What does Customer Success mean to Netpremacy?

 

By definition, customer success is the function of making your customer as successful as possible with your products. It is a professional strategy that aims to maximise customer sustainability, productivity and profitability, through long-term partnership and technical advancements.

Organisations, particularly in the technology industry, are swiftly starting to see the importance and value of customer success, and this can be seen with the rise in customer success managers emerging across businesses. This upcoming, vital role serves primarily to maintain, retain, and optimise relationships with customers.

The acknowledgement of the need for customer success is, in itself, the first step to establishing and developing this practice as an integral part of the overall performance of the company. Customer success isn’t something that happens overnight or even in a few months; it’s an extended, long-term journey of strategic business objectives that continuously chop and change with ever-advancing technology.

Customer success is a forward-thinking, proactive planning and strategic approach to business.

So, how do you make a customer successful?

Success is extremely subjective. Yes, money, people and strategic focus are the obvious factors that pop into your head when you think of business success; but the measurement of these factors are entirely dependent on the company. Think of it this way: recruiting 50 people in a year would be considered a huge success for an organisation of only 100 employees (that’s 50% growth); but to a company of 10,000 employees, 50 extra people wouldn’t seem that much at all (and is only a 2.5% growth). So instead, what I’d like to explore in this section are what characteristics, methods, or techniques are crucial to ensuring the customer achieves their goals.

Often customer success can be confused with customer support, which (while having some overlay) actually appear on opposite ends of the spectrum. Customer support is a reactive service, handling issues that have already taken place. This is, of course, extremely necessary for companies to ensure there is a level of support if and when it all goes wrong. However, an element of customer success is to help proactively mitigate unnecessary risks in order to minimise the number of major incidents that occur in the first place. Appreciating that the latter is a “sunny day” scenario and a lot easier said than done, other elements of customer success involve;

• Ensuring organisational health and development,
• Unlocking the full potential of the tools,
• Continuing the product journey from implementation to innovation and beyond.

These, in turn, are accomplished through good communication and expert knowledge. It is important to engage with customers on a regular basis to report on progress of initiatives and any internal changes (of circumstances, staff and/or decisions). Transparency on both sides is an extremely valuable asset and is the key to true partnerships. Only through real understanding (and even empathy) of the situation can we effectively tailor our consultancy to produce the right solution or approach for the company.

But what use would our consultancy be without expert knowledge. For the type of CSS programme we offer here at Netpremacy, this transposes into three areas: a solid grasp of the product, an in-depth understanding of its evolution, and a breadth of experience using, implementing and configuring it. With this level of expertise, we can confidently advise our customers, provide sound guidance, and make educated recommendations.

And, why is customer success important to Netpremacy?

Our customers aren’t just premium accounts, they’re the people that make Netpremacy who we are. We pride ourselves on the ability to keep strong, tight-knit relationships with our customers, making them feel like an extension of the team and really part of the Netpremacy family. With this in mind, we’ve put a lot of time and effort into the customer success services to ensure the programme is as fine-tuned, beneficial, and relevant as possible to our customers. The methods are all tried and tested (believe you me!), but we continuously look to improve and develop the offering in order to provide the maximum value and, of course, help make our customers become a success.

Netpremacy’s portfolio for the customer success services boomed over the course of 2018 and we endeavour to continue expanding our “extended” team. If you’d like to find out more information about our programme or if you have any questions, please feel free to contact us here.

Thanks for reading!

 

Blog post written by: Fraja Hodges, CSS Programme Manager