Customers form the backbone of every business, and they are vital in determining your product’s success. So unless your business attracts and retains sufficient customers, it would be hard to thrive even if you develop a top-notch quality product.
To help you succeed, you must involve professionals at all levels to manage and control employee performance and marketing. Besides, you will also need to set up the right OKRs to ensure that customer success is guaranteed.
The most critical part of your business is nurturing customers and familiarizing them with your business through the product. This way, you can hold these customers and convert them into loyalists who you can count on the next time you are making reproductions.
That is why business owners, marketers, and entrepreneurs are shifting their focus to customer orientation.
However, most businesses are yet to get it right when it comes to customer success. It is critical to understand that customer success exceeds traditional customer support and relationship management. The former is reactive, while the latter is proactive. Instead, modern customer success starts with OKRs.
Below you will learn more about setting up effective OKR for communication with customers but let’s first understand and analyze customer success.
Page Contents
A Closer Look at Customer Success
In simple terms, customer success is the process that ensures that most of the customer issues are addressed even before they arise. In other words, management and the technical team anticipate the challenges that the customers are likely to face or problems they are likely to ask and find solutions to them in advance.
This approach is very different from customer experience that examines the consumer’s interaction with a product or service and creating solutions to the challenges noticed. Therefore, through the methodology, your customers will achieve their desired results as your product empowers them.
What About Maintaining the Customers?
Maintaining customers is a process with several stages determined by how you present or conduct yourself once a new customer comes to buy your product or avail of your service. Essentially handholding involves the following stages:
- Onboarding- in this stage, the focus comes to your product or service, and it is the ripe time to provide the necessary information about your product and usage.
- Adoption- The next phase where the customer personally interacts with your product and familiarizes with your company. In this stage, you have to maintain constant communication with the customer and find out about their experience with the product.
It is critical to provide customer support while showing concern for the customer’s perception of the product after using it.
- Renewal- It is the stage where the customer makes the final decision about your product after having the initial experience. Here they decide to buy again from your company or not. Therefore, you develop strategic approaches such as incentives, including upgrades, to influence customers’ decisions.
- Expansion- In this stage, your customer becomes loyal and advocates your brand if they are satisfied with your service or product. In this case, the customer is likely to market your product mostly through word of mouth hence boosting reputation and awareness. The best thing you can do for such a customer is to appreciate their efforts and make them feel unique and valued.
Although the process looks attainable and straightforward, it requires collaboration and coordination with different departments, including marketing, customer support, and production. It is also essential to establish a professional customer support team with a skillful manager.
Learn More about Customer Success
In the modern world, the business world is full of a competitive and consumer-driven market that compels you to focus on the customers if you want to thrive. Most importantly, it would be best if you concentrate on maintaining loyal customers as the cost of acquiring new customers is relatively higher than retaining.
Besides, it is easier to sell new products to the existing customers hence the need to build a long-term relationship in order to handhold, delight, and nurture them.
Common Customer Challenges
Developing and implementing a customer support strategy is easier said than done. The first challenge encountered by many companies is the lack of coordination among teams leading to confusion. Besides, the company’s persistent challenges and immediate needs could obstruct you or the customer support team, from addressing customer issues.
For these reasons, it is essential to set measurable, realistic, and achievable objectives that will lead you to customer success. In other words, you need OKRs for effective customer communication and success.
Using OKRs to Achieve Effective Customer Communication and Success
The Objectives Key Results is a goal-setting methodology used to define objectives and track the results. When developing the term, John Doerr asserted the need to measure what matters.
The most significant benefit from the use of OKRs in customer communication is that it plays a significant role in helping employees and departments prioritize tasks. Besides, heads of departments find it easy to assign specific responsibilities to team members, ensuring that all their objectives focus on attaining effective communication and customer success.
Besides, the OKRs align the high-level organizational objectives with those set to individual members. This aspect is crucial, especially if you’re running an organization with hundreds of employees and involves a matter of urgency. The strategy will help track time-bound milestones at different levels and help improve on sectors that lag.
In the modern world of technology, business competition has gone a notch higher, facilitated by social media platforms and technological devices. For that reason, it is possible to attract or lose thousands of customers in a very short time affecting your overall reputation and profitability.
Therefore, customer success has become the secret weapon that you can use to take your business to greater heights depending on the strategies you incorporate. Notably, developing effective communication with your customer through the OKR framework is critical as it will contribute to customer success.
The most important thing is to define your objectives and set trackable and measurable key results.
