Do you have a brand that you go back to, time and time again?

If you do, what is it about this brand that’s captured your loyalty?

I do not doubt that an exceptional customer experience plays its part. That is, think about how that brand makes you feel. Good huh?

According to Bain & Company, businesses that invest time and effort to optimize their customer experience (CX) flows, experience above-market revenue growth between 4-8%. With the vast choice of products, services and brands available, exceptional customer experience comes as the ultimate seduction and differentiation for businesses to stand out above competitors.

In this Process Street article, you’ll learn how to engage your customers at every point in their journey with you. You’ll learn how to consistently create a service with a smile, a product to praise, and a beloved brand.

Learn from the best as we take a glimpse into the CX operations used by the likes of Netflix, Microsoft, and of course Process Street. You’ll then be given 5 tips on how you can optimize your CX flows, taking into account the changing business landscape, and the impacts of digitalization on customer behavior and experience.

Click on the relevant subheader to jump to your section of choice. Alternatively, scroll down to read all for an in-depth understanding of CX.

• What is CX?
• Case studies: How top tech companies deliver excellent CX
• How to optimize your customer experience flows
• Using checklists to optimize your CX flows in 5 steps
• Understanding customer experience flows in a digital world

Let’s jump to it!
Continue Reading

As the CEO of Custify, Philipp Wolf helps SaaS businesses deliver great results for customers. After seeing companies spend big money with no systematic approach to customer success, Philipp knew something had to change. He founded Custify to provide a tool that lets agents spend time with clients—instead of organizing CRM data.

Customer success is vital to a company’s growth because customers are the ones that bring revenue. Although more popular in high-tech sectors, like SaaS product development or cloud services, the customer success manager (CSM) role is gaining more and more popularity in other businesses as well.

But you may be asking, what does a customer success manager even do?

A CSM’s role revolves around making sure customers get their desired outcomes while using the service/product, thus prolonging their life cycles.

In this Process Street article, I will walk you through a customer success manager’s tasks, from onboarding and training the customers, to reducing churn, dealing with critical events, getting and analyzing feedback from customers, and so on.

Read on to get a full 360-view of what the CSM role entails and why it’s so important for a company:

• CSM responsibilities: Customer onboarding
• CSM responsibilities: Collecting & analyzing customer feedback
• CSM responsibilities: Maintaining customer success
• CSM responsibilities: Customer offboarding

Let’s jump right in!
Continue Reading

Glassdoor reports effective employee onboarding increases retention by 82%.

“Organizations with a strong onboarding process improve new hire retention by 82% and productivity by over 70%”

Now consider the cost of hiring a new employee is between ~6-9 months salary (the average salary for a customer success manager in the U.S. is ~$85,000 annually). When you do the math, it becomes clear how costs start to rack up.

If you’re a SaaS company dedicated to growth and gaining a competitive edge, this is an unnecessary cost that every team, including your customer success team, should avoid.

One of the best ways to improve retention is by focusing on your employee onboarding. That’s what we’re going to look at in this Process Street article.

We’ll explain how we, along with Salesforce, Netflix, and Intercom, onboard our customer success managers.

And if you’re going to invest in onboarding, making sure your customer success managers are onboarded effectively is a good way to effectively hit two birds with one stone. Your CSMs are in charge of customer onboarding, so by providing a solid employee onboarding foundation to orient them, you’re also laying the foundation for a solid system of client onboarding.

By the end of this article, you’ll have learned the 16 employee onboarding best practices used by these top 4 international tech companies. Although these onboarding best practices are specific to a customer success manager role, they’re applicable across most business departments.

• Why onboarding is important for retention
• 16 onboarding best practices (used by top tech companies)
• How to implement onboarding best practices in your company

Let’s get stuck in!
Continue Reading

90% of customers feel that the companies they buy from could do better when it comes to how they experience onboarding.

Customer success is about helping your customers understand and leverage the value of your product; you’re basically helping them achieve their goals. In a sense it’s one step beyond traditional customer support, taking a proactive approach to understanding and addressing customer needs.

A key component of customer success is making sure your customers are effectively onboarded.

