowledge-base management as follows:
- Enable team members to easily navigate the details corresponding to customer queries.
- Identify and add new solutions to issues using relevant optional methods of resolution.
- Point out the areas related to products that your business is no longer providing.
- Annotate existing solutions to new inquiries if they are identified as relevant.
- Recommend new potential solutions to resolve the issues.
Improves customer success automation
The biggest challenge for businesses today is the ever-increasing level of customer expectations. To cope with these demands as well as the colossal amount of data generated automation is indispensable.
When your focus is on customer success and effective customer engagement, AI can help you to meet with the demand of driving autonomous actions by collaborating Big data, smart algorithms and workflows.
- The mammoth amount of data generated by businesses by recording every action of customers allows them to discover the purchasing patterns.
- With the help of algorithms they can find out the customer preferences and potential automation avenues that carry out data interpretation.
- Customer success automation engines enable to establish customer engagements on time, initiate personalized interactions with customers and implement proactive actions keeping in mind customer behaviour.
Conclusion
AI can revolutionize the customer success landscape by opening doors to new possibilities including the ones mentioned in this blog. Are you investing in customer success?
An AI-enabled chatbot integrated to your business site can be a positive step towards ensuring customer success. Interested to find out more about it? Talk to our web development experts!
You can also be the first to initiate a healthy discussion regarding this topic by leaving your comments below. Stay tuned for more interesting tech-related stuffs!
