What’s the most frustrating thing in the world?

Buying a product that was perfectly marketed to solve all your problems only to be faced with even more problems once you’ve handed over your banking details.

We’ve all been there – and most of the time, the marketing was truthful. The product could solve my problems. The real problem was that I didn’t know how to get the most out of the product. 

And why’s that? I, the customer, wasn’t properly onboarded. And that led to me feeling tricked by the company because the product didn’t meet my expectations.

Instant buyer’s regret. 

You don’t want your customers to feel the same. Understanding customer onboarding will help you help your customers get the most out of your product or service.

• What is customer onboarding? 
• Why is customer onboarding important? 
• Customer onboarding best practices 
• Customer onboarding process steps 
• Customer onboarding software
• Giving your customers the support they need for success

When thinking of the world’s most popular brands, which ones come to mind? In Forbes’ annual list of the World’s Most Valuable Brands, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and (META) Facebook are identified as some of the top-performing companies, with earnings being a key indicator of their success.

But while revenue may be a significant proof point of industry viability, how you approach your customer experience is another metric that gauges the future prosperity of a business. And one that has an equally significant say in how your business fares in the future.  

In Aircall’s report, Putting Your Customer First, we found that more than 50% of customers stopped supporting a business after a poor customer experience. This shows just how impactful a negative customer experience can be, undoing potentially years of customer loyalty in a single interaction. 

On the flip side, though, a positive customer experience can make a profound impression on people and go a long way to securing brand loyalty in an increasingly competitive marketplace.

Either way, customer experience and going all out to impress your audience is one area you cannot afford to neglect. 

To make sure your strategy is as impactful as possible, this Process Street post will cover these five tried-and-tested ways to improve your customer experience below: 

• Be responsive to customer needs
• Provide multiple communication channels
• Follow up with your customers
• Value customer insights – good & bad
• Promote customer testimonials
• Perfecting your customer-first strategy

Since 2015, Nahla Davies has been working with enterprise clients around the world developing RegTech protocols and best practices. She’s also worked with both enterprise and sovereign governments as a key contributor for notable public projects like DCOM.

If the pandemic has shown the world anything, it’s that business professionals and, specifically, marketers can still meaningfully engage customers in an increasingly digital world. It’s undoubtedly challenging for marketers to continue providing a seamless customer experience across different digital channels such as social media.

Thankfully, though, factors such as artificial intelligence (AI) and data analytics can make multi-channel customer experiences engaging across the entire customer journey — from product consideration all the way to purchase.

Businesses have proven themselves both capable and willing to remain adaptable amidst the tumultuous COVID pandemic in order to understand business problems and subsequent opportunities. The process of actually understanding these problems and opportunities, however, isn’t exactly straightforward.

Analytics, data, and artificial intelligence have the potential to enrich marketers’ understanding of their customers’ experiences in order to deliver meaningful, relevant experiences in the future. To that end, let’s quickly take a look at how data and analytics can be invaluable for marketers interested in enhancing the complete customer journey that they provide across different digital channels.

• Tailored strategies enhance customer experiences
• Analytics and data-driven personalization
• Automation increases time for customer interaction
• Chatbots are becoming more useful than ever to customers
• AI & data analytics: The trend that keeps growing

Let’s jump in!
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During the second world war, a young soldier from Lille attended a dance for servicemen about to be deployed. One woman caught his eye, and eventually, he worked up the nerve to ask her to dance.

Thinking that he would ask again – as most of the other young men would – she politely declined. The young soldier was shy, though, and took her refusal at face value. Not knowing her name or if he would even return, the young soldier went off to war.

Nearly a century later, their granddaughter – my very closest friend for all of three days – told me the story as we drove through the French countryside between Lille and Arras.

We love stories like that – the romance of chance encounters, unintended separations, and reunions that could only be an act of fate. Maybe it’s having an answer to the so-often unanswered question What might have been? that’s the thing that really resonates. Personally, I’m just really nosy and I like stories.

While most of us have some variation of “a friend of a friend’s second cousin’s grandmother was reunited with her first love by total accident,” the truth is, we rarely experience these reconnections without some sort of deliberate effort by one or both parties.