Onboarding provides a unique opportunity for the CS team to nurture and address the key needs of a new customer, and an effective onboarding program can mean the difference between a long-term customer and a rapid churn.

For customer success teams to succeed with onboarding, CS managers should drive clear best practices and use well-structured processes to make onboarding as effortless as possible for everyone involved.

In this Process Street article, we’ll dive into:

• Customer success onboarding best practices
• Designing your customer success onboarding framework
• The customer onboarding process
• Measuring success with key customer success onboarding metrics

Continue Reading

This is a guest post by Brayn Wills, the current Knowledge Management Specialist at ProProfs knowledge base. He is responsible for creating unique and relevant content on the knowledge base and keeping track of the latest developments in the realm of knowledge management. In his free time, he is either reading a new book or exploring offbeat destinations.

When a crisis strikes, it brings along daunting challenges that require businesses to reevaluate their strategies. One such significant challenge is customer churn. It can impact a business drastically if left unchecked.

Statistics show that, on average, most companies experience a monthly churn rate of 7.5%. If left unchecked, this can be catastrophic for a company’s bottom line.

A rapidly shrinking customer base means reduced profits that can have a severe impact on an organization, especially during a crisis. What’s more, crisis situations tend to exacerbate the root causes of churn, meaning businesses need to be extra responsive and attentive to their customers during these times.

While you cannot prevent all customers from leaving your company, you certainly can take concrete steps to keep customer churn in control.

In this post for Process Street, I will cover:

• What is customer attrition?
• Customer expectations and mindset during a crisis
• 6 Effective ways to reduce customer attrition
• How to provide extra value to customers during a crisis
• Move beyond promotion to meet customer expectations
• Customer retention solutions with Process Street

Read on to uncover the pragmatic ways to reduce customer churn during a crisis by understanding and providing value to your customers.
Continue Reading

It was known as the email incident. An incident that caused an astronomical uproar throughout the office.

Names shall not be mentioned, but before Process Street I worked as a technical service advisor for an environmental testing laboratory. It was our job to deal with customer queries and complaints, to answer questions, and to make sure the service we provided met the customer’s needs.

The email incident: My colleague forwarded a customer complaint email to our manager, adding an inappropriate comment to display his frustrations with that said customer.

Unfortunately, this email ended up in the customer’s inbox too…

Oops!

Mistakes like will happen if you don’t have pre-established customer success operations to act as a form of process control.

Think about it, you’ll have optimized processes for production, sales, marketing, etc. But to effectively scale and grow, you’ll need to build repeatable processes for your customer success department too.

For many companies (72% to be exact, according to data obtained by Forrester), customer success is a top priority. This is because it’s well known that investing in a new customer is 5-25x more expensive than retaining existing ones – as expressed by the Harvard Business Review.

Make customer success operations your top priority by building and optimizing repeatable processes. And in this article, you’ll learn precisely how to do that.

Click on the relevant subheader below to get started. Alternatively, scroll down to read all we have to say regarding customer success.

• Why you need to start thinking about your customer success operations
• How to build effective customer success operations for your business in 4 steps
• Using Process Street to build repeatable customer success operations
• Using performance metrics to guide customer success operations effectiveness

Let’s begin!
Continue Reading

I was once abandoned when I was six years old.

We were shopping in a busy department store when I decided to ride the escalator one more time, while my parents kept on walking.

Although I now know that my parents were completely oblivious to my own decision to take a solo trip down the escalator, I’ve never forgotten the fear, anxiety, shock, and anger I felt when I reached the bottom of the next floor down.

I didn’t know where to go, what to do, or how to find them again. I felt lost, uncared for, and cruelly abandoned.

Ok, so I wasn’t really abandoned and I was, in fact, entirely to blame for this incident – but I’ve never felt the same about escalators or busy department stores since. I still avoid both.

I’m sure we’ve all had similar “abandonment” experiences when we were kids, but maybe we’ve had some more recently too…

Feeling lost, abandoned, and unappreciated is the #1 reason customers move away from products and services and is why 52% of customers will never touch a brand again.

