It seems so obvious: Businesses that take a proactive approach to customer success by going out of their way to anticipate customers' needs, and to offer help rather than waiting to be asked, are more likely to have loyal and repeat customers.
Shifting from reactive to proactive customer success is especially important for software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies; after all, their subscription-based business model demands keeping customers happy over the long haul.
Yet, adopting proactive customer success is easier said than done. Many SaaS companies don't understand that proactive service can't be just an aspiration and that it requires a well-thought-out strategy with the right processes and technology tools to support it.
Here are five steps for a proactive strategy that can improve satisfaction and customer loyalty.
1. Customer Success Journey
You must start at the start: defining the customer's success journey.
"Customer success journey" is more than a buzzword. You really need to have a firm grasp on all the milestones, touchpoints, and metrics you can use to construe the value the customer gets out of your technology. And success plans should be predefined, with minor customer-specific adjustments post-sales.
As you onboard customers, work with them to lock down specific goals they want to achieve with your product and outline a path to achieve these objectives. Doing so helps provide a blueprint for identifying potential problems in the future and ensures alignment on strategic goals.
2. Behavior-Based Engagements
Most customer relationships have processes such as quarterly and midyear business reviews that provide a regular opportunity to check in on how much and how well the customer is using your product. That's easy.
More challenging is picking up on behavioral triggers that could indicate a need for increased handholding even though the customer hasn't asked for it. To do that, you must deeply understand what customers are doing with your technology, and you need to be able to predict reasons for concern.
Make sure you're keeping track of the customer's behavior over time: not just a month or two, but six months and beyond. Compare each customer's behavior and actions with cohorts of similar customers, and look for patterns of success and failure. Identifying those trends is important to predictive and proactive customer engagement. If you see leading indicators of failure, proactively reach out.
3. Proactive Customer Success = People Power
Business relationships are about people. Again, that seems obvious, but consider this scenario: You sell your product into a company, and everything seems to be going well; then, after months of success, you see a decrease in usage and overall success behaviors, leading to a notice from your customer that they are looking elsewhere; after reaching out, you learn that your primary champion and customer system administrator took another job some time ago.