But we lose touch with people all the time. High school best friend. University mentor. Pick-up game buddy. Customer whose payment didn’t go through and involuntarily canceled their subscription to your service because they didn’t realize it.

Happens all the frickin time. But there is no missed connections column for lost customers. If you want them back, you’re going to have to be proactive. Fortunately, not only am I good with stories, but I’m pretty good at solving problems, too. (Or, at least, nagging our CS and Ops Team Manager, Blake Bailey, until he spills all his secrets.)

Either way, in this Process Street post, I’ll share the 5 things you need to know to put some life back into those ghost customers haunting your MRR.

• The journey to passive customer churn
• 5 tips to bring customers back from the dead
• Ghost customer resurrection a plan

Let’s reconnect!
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“Overall, [Process Street has] made a world of difference inside the organization. It’s really helped our quality and keeps our customers happy.” – David Schenz, Director

ERP Suites helps enterprise companies implement scalable IT solutions for secure data, improved response times, and application of industry knowledge & best practices.

The company began its very humble start in 2006 with a few guys in a basement with a vision. By 2017, ERP Suites had grown into an award-winning company known for its IT solutions and innovations.

Currently, they meet the needs of over 250 mid-size organizations within the US and abroad.
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The customer lifecycle begins with awareness and matures to advocacy, from the first interaction with your brand, to an evangelized super-user who raves about and recommends your product to friends, family and associates.

This Process Street article focuses on the customer lifecycle management – how to understand the different stages of the customer’s lifecycle, and guide them from initial awareness to long-term advocacy, with the help of tech.

Optimal customer lifecycle management is vital as this can maximize customer lifetime value (CLV) by boosting customer retention. This, in turn, will bolster your bottom-line by:

1. Selling to an existing customer base: There’s a 60-70% chance of selling to an existing customer base relative to a 5-20% chance of selling to new prospects.
2. Increasing customer retention: A mere 5% increase in customer retention is enough to raise a company’s profits by 75%.

Getting customer lifecycle management right can be tough. To help you, we’ve put together this list of essential tools to complete your customer lifecycle software stack, for optimal customer lifecycle management.

Each tool is chosen as per the customer lifecycle stage it’s best used for. Each customer lifecycle stage will have differing aims, which means it’s vital you use the right tools to meet your objectives. For this article, we’ve done the work for you.

• Understanding the customer lifecycle in detail
• Customer lifecycle software to help build brand awareness
• Customer lifecycle software to promote customer engagement
• Customer lifecycle software to ease customer evaluation
• Customer lifecycle software to help your customers make a purchase
• Customer lifecycle software tools to use post-purchase
• Customer lifecycle software tools to promote customer advocacy

Let’s dive right in!
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Hello, and welcome readers to the experience economy.

Take my hand and I’ll guide you to a place of psychic gratification. Feel your senses tingle, and your attention sharpen. You’re entering a new chapter of customer success, one that’s immersive and marks the next economic stage.

Businesses are no longer competing on a commodity level. In a digital world, with growing immersive processing power, organizations must crack the whip and adopt the experience mindset. This is a mindset that’s focused on customer success and delivering exceptional experiences instead of commodities.

In this Process Street article, we take a look at how one particular tech unicorn is succeeding in this experience economy.

You got it, I’m talking about the tech-tycoon Salesforce.

Salesforce is one of the largest tech companies to date with over 49,000 employees in 28 countries and has built the world’s most demanded CRM. Part of Salesforce’s triumph lies in the organization’s customer success capabilities. And today, you will learn how they’ve perfected customer success using principles from the experience economy.

Grab onto your seatbelts as you’re about to be blown away!

• What is the experience economy?
• 8 ways Salesforce achieves complete customer engagement in our experience economy

Here we go!💨
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Nahla Davies is a software developer and tech writer. Before devoting her work full time to technical writing, she managed – among other intriguing things – to serve as a lead programmer at an Inc. 5,000 experiential branding organization whose clients include Samsung, Time Warner, Netflix, and Sony.

