A transformation of the customer success arena has taken place. New strategies and methods have appeared and been refined by the experts of the field. The role of customer success professionals has also been expanded in this digital age, as businesses take on a more active role in social issues. The quantity and variety of data that businesses can make use of now is staggering. From the likes and dislikes of customers, to their demographic data, there is more than enough to develop a fantastic customer success model, if done well. The difficulty lies in translating the raw data into something that can be actively used, and used to the benefit of the whole business, not just the sales and service department.
The first step towards making the most of data is to find out what data you will be looking at. Depending on your product, there will be different data which you will need to keep in mind when devising your strategy.
The practices for each business will take some time to develop, as many firms will find surprising details in their data that they can work on. The important thing to remember for a customer success professional is that the process will take time. Developing the best practices based on data will take time as a business familiarises itself with the data. The types of data that the business focuses on may even change, but it is all part of the process.
The next step is to develop customer engagement strategies on the back of these parameters. Again, this will change heavily depending on the business, but building the model on the data will allow you to better manage your resources.
Using the data will also be very important in evaluating the success of a strategy. With the information available, you will be able to clearly see the types of customers that you are having the most success with. You will also be able to see how well different campaigns are doing through engagement data. This will allow you to further develop your strategy by focusing on effective methods.
Many social media platforms now also offer the option of running campaigns with a control group. Much like a science experiment, this allows you to run a campaign with a smaller representative group. Running campaigns for these groups can be very useful for a business looking to widen its reach. The campaigns can be targeted to new demographics, and as it is run to a smaller audience it will cost less. This can be very useful for testing new methods and collecting useful data. Hopefully, when you find that the control campaign has succeeded, you can then roll it out to a wider audience.
When your engagement strategies are up and running, the data remains in use to monitor the efficiency of the campaign and the health of your customer base. It can be best to gather customer satisfaction at this point through simple online interactions, feedback, surveys and the like. With these specific results a business can get better insight into how their customer relation develops throughout campaigns.
It can also be useful to request feedback on certain best-selling products, as the extra analysis can be put to use in refining campaigns for your most important products. You might sometimes strike gold on a customer success strategy that works perfectly. However, the way to consistent success with customers is a strategy that founds itself on the wealth of information available to businesses. With the data and solid analysis, there’s no way but up.
Lisiane Ndong 