“Humans are driven by feelings. So if you want the consumer to remember your product or brand, they must be engaged and impassioned by the interaction with your company.” – Inc, Harvard Professor Says 95% of Purchasing Decisions Are Subconscious

Not with Process Street though. Thanks to our customer success team, no customer of ours ever feels lost, uncared for, or abandoned.

How? Let’s find out together as we go through:

• The 4 best practices our customer success team follow
• How our customer success team succeeds at customer success

Ready to succeed? Continue Reading

This is a guest post by Jin Choi. Jin Choi is a writer who runs the MoneyNam blog. His favorite hobbies include learning about the newest trends in online marketing and lifting heavy iron at the gym.

The customer lifecycle consists of the stages that a customer goes through from the moment they become aware of your company to the moment they purchase your product.

It’s essential to apply the right strategies for each stage of the customer lifecycle if you want to maximize your customer lifetime value (CLV).

In order to build a successful company, it’s important to focus on the CLV.

Why?

Because repeat customers are nine times more likely to buy the same product from a new seller.

This Process Street guest post provides you with the tools to understand each of the stages of the customer lifecycle so that you can maximize the value of each and every customer you acquire.

• The stages of the customer lifecycle
• Customer lifecycle stage 1: Awareness
• Customer lifecycle stage 2: Engagement
• Customer lifecycle stage 3: Evaluation
• Customer lifecycle stage 4: Purchase
• Customer lifecycle stage 5: Post-purchase
• Customer lifecycle stage 6: Advocacy
• Customer lifecycle marketing: A summary

Let’s get started. 🚀
Continue Reading

Have you ever typed out a full message on your phone, only to realize that you’ve misspelled something at the very beginning?

It can often take you longer to navigate the teeny-tiny cursor back to fix your mistake than it did to write the message in the first place, right?

I’ve got a little trick that will make correcting your texts 10x easier.

If you slide your finger over the spacebar, you can move the cursor around quickly, easily, and accurately, letter by letter.

Try it!

With this small but effective tip, I’ve not only taught you how to get more value out of your phone, but I’ve also given you an example of how customer success works.

“When you teach your clients how to maximize the value of your product, you help them succeed and you show them why it pays to stick with you.” – Tenfold, 10 Companies Mastering Customer Success

Now, if I was an organization, I’d want to provide this type of value to my customers on a far larger scale – all of the time. And, judging by the fact that the use of customer success software platforms has risen from 25% to 43% over the past few years, so would a lot of other people.

Allow me to elaborate as we go through the following in this Process Street post:

• What is customer success software & what does it do?
• Why you need customer success software
• How do you choose the right customer success software?
• 4 customer success software platforms to consider

So, put your phone aside, and let’s get cracking!
Continue Reading

This is a guest post by Alyse Falk. Alyse is a freelance writer, and she handles stories about the latest developments in the field of technology. Passionate about AI, Alyse has extensive experience writing articles and essays on data-driven analytics, cloud computing, cybersecurity, machine learning, and IoT devices.

Customer feedback is integral to understanding how to deliver a consistently good customer experience. By gathering feedback, you stop guessing about what your customers do and don’t like and, instead, gain direct action items for how to improve customer experience in the future.

Improving customer experience (otherwise known as CX) comes with many benefits. Perhaps the largest of all is that your customers will get better service quality, leading to increased customer satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy.

Besides improved customer experiences, you will also get significant financial benefits. In fact, 73 percent of companies with above-average customer experience perform better financially than their competitors with a lower level of CX!

However, getting good customer feedback and reaching that ‘Aha!’ moment so you can improve customer experience can be tricky.

That’s why, in this guest post, I’ll be telling you everything you need to know about customer experience measurement, how to do it, and how Process Steet can help.

Read through these sections for everything you need to know:

• What is customer experience measurement (and why measure CX)?
• What to do before measuring customer experience
• The key customer experience metrics (and which ones to choose)
• Building a CX measurement scorecard
• Use Process Street to help with radically improving customer experience!

Or, if you wanted to start compiling customer feedback straight away, here’s Process Street’s Customer Feedback Checklist Template.

Click here to get the Customer Feedback Checklist Template!

Let’s jump right in.

Continue Reading