Identifying Excellent Customer Success: What to Look For
By: Sierra Hays
Tags: Wistia, Customer Success, Warby Parker, Customer Service, Ritz Carlton

The loyalty of a customer to a product or company stems from the quality of the customer success platform within that organization.

One bad experience may have you swearing off that product and company forever, however, one exceptional experience can lock you in as a lifelong loyal consumer.

According to Accenture more than half of U.S consumers express loyalty by recommending brands to family and friends, and almost half of those consumers stay loyal to those brands.

To have excellent Customer Success Platforms within a business we need to ask ourselves two important questions: First, how can brands actually earn the loyalty of customers? Secondly, How can customer service professionals consistently delight and empower customers so they not only keep coming back, but they refer family and friends to become customers, too?

The HubSpot Customer Code is a wonderful source to use when determining what excellent customer success is and how to implement it into your own business.

But before we can explore examples of excellent customer success we need to establish a strong understanding of what customer success is.

In addition to the characteristics listed above, let’s spend some time breaking down six of the most common characteristics of excellent customer success.

1. Rapid Response Times

Customers are always looking for quick and easy solutions to their problems. Sixty-six percent of adults say that the most important thing a company can do is value their time. That is over half! So it’s important that the customer success team focuses on efficiency and has a workflow that streamlines different support functions. One way to implement that would be by creating a help desk.

2. Customer Feedback Collection and Analysis

Each business is different and provides differently for their customers meaning that the customer’s needs will also vary from business to business. It’s important to understand that excellent customer Success looks different depending on the type of business you’re running. However, the best customer success teams have one thing in common and that’s Feedback Collection. This tool can help identify the specific needs of the customer base and create personalized solutions for them.

3. Customer Self Service

With over fifty percent of customers wanting to solve their own problems, providing the right tools so customers can easily find their own solutions is a great resource to have.

Using self Service resources provided by your business is a great way to encourage customers to solve their problems on their own. A great example is FAQ pages that supply customers with solutions to common user error.

4. Omni-Channel Support

No one likes a goose chase or playing telephone tag. It should be easy for customers to contact your support team, regardless of the medium they’re using. Your customer success team must be equipped to respond to incoming service requests via the phone, email, social media, live chat, or any other communication channel that your customers prefer. Providing this type of omni-channel experience makes your team more accessible and creates less stressful service interactions.

5. Emotional Intelligence

Emotional intelligence refers to your ability to read and react to other people’s emotions. Having this skill is highly valuable in customer success roles because it helps with diffusing difficult customer interactions. It is a guarantee that you will encounter an unhappy or frustrated customer so it’s important to be prepared and ready to handle these situations so you can prevent potential churn. Sixty-Seven percent of Customer Churn is avoidable if the customer’s issue is resolved during the first service interaction.

6. Creative Problem Solving

Ultimately excellent Customer Success stems from the ability to problem-solve. A good Customer Success Team is tenacious and determined to help their customers achieve their goals. This also means that more times than not it requires them to think outside of the box and provide unique solutions to customer’s issues.

Below are three examples that showcase Customer Success teams thinking outside of the box to provide customers with solutions:

1. The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company

The Ritz-Carlton’s service policies are so legendary, stories of satisfied customers have even made it into books — like this one.

In it, customer experience expert and author John DiJulius shared the story of his stay at a Ritz-Carlton hotel — when he unknowingly left something behind in his guest room.