Customer Success – It’s all About the Journey

Much to the chagrin of my wife, I am always tinkering with something – even if that something is working perfectly fine. I’ve always been curious about how things work and how we can improve what we do every day. This curiosity and desire to improve, is one of the reasons why I am excited to come to work in the morning. The team I have to help drive this change is another reason. As VP of our Customer Care team, I am constantly working with my team to evaluate how we can be better serve our customers – how we can be quicker and more efficient while still consistently delivering the experience our customers expect. While customer success is never an exact science, I have come across best practices over the years and thought I would use this forum to share some of what we’ve learned.

Improving and creating a great customer experience is an ongoing journey. One that goes far beyond the reach of just providing support to our customers. With the multitude of engagement channels available, influence can happen at any moment in the customer lifecycle. Today, every single interaction with a customer, whether it happens within support, sales or within the product, is an opportunity to strengthen the customer relationship.

What are you doing to understand your customer’s needs? Do you have the tools and insights to guide your approach and help customers use your product to achieve their goals? Understanding the answers to these questions takes time and is critical to your success and for the creation of brand ambassadors. What might work for one company, may not be the best route for another. What works one year, likely will need to evolve the next.

Where do you start? Let’s start with understanding your customer, their needs and how to align the experience with your brand. Without this understanding, it is difficult to create a great experience for your customer, whether that is in the product or between your support team and customers.

Why does it matter? Historically support centers focused on the length of a call and how utilized a team was. These measurements were trying to determine if we were efficient at handling the customer contacts, but not focused on what is good for the customer and ultimately health of the business. Resolving a customer issue and enabling them to use your product to achieve their own goals is a much better measurement of success. Shifting your measurement of success from internal metrics to focusing on your customer’s needs will allow you to focus on ultimately what’s good for the business. This customer focused view on how we act leads to a better interaction and a happier customer. It also means providing your reps with the tools and resources necessary to support your customers in ways that will provide a quick, efficient and delightful experience.

We use the common expression, ‘eating your own dog food’ frequently when talking internally about how we leverage our own products – including LogMeIn Rescue — to support our customers. In this blog series, we will be offering a bit of a sneak peek behind the curtain into our thoughts and experiences around customer experience including best practices, big wins and lessons learned. From one customer success professional to another, I’m looking forward to sharing our stories and hearing about yours. Stay tuned for more!