January 23, 2021
Customer success is one of those words that make business people in SaaS startups question the difference between account management and customer support, but there is a difference, trust me (or don’t, just read on). First and foremost, the content that I’ll be presenting is anti-fluff. What does that mean? You won’t be reading and learning theoretical strategies, but practical and actionable items you can copy and paste into your business and startup right away.
Customer success is a culture, NOT a department. Everyone in your company including your assistants and Google Adwords specialists must have the customer success culture. Let’s talk a little philosophy for a minute, what is customer success? In my opinion, customer success is treating every customer as if they were your first buyers. It means that you are still willing to go the “extra mile” and provide a phenomenal customer experience during the lifecycle of the customer.
Here’s a formula that you should apply to your business ASAP:
Happy Customers = A Happy Business
Happy Employees = Happy Customers
Customer success in a SaaS startup starts with the hiring process. Your company culture should be a requirement for all new employees. The reason you want to do this is because your new employees will be the ones speaking to the customers and representing the brand. I cannot understand why so many successful companies like MetroPCS and Salesforce have such poor customer support (try calling their tech support line and you’ll see what I mean). By the way, I do not see a difference between customer success and support - both mean the same thing because both have an end goal of making customers happy, it’s simple.
Yes and No. Not all SaaS companies have customer success departments, many do. The larger a company grows the more likely it will need branches of specialized departments to handle the volume. I bet that when you started your business, you were the customer support, billing, sales, marketing and HR department for a while until your company grew. Eventually, these departments branched out as demand grew. Even if you built out a customer success department to handle the load, “customer success” should still be a mentality among your other departments. I mentioned this earlier, even your marketing team should be customer success. Imagine if your marketing team understood your customers with the same level of context as your sales and customer support reps? What type of marketing and email campaigns do you think you’ll have in return? Your business’s customer success team is the entire company, it’s a brand ambassador.
If you’re a business owner that preaches the improvement of customer success, but doesn’t follow suit with your employees then you’re not being a leader. Lead by example and demonstrate patience, flexibility, kindness, and empathy with your employees - the same traits you would display with your customers.
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Mor Assouline is the Vice President of Accounts for PracticePanther, the fastest-growing legal case management software in the world. As the company’s second employee, Mor has channeled his passion and 10+ years of experience for sales and customer service into the #1 rated legal case management platform on the market. Combining his affinity for constructing streamlined, intuitive business procedures with his extensive experience in successfully implementing such processes, Mor has spearheaded the bulk of PracticePanther’s revenue generation with tremendous results. Mor is thrilled to continue leading PracticePanther’s accounts into what is certain to be a bright and prosperous future.
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