Depending on the industry and sector you are in, the world is under transition from customer support to customer success. Both in short are called CS. It can mean customer support in a reactive context, but also can mean customer success in a proactive context.
Communication skills remain important for both roles, be empathy, problem-solving, keep communication open, time management, and be a team player. To a very big extent, marketing, sales and customer success (CS) should keep a lot of communication.
Customer success is working in a proactive manner, do not wait for the customer to contact you for a problem. Instead, keep working out something, to let the conversation channel open. It can be prepared for a product, new feature sharing, how-to and demonstrate what it matters for some kind of use case and context. It can be a seminar, workshop or lab session, the opportunity to create customer experience is limitless.
Customer success is about having more face-to-face customer interactions even if it is just a web session. Keep them see your face. Modern communication technology makes it possible to engage mass customers for the target topic and theme based discussion. You can even record it for those who may need it for the future to play back.
In customer success you know what to do, to enable customer success, to educate them, to help them, to share with them how to use the product or service more. A lot of industries and sectors remain operating in old traditional technical support basics, based on customer support trigger and act on it. World class customer success experience is that customers always know and keep you in their mind, not just because of support, but also for any opportunity and new requirements.
This is why, when I saw modern day certain companies keep the customer support unit or department structure, and those who are using customer success structure, I have a very different kind of perception. I do not simply mean just rename the customer support to customer success, everything will work by itself. You need a holistic customer success program from the inside-out to really reap the customer success experience that it can bring your enterprise for. In short, it is all about the end to end customer experience journey, not just about touchpoint customer satisfaction. Another important measurement is that it is relationship centric, not just transaction centric.
E-SPIN Group in the enterprise ICT solution supply, consultancy, project management, training and maintenance for corporation and government agencies did business across the region and via the channel. Feel free to contact E-SPIN for your project requirement and inquiry.
Related post that may interest you:
