The only differentiator available to companies in a competitive space is customer experience (CX). Customer Experience gives companies a chance to make the customers’ interactions with sales and support memorable enough that they continue to be repeat buyers. A good customer experience helps the sales process and once a sale is done, nurturing customers and enabling their success can be a valuable revenue source. Customer Success (CS) is a valuable part of CX in that it helps maximize the customer’s lifetime value and the business’s profitability. Let’s explore customer experience (CX), CX strategy, customer success (CS) services, and why CS is an important part of the CX strategy.

Table of Contents

What is Customer Experience?

CX is the overall experience the customers have from interaction with your brand on all channels. A customer’s opinion of your brand is built on various experiences with your business. A customer may contact a company to gather information on their new offerings, updates on their purchase, order fulfillment, or post-sales service. The pre-purchase, purchase, and post-sales experience must be consistently excellent. All these experiences at the different stages of the customer journey make for a customer experience.

Examples of Customer Experience

A good example is a software company that builds CRMs for businesses in different industry verticals. The software provider creates a robust and proactive digital platform for customer communication. A business can contact the developer via email, live chat support, call the contact support centers, and even interact via the app to get answers to their queries. The software company adopts an integrated customer support strategy. The agents have all the information and context of the customer’s problems and questions, irrespective of their chosen channel. The customer might have to interact with various departments in a company, but with a unified strategy, businesses can provide a good and uniform experience on all channels. Like a software development company offers self-help menus with IVR menus and sub-menus in the contact centers, builds knowledge resources, and provides instant support via automated messages or live agents. The main aim is to deliver better CX across all the channels and provide high customer satisfaction.

What are the different Customer Experience Strategies?

CX strategies focus on delivering the most unique customer experiences throughout the lifecycle. Mapping the customer journey with the customer expectations is the secret to creating a winning CX strategy.

Engagement: Businesses must contact prospects and customers to learn about their expectations. It involves engaging customers on different platforms online and offline to attract them to the business. CS strategies include understanding the problems the customers are facing and solving them on a priority.
Nurturing: CS strategy allows gradual building and nurturing of the customer relationship by providing them the information they need. Businesses can know the prospects’ intentions via information collected with intent data. For instance, if a lead is looking for B2B lead generation services, the company can send links to whitepapers and case studies in exchange for email addresses. Site visits, average time spent on the website page, email clicks, etc., are ways a business can learn about the prospects of engaging with the company. If a prospect communicates via live chat to learn about a particular product, the business can engage them accordingly with relevant content. Providing the right resources at the right time will help prospects make a buying decision.
Conversion: After attracting, informing, educating, and nurturing customers, the CX strategy focuses on conversions. The sales team comes into action and reinforces the value of the product the prospect is considering buying. They encourage the leads to make a buying decision by making them aware of the benefits, features, and overall return they’ll get from their investment.
Support: A CX strategy involves providing the support customers seek after purchasing. Post-sales support is essential to give the clients a sense of belonging. Businesses must urgently address all customers’ issues to retain their faith and create goodwill in the market. It helps the business ensure brand loyalty and customer advocacy over time.

How to Provide an Enhanced Customer Experience?

Businesses need to deliver better CX every time the customer interacts with the business. Whether the customers visit a brick-and-mortar store or buy online via an app or website, the experience always has to be good. But how do businesses achieve this? Companies must have a unified and integrated customer management strategy to offer a seamless CX.

Today, businesses are hiring dedicated customer management companies to offer an enhanced CX. The experts use CX automation tools to monitor customer health scores. They assess customer satisfaction levels on various parameters. They also optimize the marketing, pricing, inventory, sales, delivery, and post-sales to ensure customers have a great experience at all the touch points.

What are Customer Success Services?

Customer success services are an integral part of a customer experience strategy. The service encompasses activities helping customers meet their expectations after they buy from a business. CS services include regular communication with the clients and help them achieve the expected results from the products and services they buy. CS services start at onboarding and focus on the post–sales journey in which the business continuously nurtures the customer relationship. Regular communication helps the company understand the customer’s challenges, preferences, and pain points. The CS strategy enables the business to manage customer expectations with continuous training and education and tap the opportunity to upsell or cross-sell. This makes CS a revenue center, not a cost center. Today, businesses are hiring for customer success more than ever. Forrester Research says that 72% of surveyed companies said improving customer success would be their top priority. Customer Success services help provide an enhanced customer experience with communication, education, and training. CS services, similar to customer experience strategy, are focused on enhancing the customer experience and ensuring brand loyalty.

Examples of Customer Success Services

Software development companies help their customers quickly adopt their software solutions. The CS service extends the relationship beyond the purchase and allows them to use the product in the best manner. Educational training and proactive reach-out help customers derive the maximum value from their purchase. Similarly, a textile manufacturing company would reach out to the intermediaries in the supply chain, such as distributors and wholesalers, to continuously gauge the feedback on the quality of the product and their expectations in terms of quality, print, color, design, etc. It helps them align their manufacturing process to the market demand.

What are the Different Customer Success Strategies?