Allocation of marketing resources is the key problem which leadership teams in marketing departments are continually trying to solve.

Often we talk about PPC vs organic, brand vs conversion, SEO vs social, or any such pairing of activities. But maybe the biggest question at the top of the decision tree is: Acquisition vs Retention.

Should you try to generate more revenue from existing customers? Should you spend more effort to develop new customers? Or is there a happy medium that will work perfectly for your business?

Based on statistics alone, your existing customers are your best bet for new revenue. It is generally easier and less costly to rely on the people you have already built relationships with. But businesses that don’t take sufficient steps to bring new blood into their base will inevitably die.

In this Process Street article, we’ll attempt to answer some questions, namely:

How involved should marketing be in retention efforts? And how do different company structures or products impact that? How do we weigh those efforts against acquisition – the primary function of marketing?

To help you through the process, we’ll be looking at:

• How other companies divide their efforts between acquisition and retention
• Why do businesses spend so much on new customer acquisition?
• How should you divide your marketing spend between acquisition and retention?
• Putting it all together with process

Let’s get rolling!
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Bora Lee is the Manager of Customer Enablement at ChurnZero. She is passionate about helping customer success teams succeed by crafting big-picture strategies executed through automated, streamlined processes that put the right data in front of the right customer at exactly the right time. She works hand in hand with customer success leaders to create fruitful, long-term relationships and to maximize customer satisfaction. In her free time, you will find her scuba diving and traveling.

Since customer success (CS) is still an emerging field, it’s not uncommon to find CS leaders who are founding their company’s first CS team or creating CS processes from scratch. Being the new department on the block, you may have had to find workarounds to other team’s more established processes. Or you might have encountered the common workplace scenario of inheriting your predecessor’s way of working.

No matter how your processes came to be, I can tell you one thing: they’re not perfect.

You can’t put your processes on a pedestal or become complacent with their adherence. Your market, solutions, and customers are constantly evolving. Your processes must adapt to the people and to the context – not the other way around.

Especially when you’re implementing CS processes for the very first time, it’s impossible to account for the multiple variances that will occur when you put concept into practice.

Instead of striving for process perfection, a goal more worthy of your efforts is the continuous improvement of your processes – routinely assessing their design, usage, output, and effectiveness.

And that’s where audits come in. By auditing your processes, you can uncover if dips in your performance metrics are merely a fluke or perhaps the cause of an undiagnosed bottleneck. Or if outwardly unrelated customer complaints actually stem from the same source.

As you audit over time, your small incremental efficiency gains add up. Consistent and measured refinement is the key to sustainable growth.

When auditing, it’s all about asking the right questions to uncover both the visible and underlying issues in your processes. To keep your customer success operations running smoothly, in this Process Street article, we’ve detailed a few simple, yet commonly overlooked questions to ask during your next process audit:

• Does your process align with your team’s responsibilities?
• What parts of your process generate the most feedback?
• Outside of the process, what other work does your team perform?
• Where do you have process bottlenecks?
• Where’s your team spending too much time?
• How should the process ideally work?
• Are you getting the data you need?

Let’s get right to it!
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The customer’s Net Promoter Score (NPS) was in the highest percentile, yet I found myself closing the account. How did we miss this churning customer? Were there early warning signs we’d failed to notice?

I used to work as a technical customer service representative for an environmental testing laboratory. It was my job to keep an eye on the accounts I handled. I needed to make sure the customers were happy and meeting their goals with us. For this, we relied heavily on NPS scoring, but this measure was failing us.

NPS scoring could be failing you, too.

The problem is that NPS metrics give reactive, snapshot values. Plus there are other aspects to an account’s health beyond customer satisfaction. For instance, you need to understand your customer’s goals and whether they’re on track to meeting those goals.

According to McKinsey and Company, perfecting account health scoring can improve client retention by up to 95%. If I knew this, I could have prevented that one account from churning. In this Process Street article, we introduce a more comprehensive and proactive means of determining the health of your accounts: the customer health index (CHI).

• What is a customer health index?
• Why you should transition from NPS to CHI
• How to calculate a customer health index in 4 steps

Let’s jump right to it!
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