The Customer Success Manager is a relatively new job title in the fashion industry that has become necessary due to the growing demands of customers and clients. The job title borrows heavily from traditional account managers, who in the past were burdened with manual work processes such as maintaining massive paper customer and contact lists.
The good news is managers now have automation in the form of CRM, analytics and a host of other tools that help in improving business productivity and consistency. While there are only so many hours in the day, as a Customer Success Manager (CSM), you are probably juggling between building relationships, onboarding, and managing a diverse customer base.
The following tips will help your customer success team become even more efficient in the digital world.
Generate Repeatable Processes
While tracking your work flow you should have a process for each of your customers. This ensures nothing is overlooked and all the relevant data is consistent and in a single point. Look at other companies in the fashion industry such as Azazie bridal gowns for a good examples of how customer processes can be effectively managed. For example, your workflow could include how to prepare for kick-off calls, discussion points during the call, and capturing of customer requirements.
Information gathered will also help you gain insight into the real world applications of your fashion products and services.
Customer Tracking in Processes
Dealing with a string of customers at different adoption and implementation stages can be difficult. It’s therefore easier to manage your customers’ progression when you break them down into segments. Customers who have similar requirements can be dealt with back-to-back.
Automated CRM systems are available that inform you of the status of each new customer. The system can look up information about a company’s size, location etc. and automatically populate your CRM software. All this data is centralized, making it available to the customer success teams and others across the company.
Create Automated Email Sequences
To achieve true customer success, ask your team reach out to customers at specific stages of the customer journey. They can offer support, send messages, and help connect customers with the appropriate team member. You can even trigger such events automatically in your CSM app.
A sequence of emails can also be triggered by specific rules. For example, if a customer is already scheduled for a call with you, they are removed from the rest of the email sequence. This will allow you to be effective with follow-ups by ensuring that you don’t send irrelevant emails to customers.
Reduce Data Storage Places
Your CSM team should have a pulse on your customer’s entire mindset. If a fragment of data is only available in your sales CRM and parts of it in your agent’s inbox, you don’t have the entire picture. The solution is using a limited number of tools working together.
Consider using integrations to connect disparate tools like these example excel time sheets to your CRM, support tool, and even your workflow tool. Such integrations allow you to work inside the best business tools while ensuring that your data is tidy and centralized. Plus, you achieve syncing of numerous data points between your sales, customer success, and support systems.
For the Customer Success Management team, automation and processes trigger productivity improvements. The best way to start is by thoroughly examining your everyday workflows and picking those factors that are slowing down your entire process. While you will not achieve increased productivity at once, the small improvements you make today eventually compound.
