What is Customer Success?

Have you ever heard that term before? I hadn’t and  when I did I thought customer service and customer success were one and the same. Turns out I was wrong.  So just what is customer success and why would my business need it?

Wikipedia defines customer success as: 

the function at a company responsible for managing the relationship between a vendor and its customers.

Looking at it that way, I can tell you a handful of companies right off the bat that didn’t have customer success with me. In fact, they could use https://www.qualtrics.com/experience-management/brand/behavioral-segmentation/ to help them better understand their customers and achieve customer service success. It would help give their customer a better experience and therefore help their business grow.

It’s true. In my business customer success means making sure that every client I have knows what to expect and that I deliver on that. There are always clients who aren’t happy with something and I do everything possible to find a solution right away. Let me give you an example. In my capacity with my brother’s company I was responsible for placing orders. We had a customer place an order and the item they wanted was back-ordered. Now I didn’t take the order from them, it was one of the business partners. Months went by and we got the run around from our vendor. So I went straight to the store, the manufacturer, to find out what was going on. They were horrible (talk about a customer failure!)

I decided the best course of action was to refund the customer money. However, that still left them without the part they wanted. My suggestion was to offer them three or four alternatives that were similar (but a different manufacturer) to the original. Once they made their choice we also gave them 30% off. We lost money on the transaction but gained a customer who came to use for three more jobs. We had customer success even if we didn’t feel like it at the time. 

Today things like sales and marketing aren’t the growth levers businesses use. There was a time when customers weren’t a top priority. Those days have changed. An unhappy customer can let hundreds if not thousands of people know in minutes. One tweet, or post and the whole world knows what went wrong.  The flip side of that coin is that when a customer is happy with you and/or your services they will let others know. Many customers are like me and will become life long customers.

We had another moment with my brother’s company that brings the point home about paying attention to customers. A young girl was looking for some parts (Jeep parts.) One of the guys said to just ignore her because she didn’t know what she was talking about and he didn’t want to bother. My sister in-law, than the Lord), immediately set him straight. After the job had been finished the girl’s mother told us that every place she had talked to prior treated her daughter like she was wasting their time since she was new to the whole Jeep thing. We didn’t, in fact my brother went out of his way to explain what the girl really needed and the results she would get.

By not doing what every other business had done and taking the time to realize that she needed more than just a price quote we were able to again, have a repeat customer. One who told everyone on social media about what happened.