Understand Customers: CS services are focused on delivering and ensuring delightful experiences. Smooth onboarding, customer feedback collection, and analysis let the business understand the customers. It increases their profitability. Zendesk shares its findings from a survey that two-thirds of customers who believe that a company cares about their emotional state will become their likely customers. Businesses get in-depth insights into customers’ minds by investing in CS services.
Customer retention: CS services provide end-to-end customer service and support to build a delightful experience for them. Customers recommend the firm to others and share their positive experiences on social media. It increases customer retention rates, enabling the business to maximize revenue.
Customer Loyalty: A CS team continuously engages with the customers, helping the business increase its customer lifetime value. A business can increase its wallet share with repeat purchases with CS services. Customers quickly pay more to companies when they provide a positive experience. Super Office says 86% of customers will pay more for a better customer experience.

How to Provide Better Customer Success Services?

B2B companies need dedicated personnel to help customers quickly adopt their products and services. They can outsource the service to a CS manager who can help them strategically execute the CS services.

The primary responsibilities of a CS manager are:

Onboarding new customers, ensuring a smooth experience.
Easy adoption of the products and services with a focus on delivering an enhanced customer experience.
Collecting and analyzing customer feedback.
Making personalized recommendations and finding upsell and cross-sell opportunities.
Assisting in off-boarding.

The CS manager is the communication link between a business and its customers. The professional informs the company of customer satisfaction levels and the changes it needs to improve the overall strategy.

Is Customer Success a part of the Customer Experience Strategy?

Customer success services like customer experience strive to provide an enhanced customer experience. CS activities start when the prospect has already become a customer, and the CS team helps them with product adoption. They hand-hold the customers to fully explore the product’s potential and make them aware of how they can get the maximum benefit from their purchase. CS services and CX have the same goal- improving the customer experience, increasing the customer retention rate, building loyalty, and increasing revenue. The strategies overlap, which is beneficial for a business. Both CX and CS adopt various strategies that converge to achieve the same goal of prioritizing customers and improving profitability. Some examples, discussed below, prove that CS is an inherent part of the customer experience.

Better CX: A customer experience strategy focuses on improving the prospects’ experience at every touch point. It provides a great customer experience whenever the customer interacts with the business. It ensures that the customers continue to get a great experience while they are associated with the company. It covers the entire customer journey, including post-sales, in which customers gradually explore the products and try to achieve the purpose of their purchase. The CS services focus on smooth onboarding and ensure the customers have a great experience with regular inputs and insights from the CS team. They optimize the entire experience of using the product and help the customers derive the maximum value from their purchase.
Customer Retention: The CX strategy focuses on improving CX, which helps retain more customers over time. Improved and enhanced experiences create a happy customer base that prefers to stay with the business. A robust customer experience strategy gives compelling reasons to customers to remain with the business. The reasons may be that they get quick assistance in resolving their issues, a proactive customer support approach of the business, or a smooth post-sales demo process. When a business continues to meet the customers’ expectations and address their issues without delays, the customers reserve their loyalties for the business. Brand Loyalty ensures business continuity and helps the business thrive in a competitive marketplace. With CS services, the experience continues to improve, and customers do not feel abandoned after purchasing. The experience improves with communication by educating the customers with various resources. It helps build a substantial and loyal customer base for the business. So, both CX and CS achieve the same goal.
Brand Advocacy: A CX strategy ensures businesses deliver better customer experiences at every customer touch point. A consistent and excellent CX builds brand loyalty, and customers recommend the brand to others. Customer advocacy attracts more prospects and customers. The CS services ensure that the customers get the best experience after they buy the business. How the customers are treated, the attitude of the business representatives toward them, and the way they are educated and trained all form a part of the customer experience. So, customer success services also help deliver an enhanced customer experience and serve the same purpose as a CX service and, hence, are a part of the larger picture of the CX strategy.
Maximize Revenue: The customer experience strategy is focused on delivering an enhanced customer experience, retaining customers, and building brand loyalty. It helps the business increase revenue by building a large, loyal customer base. Customer success services also help increase business profitability by providing a great customer experience during the post-sales journey. It also encourages the customers to do business with the company by making repeat purchases. The CS services include customer expansion with upsell and cross-sell strategies ensuring recurring revenue. So, both CX and CS services help achieve the same purpose of increasing the wallet share and maximizing revenue.

Conclusion

Customer Experience delivers an enhanced customer experience at all the touch points. The CS services focus on helping customers with training and improving the customer experience during the post-sales journey. CX and CS services are inseparable and essential to helping businesses increase profitability.

Businesses must invest in improving customer experience and customer success services. A customer management company can help you achieve your goals with a 360-degree customer management approach.

About Mycustomer360

MyCustomer360 is a customer management company specializing in customer success, customer support, and expansion services, helping you improve the overall customer experience. We help businesses invest in CS services, build brand loyalty, and increase customer retention.

Delight your customers with a modern approach with the help of our experts. Deliver the best customer experience to your customers and scale rapidly with customer-led growth with CS services.

Is Customer Success part of the Customer Experience Strategy?