Why is customer success important? (Part 2 of 2)

A good method of doing this is allowing customers to build a relationship with your other customers. Don’t act on customer success until colleagues and customers are committed to:

• Retention
• Future relationships

Without these you may cause more work which could ultimately fail – customers know explicitly and tacitly if your colleagues and leaders are committed to them. It’s best to motivate and encourage your customers to talk to each other through methods like events, introductions, social media and/or specific customer success websites which encourage community-building.

Such websites should make it clear to customers that you are introducing them to other customers. Once they dip their toes in the water, their confidence levels will skyrocket. Make sure to ask your colleagues to promote customer success to their community. As colleagues are the ones with the trusted relationships, you should recognise colleagues who encourage customers to be part of the community.

Those communities should be driven by the customers by helping to facilitate conversations on your side. This is an opportunity to learn and apply it to their own organisations and achieve potential success. On macro topics like Europe or the introduction of the living wage to the UK economy, try to make these conversations personal.

Future product roadmaps and the influence customers have on these roadmaps are great for customer engagement and for providing product teams with insight into future requirements.

Customer communities provide fantastic sources of market intelligence and can articulate to the market what it feels like to be a customer of your organisation. Future customers can, at first hand, see the positives and negatives of your organisation. More importantly, they will appreciate the integrity of direct customer involvement.

Customer success is a tricky journey where you’re bound to make mistakes as you go along. The most important thing to remember is that colleague engagement is crucial with customer engagement, igniting customer success moving forward.