Not only does customer success lead to greater happiness and loyalty, but it also helps businesses increase revenue and customer retention.

When executed properly, customer success will reshape your business and how customers relate to it. This results in many advantages including reduced customer acquisition costs and streamlined customer onboarding.

Additionally, at its core, customer success is about keeping your customers satisfied. The needs of your customers are constantly changing, so it’s essential to be aware of the customer support trends of 2022.

Greater emphasis on customer onboarding

Customer onboarding is the process of introducing a customer to a product or service in order to improve their knowledge and result in greater success. Onboarding is particularly important for software businesses, however, it can be utilized in a variety of industries.

This process is so important because it impacts your business’s overall customer journey — both positively and negatively.
Any onboarding process should aim to ensure that your customers find your product or service valuable and therefore continue to use it.

Here are customer onboarding strategies worth trying:

• Start the onboarding process as soon as possible – Ask for onboarding forms to be completed and give product tours or provide useful tips. The sooner someone achieves success with a product, the more likely they are to convert.
• Personalize the process for every customer – Understand at what stage every customer is in their customer journey. And provide assistance as you see fit.
• Reach out during milestones – Especially if you’ve helped them get there, celebrate your potential customers’ win. Being there for them creates trust and encourages them to work with you.

AI

AI can be used in a variety of ways to make business processes easier. In customer success, AI is often used in the form of chatbots. A chatbot is software designed to simulate conversation with human users. As chatbot software improves and gets better at mimicking human interaction, it is becoming more valuable and therefore more popular.

The benefits of using AI in customer success include:

• 24/7 availability
• Increased customer interaction
• Instant responses
• Consistent responses
• Multi-language capabilities
• Frees up customer success teams to focus on complex problems

It’s important to recognize that although chatbots serve a purpose in customer success, and provide many benefits, customer success is primarily relationship-based. This means that human involvement is necessary.

Essentially, chatbots can do some of the work, but it is impossible to use them as a replacement for a customer success team. Therefore, it is up to the business to decide how and when to use AI in order to support their customer success team and assist customers as effectively as possible.

Customer journey mapping

A typical customer journey is growing more complicated. Nowadays, the average consumer communicates with companies across ten different channels.

But while the landscape is changing, customer journey remains important. According to research conducted by Salesforce, 80% of customers value their customer experience with a business as much as the product or service they are purchasing. Customer journey mapping is the best way of understanding the customer journey as a whole.

Journey mapping allows businesses to identify what kind of content resonates best with the target market. This will help you create more effective marketing and sales strategies. It also helps to acquire insight into the types of issues that your clients face and have the opportunity to remedy them before they occur.

Additionally, your customer success journey map will help you create better experiences for your consumers and add value to your products. This matters because customers who value your products are far less likely to purchase from your competitors.

As a result, your acquisition expenses will decrease, your business’s income will increase, and your business’s public image will improve dramatically.

Here are ways your customer success teams can introduce customer journey mapping:

• Step 1 – Understand your customers’ definition of success.
  When you know what a consumer wants to accomplish with your product, you can create a journey that helps them get there as soon as they can.
• Step 2 – Find out where your customers are in their customer journey map. The customer journey is divided into various parts. Identifying them can assist you in comprehending the general structure of your customer success journey map and how each stage corresponds to your customers’ objectives.
• Step 3 – Set touchpoints and acknowledge your customers’ milestones. Prospects and customers interact with your company at touchpoints along the customer journey. Examples of touchpoints are sales calls, company websites, and social media.
• Step 4 – Identify what a successful milestone looks like. Determine how your customer will succeed at each of the milestones you’ve established. Be realistic with this and help them as much as possible. Based on how this turns out, include the information in your customer success journey map.
• Step 5 – Optimize your customers’ journey.

You may consider including red flags and eliminating anything that seems off. They’re signs that your customer isn’t getting the most out of your product and isn’t accomplishing their objectives. After the picture is clear, tighten your processes. And always be there for your customers.

One on one video calls

Due to the pandemic, organizations such as businesses and schools have had to find alternatives to meeting face to face; video conferencing was the obvious solution. The rise in the need for video calls has highlighted how important and helpful they are for virtual face-to-face communication.

Video calls have become a popular method of communication for customer success specialists and clients and will continue to grow in popularity in 2022.

Whilst in most cases, video calls are used for group communication, they can also be used for one-on-one meetings. Compared to group calls, one-on-one calls are far more effective for customer success purposes. It allows for a more personal experience and gives customers and customer success teams the opportunity to discuss issues and problem solve efficiently.

Automation

Automation is the development and deployment of technologies that allow goods and services to be produced and delivered with little or no human interaction. Many tasks that were previously performed by people are now more efficient, reliable, and/or fast because of automation technologies, techniques, and procedures.

Automation is typically used to reduce labor costs and if possible, to replace humans in the most menial or repetitive duties. It can be found in almost all industries and niches. Automated text messages, content management systems, expense reporting systems, online booking systems, and online ordering systems are all great examples of successful automation.

It’s a growing customer success trend because it helps you streamline your operations. Notably, if you automate customer success, you’ll have a real-time, summarized view of customer service. And this gives you the data you need to manage your customer relationships more effectively.

Conclusion

Customer success can make or break your business. If your customers aren’t happy with the service they are receiving, your business will not succeed. However, by keeping up with current customer success trends and focusing on customer satisfaction, it is likely you will see a higher rate of return customers.

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