💡How to Retain Customers with the Customer Success Model...

4 Insights on how to retain customers with the Customer Success model with startup SEO and Audience Development expert, Elvorne Palmer...

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OK, you’ve got a product, some adoption and the numbers are looking good until… CHURN she goes.

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Now, I don’t use the C-word very often, because in startup, it's just a fact of life – there are seasons to everything, people grow, develop and eventually move on from basically everything at some point. But, still, there has to be a better way to retain more.

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And then it hit me… Customer Service.

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See, normally, customer support is a corporate exercise everyone hates – the business clearly begrudges the fact they have to offer support and the poor customer who has to try and get answers from someone who doesn’t really care.

But then I discovered the concept of Customer Success, from Nick Mehta and Dan Steinman’s book (which you can buy on Takealot), and it could be quite revolutionary.

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The concept is simple: Instead of viewing customer support as a grudge service, what if you use it as an extension of your retention strategy?

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Like so:

• Don’t wait for users to contact you
• Actively contact them  
• And ask if they’ve achieved their goals with your product
• If not, you help them do it. Success!

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It’s basically an extension of customer interviews. And what better way to ensure you keep customers than by helping each individual unlock value with your product?

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OK, this probably doesn’t scale well in B2C, but if you have a high LTV or perhaps even B2B, it could work quite well. Let’s have a look…

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4 Ways to Implement the Customer Success Model in Your Startup

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1. Track Customer Journeys

Start with your product’s user journeys and use your analytics to identify which new users have or haven’t unlocked value with your product (yet). If you have 10 new users today but only 5 of them have actually achieved the first bit of delight with your product, this allows you to actively go and engage the laggers – find out if they’re struggling with your UI or why they haven’t used the app yet, etc.

2. Create a Proactive Engagement Strategy

This is the tough-but-necessary part. If a user comes in and doesn’t reach a moment of delight, you have very little time to re-engage them.  

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In a perfect world, you’d have an alarm go off and then you jump on a call with the person and straight-up ask them: “I see you haven’t done XYZ on our app yet; I’m the founder, can I help you get it done?” But outside of B2B, where you maybe have fewer high-paying customers, that doesn’t scale.

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So it’s probably worthwhile developing something scalable that can proactively engage a lagging user and then help them get some delight out of your product. Maybe that’s where an AI chat tool can help, or some form of automated outreach that links to resources, if you can create some that can actually guide users to achieving their goals simply and effectively.

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3. Establish a Feedback Loop

Just because you’re proactively reaching out, doesn’t mean you can’t have passive support. Still use your normal surveys, feedback forms and such to gather continual feedback – if only to train your proactive engagement system.

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4. Build a Company-Wide Customer Success Culture

Passive customer support is often so bad purely because the person offering the support doesn’t know why they are doing it. (At least that’s what I tell myself.) So, making the process of helping every customer achieve success with your product part of your company’s DNA makes sense.

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You can focus on only hiring people who accept and live out that ethos, for example, do all your company training around customer success and maybe even base your incentives on how many unsure users each team member helped turn into a successful user.

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Got a startup hack or tips to share? Email us here and let us know — you could be featured here next.

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