Now. the customer support team are the working-class heros who answer all the questions and requests that your customers bombard them with. They also identify and fix issues, and give your customer reasons to be chearful - regardless of whether they're contacted by live chat, email, of telephone.

Customer success means that they provide a consistently good service over time, and that your customers get the most out of what you sell. They also collect feedback and transform your customers into loyal, vocal advocates.

So it's not necessarily a rebranding of customer service. Instead, it's about building a team of experts who are human-oriented, strategic, and who also deliver value to your customers. This starts with onboarding, but also includes actioning feedback, providing tips and tools, and even also activating exit surveys so that customers are given many different ways to give your business their opinion of it. And of course, underneath all this, the basic aim is simple: increasing revenue and lowering costs!

#1: Communication Flawlessly

Communication should be friendly, human-centered, effective and also authentic. Make sure you know everything about your product. Identify limitations. Create effective workarounds. Be open to feedback and also learn how to ask for information.

At its heart, customer success is all about building customer loyalty and strong communication capabilities. If everything goes well, you will get a lot of constructive feedback, ideas, and amazing testimonials and reviews that you can use to then convert new customers easier.

Customer Success Tip #2: Simplify Onboarding

A high percentage of your customer success lies in the onboarding process!

Make sure that once you have a visitor on the website and/or a customer, you then offer them an easy-to-follow-process in order to get used to your product: use tooltips, tutorials, how-tos and everything else that suits your business (milestones achievements, perks, action-triggered messages, etc).

#3: Automate Processes

It is highly important to be there for your customers, but you can still automate some mails, messages or some pop-ups to appear during the process. You can also see and analyze the usage patterns of your customers and prepare a set of answers beforehand and adapt them. Prepare a set of guides, ebooks, videos, and articles to support what you explain. It helps a lot!

Customer Success Tip #4: Talk to Them

Talk to your customers, listen to them and also check out when they stumble upon challenges using your product or service and document them.

This will help you understand the customers’ needs better, identify new features, improve current processes, identify niché problems (and solutions, hopefully) and also to ask contextual questions. Saving a lot of time for everyone and make the customers happy!

#5: Use Analytics to Assess Performance

Needless to say that you have to check your stats and understand analytics: see how your visitors browse the site, what type of device they use, how much do they spend on the most important pages, how often do they write you on support, etc.

This ensures a good overview of your communication, onboarding, marketing efforts, customer support and customer success work and so on. You will understand what can be improved, what works smoothly and  whether your investment into all these processes and actions is actually paying off.

Now that you know what is customer success, the hard part is out of the way!

And as you can see, it's also not a hard thing to get your head around.

In a nutshell, it's all about predicting issues before they happen, fixing these pain points, and also ensuring that you have the customer support mechanisms in place to respond to issues quickly.

So start working on customer success today, your business depends on it!