Managing Customer Success using Automation and Technology

Customer success is of greater importance to the market today, especially when the competition is increasingly fierce. Customer success is emblematic of how well an organization can deliver a high-quality customer experience. Thus, we can determine whether our customers’ expectations are met and, if they are, how likely are they expected to do business with us in the future. Customer success may manifest in multiple forms, but it typically combines customer advocacy, retention, and satisfaction. Therefore, a strong focus on customer success is crucial for any business, regardless of industry or domain.

A framework or structure should be considered while scaling customer success in any organization. The company’s objectives and principles should be considered while designing this framework. When creating a customer success model, it is crucial to remember that customer success should not be confused with customer service or support. While customer service is usually reactive, customer success is intended to be proactive. A more strategic approach is needed to ensure that customers realize the full potential of products or services.

The following are suggested action items for creating a robust customer success framework:

1. Identify the strategies for brand visibility.
2. Explore methods to obtain new leads and gain new customers.
3. Determine phases of the customer journey and their needs at each phase.
4. Figure out customer segmentation with thorough research.
5. Develop an efficient process for customer onboarding.
6. Implement a system for providing timely customer support.
7. Identify and apply the customer’s preferred way of communication – chat, email, voice call, etc.
8. Create a customer-facing knowledge base with personalized content.
9. Build a customer community to engage them.
10. Employ a system to measure customer satisfaction.
11. Utilize means to obtain an account’s health, i.e., customer health score.
12. Set up efficient and smooth renewals, upsells, and expansion processes.
13. Design a process to demonstrate the true potential of the product/service to customers for higher engagement.
14. Establish a process to obtain customer reviews and testimonials to gain customer advocacy.
15. Enforce a system to measure the effectiveness of customer success initiatives.

To implement the aforementioned framework – technology and automation offer an efficient and measurable approach to managing customer success. In that light, Salesforce is an effective tool that can greatly streamline processes for customer success management and empowering teams to provide highly customized customer experiences. Businesses can leverage this AI-powered technology to  

• Gain deep insights into customer trends and needs
• Gain a better understanding of their customer base
• Anticipate customer needs more effectively
• And achieve customer success

Salesforce offers specialized products that can be tailored for better customer experience, including Salesforce CPQ, Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Data Cloud, Customer 360, and Experience Cloud. Businesses can understand customer demands, trends, problems, and issues using Salesforce’s reporting and analytics solutions. Salesforce automation capabilities can optimise and streamline processes like

• Customer onboarding: Once the Sales cloud takes care of pre-sales activities, leads, opportunities, etc., and the deal is closed-won, the customer handoff from the sales representative to the account manager can be ensured by automating onboarding with Lightning Process Builder or customer journey builder.
• Product usage monitoring: An Advanced AI dashboard can be used to get customer product recommendations based on their predicted product purchase scores. By profiling customers, an automated process can be configured to prioritize those who require immediate attention.
• Customer experience (CX) metrics: Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT), Customer Efforts Score (CES), Average Resolution Time (ART), Net Promoter Score (NPS), and Customer Effort Score (CES) can be used to monitor customer’s health.  Utilizing a single source of truth, such as Salesforce Customer 360, can assist in combining data on customer satisfaction from many sources and swiftly build particular metrics.
• Customer segmentation: Customer 360 can be used to segment demographic profiles and track previous interactions. It simplifies customer recognition based on their requirements and behaviors and personalizes the approaches accordingly.
• Customer satisfaction levels: Implementation of customer feedback is very quick using Salesforce’s built-in capabilities with the help of well-designed surveys, quizzes, and polls. Furthermore, Einstein AI is very helpful in identifying deep patterns in customer feedback and contributing toward customer success.
• Personalized customer service: For agents to deliver personalized customer support, the Salesforce Service Cloud console is a very efficient tool that combines all customer data across channels and devices, including customer profiles and case histories. It also gives customer success managers the ability to monitor the effectiveness of their team.
• Insights into customers’ needs and preferences: Calculated insight feature of Salesforce Data Cloud can be used to define and calculate multidimensional metrics at the profile, segment, and population levels.  Additionally, a number of dashboards, including the Case Insights Dashboard, Opportunities Insights Dashboard, Activities Insights Dashboard, Lead Insights Dashboard, and Products Insights Dashboard, are available in the customer insight apps to help understand customers’ needs and preferences.
• Prompt responses to customer inquiries: A powerful tool for providing prompt responses to client inquiries is Salesforce Einstein Bot. It enhances the client experience using artificial intelligence. It is compatible with numerous platforms, including SMS, chat, Slack, Facebook Messenger, and WhatsApp. Moreover, it supports multilingual discourse.
• Real-time and relevant customer data: Salesforce Data Cloud helps provide real-time customer data. It collaborates with Customer 360 and Salesforce Genie to enable marketing, sales, and service teams to create personalized customer experiences. Using MuleSoft, Data Cloud simplifies connecting to a large volume of data, whether it is stored in the cloud, on-premises, or even in legacy systems. This has a significant impact on customer success management.
• Upselling and cross-selling: In-built, guided selling feature in Salesforce CPQ, can be provisioned for upselling and cross-selling, which involves a dynamic questionnaire that recommends opportunities.

Although managing customer success might be difficult, it can be made much simpler with the help of automation and technology. Thus, an effective CRM solution like Salesforce can be used by organizations with umpteen automation and technology features to help manage customer success. Companies can improve consumer support by using Salesforce to streamline customer success processes. It enables organizations to manage customer data, personalize experiences, keep track of customer interactions, automate customer care, and provide essential customer information. Overall, Salesforce offers a very good, centralized platform for ensuring customer success.

With many years of experience implementing CRM, Advanz101 Business Systems is a trusted partner of Salesforce CRM solutions and consulting services. Learn more about how Advanz101 Systems can help you overcome the challenges of managing customer success with Salesforce offerings.