When we think of customer service, we often think it means fixing a problem that a customer presents. However, we believe it is vital to see it as trying to anticipate potential issues that they may have.
Why is staying ahead so important? Because customer retention is crucial for any organization’s growth. You don’t only need new customers; you need to be able to keep them for as long as possible.
Customers lifecycle:
Your team must be present at every stage of a customer’s lifecycle, showing the product’s value and ensuring they achieve their goals. The key, with every interaction, is to leave the customer happy. To exceed their expectations, you need to invest in this area. Using a cloud workflow software to automate processes will allow your team to optimize their time and keep track of every customer’s journey with your product or service. The key is to use a low-code / no-code tool so that it is so simple to use that every member of the team can define and design their processes (without needing to code).
Here are some examples of the type of processes you could automate in each cycle:
1. Onboarding:
Customers are most motivated and excited to use your product or service at this stage. So you need to take advantage of it. You can automate the following processes:
- Customer registration: sign contract, subscribe, give access, etc. A significant benefit is that you can keep an audit trail of all tasks’ execution by automating them.
- Welcome: automate your welcome email with all the vital information and include a link to coordinate a call with a team member. You can personalize it with their name, the organization they belong to, etc.
- Once you have the first call and establish goals together, you can set reminders as often as needed to follow up on those goals.
- Include other team members in your process, assign tasks, and set alerts to stay informed of your client’s journey.
2. Active customer:
Here you want to ensure your customer is receiving what was promised and expected from the product or service they purchased. Here are examples of related processes that you could automate:
- You automatically send a form to evaluate the NPS (Net Promoter Score) every certain amount of time. By doing this, you can obtain general statistics from these answers, such as what most of your customers like and wish they could change.
- Schedule QBR (Quarterly Business Reviews) meetings to update your customer on company news, product updates, and fresh ideas to continue working together.
- Using a tool that offers metrics and reports allows you to send a report to the Customer Success Manager automatically. That way, he/she can monitor the status of each customer.
- Support: a process by which we receive doubts, problems, and complaints from the customer and try to respond as accurately and quickly as possible. By automating it, you can know precisely what the customer asked for, what the answer was, when it was given, etc. From these elements, it is possible to improve the support process continuously.
3. Offboarding:
We wish this never happened, but unfortunately, it sometimes does. The key here is to know why the customer made the decision.
- Create a process with different tasks assigned to the corresponding member, and set alerts to ensure that the steps are carried out on time.
- Create a checklist of accesses to revoke or permissions to remove, with auditing of who completed the list.
- Allow data export about the customer and their behavior with your service.
- Remove confidential information: for example, an NDA. This is very useful as it’s a formal and auditable process.
Exceed expectations
As we have mentioned, there is no point in putting a lot of effort into obtaining new customers if you cannot keep them happy and on board. Make sure to give your team the tools to simplify their tasks and professionalize the area. As you can see, automating processes is a simple and efficient way to optimize that department and overall organization.
