This is a guest post from Olivia Harp, whose easy-reading, approachable pieces help bring important business and negotiation skill-building content to new audiences in an accessible way. With a degree in linguistics, Olivia excels in creating her own engaging content.

Sustaining customer satisfaction can be challenging in business. However, there are several ways to improve your sales and customer satisfaction at the same time. Improving your sales negotiation skills is an overlooked low-hanging fruit route to making a positive impact on your customer relations.

Through sales negotiation training, you can learn how to identify your customer needs better. Understanding your customers puts you in a position to offer better services. By improving your customer relations, you may be able to attract and retain more customers.

This article outlines practical negotiation tips to increase your customers’ satisfaction.

In this Process Street article, we’ll cover:

• Redefine your business strategy
• Analyze your sales negotiation tactics
• Review your negotiation style
• Additional negotiation skills for customer satisfaction
• Get it right every time with Process Street

While your blog is the external face and voice of your company, your support team is the internal one, which is why you need an effective customer support process in place. According to Jason Lemkin of SaaStr, SaaS companies — especially startups — should be using their company’s product, even if the teams don’t strictly ‘need’ to.

In Jason’s article, he recounts how PayPal president David Marcus ranted ‘use our app or quit‘ to his employees. While it could be argued that David Marcus is being an angry egotist and going a little too far for an app that everyone may not have a use for, he says that the reason he wants everyone using it regularly is so that PayPal can ‘get better, and better’.

That brings up an interesting issue — by putting every single employee on support in some capacity, you’re tackling several problems at once. You’re lightening the load of the dedicated support teams in busier times, teaching employees about the product they may well be advertising or marketing and gathering vital data from users on how the product could be improved.

Over the several past weeks, I’ve looked at the definition of customer success, why it’s important and how to reduce churn. Now we’re going to get into the nuts and bolts of customer support for SaaS companies, including strategies, workflows, and tips for getting set up.

• Everyone should have a customer support process
• Develop a customer support process document that works for your team
• Create a customer support process workflow (and make sure it gets followed)
• Segment your support tickets to keep engaged with the customer
• Create a recurring workflow to run for each ticket
• How to start this customer support process for every employee
• Get the Ebook: The Complete Guide to Customer Success for SaaS Companies

Let’s get started by looking more closely at the support model briefly described earlier.

Customer health index is a crucial metric to look at.

Why?

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!

To excel at customer success, you need to understand your customer health score. According to a study by Gartner, 88% of Account Managers (CSMs) think they can grow by delivering a great service, which is reflected in your customer health score measures.

A customer health score is a metric used to determine whether customers are healthy or at-risk of dropping off. Customers with high health scores are high-value, repeat customers – this comes hand-in-hand with business growth.

In this Process Street article, we give you 7 vital indicators you need for determining customer health. We then explain how you can use these indicators to calculate customer health score values, before looking at examples of customer health scoring in practice.

Click on the relevant subheader to jump to your section of choice, alternatively scroll down to read all we have to say.

• Our secret source: 7 indicators for calculating customer success
• Calculating your customer health score
• Customer health scoring in practice
• Moving from a startup to big business and how this alters customer health score measures

Let’s start scoring!

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!
Continue Reading

“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.
Continue Reading

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!
Continue Reading

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!
Continue Reading

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!
Continue Reading