How to Nurture Customer Success

Always consider your customer's goals, not your own.

By Young Entrepreneur Council@yec By Syed Balkhi, founder of WPBeginner

There's nothing like the feeling of success. As business owners, our ideas of success involve growing our companies, increasing sales and leads and creating high-quality products. Many companies, specifically SaaS brands, are focusing on the success of their customers after they've made their initial purchases. The traditional buying process doesn't end after the customer pays and receives their product. 

Focusing on improving the lives of your customers by giving them the tools and resources they need can have a significant impact on your business. Customers who find success with your business are more likely to be repeat customers and will have an overall better experience. 

Let's take a look at how you can nurture your customers after they've purchased a product or service on your website. 

Focus on customer needs. 

There's a big difference between your needs and the needs of your customers. When you're designing a product or service, it's crucial that you take some time to consider why a consumer may consider buying your product. 

In most cases, the reason they are making a purchase is to solve a pain point in their life. For example, if you were a gardener but were having some trouble growing plants, you would sign up to a monthly newsletter about gardening to solve the pain point of not being able to grow a successful garden. In this example, the publication would focus on the struggles and needs of its customers concerning gardening. 

When you start with your customer needs and think backward, you're ensuring that they will have a better chance of finding success with your product. 

Create a customer success team.

Customer support and customer success are often used interchangeably, though they are drastically different. The one thread that connects these two teams is their interactions with consumers. 

Customer support is considered a reactive process in which your team is waiting for consumers to reach out with questions or concerns. When someone comes to your website and has a question about a product or service, they will reach out to your service team, and they will react by solving the problem. 

Customer success, on the other hand, is a proactive process. During the development process, you'll want to come up with a course of actions for consumers that will help them get the maximum value out of their purchase. It's your job to anticipate what your customers are going to need. 

Hiring a customer success team means you'll have a small, focused group with one common goal in mind. When your employees only have one primary task -- helping customers succeed -- there's a higher chance for success. 

Collect feedback.

Finally, it's helpful to collect customer feedback as a way to nurture the success of future consumers. There are various ways to see what people think about your site design, products and customer success program. 

One of the best ways to gather feedback is by sending out customer satisfaction surveys. If you're trying to measure your success team, it's usually a good idea to send out an email asking the consumer to fill out the feedback form a couple of months after their initial purchase. Waiting for a few months can help the customer find new uses, or flaws, in your product design or customer success strategy. 

As you begin to hear about customer experiences, start taking note of common patterns that emerge. For instance, if you sell marketing software, and a majority of consumers wish they had more help when it comes to email marketing, you can use this data to enhance your success strategy. 

There are plenty of ways to retain customers, but very few methods are as personal as nurturing customer success. If you get the chance to go on this journey with your audience, you'll gain plenty of experience and insights that help you build stronger customer-focused products and services.

As you help current customers succeed, you'll develop a framework for helping future customers make the most of your products or services. The key factor you must consider here is your customer's goals, not your own. Think carefully about what you would expect from a company that sells a service similar to yours, and determine what you can do to extend and enrich the customers' lives post-sale.

Syed Balkhi is the founder of WPBeginner, the largest free WordPress resource site that helps small businesses start their website.

Published On: AUG 23, 2019 The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com.

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