When faced with the hurdle of customer churn, you’re likely well aware of the factors at play: a poor understanding of your customers’ health score, a lack of regular engaging communication, and clients who simply aren’t recognizing the value of your product. All of these components involve an intricate process of knowing your client beyond superficial metrics. Done manually, however, this can easily seem daunting; which makes tapping into the power of automation all the more critical. Let customer success automation handle the tedious, repetitive and straightforward tasks of sorting through client data, programming emails for product updates, and much more so that your customer success team can focus on problem-solving and fostering quality relations.
How Automation Can Help your Customer Success Team Thrive
One of the recurrent challenges faced by many customer success teams is maintaining consistent customer satisfaction, particularly when experiencing a business growth spurt. In other words, how can your business continue to provide top-notch customer experiences when the pace of new clients streaming in is overwhelming your team’s limited capacity? This is particularly salient given that customer success involves lengthier interactions to allow for relationship-building as well as adequately conveying the true value of your product or service.
80% of clients surveyed admit that poor customer experience would compel them to cease their business and seek other options.
Moreover, ensuring an elevated standard of customer experience is vital if you’re concerned with encouraging loyalty and minimizing churn. In fact, 80% of clients surveyed admit that poor customer experience would compel them to cease their business and seek other options. As such, one of the biggest roadblocks in preventing this client dissatisfaction from manifesting into something more serious is by being fully aware of the issue in the first place. And for those who do have reams of user feedback, many find themselves ill-equipped to transform this feedback into actionable insight to then share with their product development team.
To relieve the burden of these common obstacles, many customer success teams are now turning to automation to help them achieve consistent goals without expending precious resources. An automation platform like Wrk has the rare capacity to automate the entire customer success process, rather than focusing on merely one facet of it. For instance, some of the business processes that you can automate using a powerful yet seamless platform like Wrk’s include:
- Relaying product updates in a timely fashion
- Encouraging and incentivizing customer feedback, and
- Ensuring smooth client onboarding
Combining Robotic Process Automation (RPA), proprietary bots, artificial intelligence as well as a skilled, global workforce, means the Wrk Platform can actually execute and complete tasks related to the processes listed above. This is crucial for long-term growth where, for example, staying on top of communicating product updates improves your customer relationships in the long run by signalling transparency and adaptability—because ultimately, customers are more likely to trust a brand that’s open and honest about self-improvement.
Let’s take a closer look at the processes your customer success team can automate with Wrk.
Automate with Ease: 4 Steps Your Customer Success Team Should Automate in 2021
Product Updates
You’ll want to inform your clients of any new features and enhancements to your product as soon as they have been implemented. Get a headstart on this process by leveraging the convenience of email marketing. Email automation allows you to craft personalized messages that offer individualized recommendations and this is important, with studies confirming that consumers are significantly more likely to respond to personalized content.
A one-size-fits-all style of communicating your product’s value is simply outdated and will not serve you well.
With the help of automation, you can develop a communications campaign that divides emails based on distinct segments with messages detailing, for instance, how a product update can benefit a specific client based on their unique needs and industry-specific challenges. A one-size-fits-all style of communicating your product’s value is simply outdated and will not serve you well. Your clientele base is likely diverse, so make sure your messages are tailored to reflect this reality.
Email automation is merely one example of a process that’s easily automatable within the realm of product updates. Wrk’s catalogue of automated Wrkflows can deliver real results that will ensure that your customers are continuously engaged with the latest version of your product or service you’re offering.
Client Onboarding
The client onboarding stage of the customer success journey is your golden opportunity to make that critical first impression. Don’t blow it! After all, you’re setting the stage for building a long-term rapport with your client, which makes every step—from welcome messages and appointment setups to product walkthroughs—all the more important as you seek to ‘wow’ a new client.
Client onboarding is a golden opportunity to make a positive first impression. Don't waste it! Photo Credit: Cytonn Photography
Successful onboarding leaves your client feeling confident and assured about using the new product on their own. To accomplish this, why not free up your team’s time to automate the more tedious tasks? Doing so, through a Wrkflow for customer success automation, may look something like this: Uploading new client information into a customer solution software like Zendesk, extracting your clients’ data from Salesforce, cleaning and reformatting this data, and uploading it back into Zendesk.
Survey Deployment
Soliciting feedback from clients is paramount to minimizing churn, maximizing retention and eventually, growing your business. As the leader of a customer success team, closing the customer feedback loop involves anticipating problems before the client brings them to your attention; otherwise, if a client complaint arises, resolving the issue swiftly is also likely to work in your favour.
Completing this process manually and efficiently, however, can be daunting. It involves reaching out to each customer segment in a personalized manner. As a result, an increasing number of customer success departments are choosing to automate this stage with automated but customized replies (customized according to customer segment or satisfaction rate, for instance).
The automation process for this could involve steps like these:
- Sending a Net Promoter Score survey to your existing clients through an online survey system such as Survey Monkey.
- Following up according to score: An above-average score would trigger a follow-up message requesting an online review or offering a referral code. A below-average score would result in a request for a follow-up phone call by one of your team members to discuss their dissatisfaction in-depth.
- Finally, complete the process by logging the client’s responses in your Customer Relationship Management system.
Automating these steps enables your team to spend more of their time personalizing their approach to customer support by addressing concerns or expressing thanks to happy clients. Moreover, gleaning noteworthy information from your customer insight is essential as you continue to iterate and evolve your product or service.
Assessing Customer Health
Assessing your customer’s health score is essential in determining the value your customer is getting out of your product or service. In other words, are they thriving and accomplishing their goals? Are they just getting by? Or are they simply stagnant, or worse yet, struggling with your product? Finding the answers to these questions is part and parcel of identifying and tracking your customers’ behaviours. And understanding customer behaviour is an indispensable part of determining their scores – which can predict how likely they are to renew, upgrade or cease their business. However, there are multiple tedious steps involved in determining this score.
The health score is made up of a few key performance indicators (KPIs)—how many is up to you. You can select the metrics to measure these KPIs (i.e.: product usage rate, NPS, etc.) and leverage automation to extract, clean and reformat the client data in order to transform it into actionable insights.
Less Tedium, More Face Time: Regaining Opportunities to Connect
At first thought, adopting automation within your customer success team may seem paradoxical—after all, customer success is concerned with bringing about personalized solutions tailored to each client’s needs. In reality though, your team stands to gain newfound time when they experience the convenience of automated solutions for various stages (from timely product updates to soliciting sincere client feedback). It’s essential to view automation as a strategic lever that places humans—both customers and staff—at the centre of its efforts. As a platform that’s founded on the symbiosis between human potential and machine power, Wrk’s automated solutions are that strategic lever—one that allows your team to focus on what matters most: nurturing relationships.
Learn more about how customer success automation can serve your team by visiting our Customer Success Hub
Featured Image: Toa Heftiba
