Improving customer satisfaction: 8 tips for CSMs

Hi, my name is Léa Hennequart (Leah in English) and I'm the Customer Success Manager at Modjo. I was invited to write a blog to paint a picture of what life is like for Customer Success teams.

Let's start, perhaps, with the definition of a Customer Success Team. A CS (or AM) team aims to support different areas of your business, from customer satisfaction to retention: it's a key team for converting POC and up-selling success. Today, customer success teams are one of the most effective ways of maximizing a company's collective sales efforts.

In fact, studies show that 80% of users abandon their order following a negative after-sales experience; on the other hand, 91% of customers say they would renew their order if the after-sales experience was good. ((source: Salesforce 2020) State of the connected customer - Salesforce.com).

Are you ready to join the companies that account for 91% of customer renewals? Here are 7 tips for building a great customer success team.

1. Start with a customer-centric culture

Zoom CEO Eric Yuan has made customer orientation his top strategic priority. This means spending 70% of the company's time working with and for customers.

Mr. Yuan said that devoting time to customer satisfaction was one of the reasons for Zomm's success.

The following steps can be taken to implement a customer-centric culture:

• Make sure the customer experience belongs to everyone.
• Recruit and train people with a strong customer orientation bias.
• Always ask for customer feedback.
• Have bold ambitions for your customer experience, you want to stand out from the competition.

🍍 Advice developed at Modjo: At Modjo, we're lucky enough to use our own tool, which is inherently customer-centric. Indeed, all our decisions are made on the basis of recorded customer testimonials, which we store and replay when in doubt.

Our product team prioritizes the roadmap for visualizing and quantifying customer feedback.

2. Define your success criteria.

Before you start building your customer success team. Make sure that what you're going to provide is what your customer needs, not what you need for the cell phone.

This is the most important advice. I've ever received. And of course, the one that has the greatest impact on both internal and external teams.

Indeed, this is generally the definition of a successful adoption. Is based. What was the product marketing decision based on? However, it is essential to guarantee this success, even if it has been well defined internally. It's really what customers expect.

This is even more important. Define and repeat the process of defining success. Because your customers and your future will evolve over time.

In order to complete this exercise. You have to make sure. That you're sitting down with your customers. And define tangible elements.

And that you can also measure to make sure he can do it. To measure his success.

🍍 Tips developed at Modjo: At Mojo, we always start our relationship with the customer with the phrase.

What would be the element that would be most considered a success for you? Depending on the customer's answer.

We go into more detail about their criteria and define the KPI that we'll check with them every month.

3. Segment your customer base.

Segmenting your database is not only important, it's essential if you want to optimize your marketing strategy. We address your customers in a differentiated way, or we have a better understanding of their expectations.

And maximize the value of each of your customers for your company.

Standard segmentation will divide your customer base by industry, company size and audience. But of course, there's nothing to stop you being creative.

The clearer the segmentation of your database in your CRM, the more you'll be able to provide personalized service on a large scale, without modifying your product. It will also enable you to maximize your revenues by identifying and proposing new offers by segment.

🍍 Advice developed at Modjo: At Modjo, we have a segment dedicated to digital natives. They differentiate themselves from others by having no existing infrastructure and by adopting SaaS products more quickly.

We approach them differently by providing a little less technical deployment support and more innovation.

4. Formalize your customer journey.

Once you've established a customer-centric culture and functional segmentation, it's time to formalize your customer journey.

A customer journey begins with the customer's first contact with your company, right through to their departure.

A customer journey is generally divided into different stages, each of which represents an achievable goal for your customers.

To help your team lead your customer to each milestone, you'll define a manual: a compendium of all the content, processes, best practices and assets that will be used like a Swiss army knife, depending on the situation.

Throughout this customer journey, you need to focus the experience on your customers' priorities, not on your company's objectives, which they should eventually achieve if well designed.

Formalizing your customer journey and user manual is a tedious task. You can find many templates on the Internet to help you get started, such as those by Lincoln Murphy. A well-defined customer journey should offer your customers a unique experience and reinforce your brand's value and attributes.

🍍 Tip made in Modjo: If your customer database has different segments, don't create a generic customer journey.

Instead, focus on a specific approach for a test segment, then start again to test and learn, and only after you've created the other playbooks.

5. Track and measure

They say "if you can't follow it, it doesn't exist".

Measuring the impact of your teams is as crucial as the actions you're going to implement. Beyond traditional adoption metrics, such as churn rate or number of monthly active users, track metrics on the features that will bring the most value to your customers.

For example, if your collaboration platform is primarily used to train new employees, you may want to track an additional metric relating to how quickly new licenses are being used.

🍍 Tips developed at Modjo: At Modjo, in addition to our weekly usage statistics, once a month we carry out what we call cohort analyses: we examine the evolution of indicators in relation to the contract start date, and make sure we can provide additional support to our customers whose adoption is slower than the average for their cohort.

6. Make it easy for your customers to find answers to their questions.

There's nothing more frustrating than not getting an answer to a simple question from your solution provider.

The first steps you can take to improve customer satisfaction are to create an FAQ or help center. This will empower your customer, shorten response times and reduce your workload so you can concentrate on higher value-added tasks.

You can also implement a chatbot on your product interface to solve problems more interactively and automate some of the generic questions.

Finally, depending on your product and the maturity of your team, you may wish to call on a dedicated technical support team to internalize specific expertise.

We deployed all 3 of them at Modjo in that order, and it had a positive impact on our NPS as well as on the value of our customer success.

When you set up automatic communication channels, make sure you also keep track of how long your customer has to wait for a response. Problems and bugs will be inevitable, and your customers will appreciate your ability to solve problems even more than your ability to avoid them.

7. Play as a team

A final tip: 76% of customers expect a seamless experience before and after sales. (source: Salesforce 2020) State of the connected customer - Salesforce.com).

So it's essential to work together as frictionlessly as possible.

The handover process between sales and customer service is owned by both.

Sales teams need to connect quickly with CS teams, even before signing the contract, so that your customers know they're in good hands, and CS has as much information as possible before starting.

Cross-disciplinary teams, such as product, marketing or finance, will also want more information from your customers at any given time.

🍍 Tip realized at Modjo: Develop a customer-centric process, so that all cross-functional teams have access to the same information and your customers don't feel like they're bringing in a new person with every interaction.

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That's it for me for today. 🙂

I liked this article, which is a bit of a change from what we usually publish, so feel free to send me a message on LinkedIn with your comments.

And don't forget to share it with every AM, CSM or KAM in your company.

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Have a good week,

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Best,