How To Build Performance with Customer Success

The Relationship Between Performance and Customer Success

Brands with strong Performance fulfill the promise that they make and do so noticeably well. Poor Performance happens when product or service under-delivers what people are expecting from your category or when your product and messaging are misaligned.  

Customer Success’s role in driving Performance is to determine and fast track customer feedback to the relevant teams within your brand. The aim of Customer Success is to ensure your customers get the maximum value out of your product or service and that, in turn, you extract maximum value out of them.    

If you’re a brand looking to drive your Performance through Customer Success, here are a few things you should be thinking about:

1. Who are your customers and how do they interact with your category? The first step to driving great Performance is to understand what customers are trying to achieve when using your brand. You need to determine who your customers are, why they might use a brand like yours, how and when they use it, and what they are hoping to get out of it. 

2. Are expectations of your product or service being set correctly and sustained? If your sales strategy inaccurately positions your product or service, then your Performance will suffer. Equally, if your product or service doesn’t keep delivering against customer expectations over time, your Performance will drop. So, consider the claims you want to make about your product and how they are reinforced in your customer journey. 

3. What can you learn from your customers to improve your product? It may be that your customers interact with your product in a way that you didn’t originally anticipate, or that you get consistent feedback that you’re not quite hitting the mark on your core claim. Reviewing the behavioral data you have about your customers and their product engagement will give you vital clues about what’s working and what’s not.

What should you do next?

• Build your customer personas: Including their demographic profile, key needs, and purchase drivers to determine how your product should be positioned for your different audiences.   

• Revise the claims you make at point of sale: What do you promise your customer when they buy your product? Is that delivered? If your promises are vague or inaccurate then perceptions of your Performance will be damaged. You’ll need to refine them to ensure that customers get the outcomes they expect

• Determine value moments in the post-sale customer journey: You need to sustain and exceed the expectations that customers have of your product or service over time to really drive perceptions of your brand’s Performance. Map out the value points you deliver, aligned to your customer promise.

• Interrogate your customer metrics for insight: Consolidate the behavioural data that you have about your customer and their product usage to understand where there are strengths and weaknesses in your proposition. Remember: You can always add your commercial metrics into ProQuo AI to unearth new patterns between how customers act and what they feel. 

How to determine if it’s working.

• You’ll see your Performance scores grow in ProQuo.  

• You’ll see your revenues rise, as customers start to recognize value from your product or service.

• You’ll keep your customers for longer: The lifetime value of each customer should increase as you deliver on the key benefit that you promise.  

  
  Guidance from:
  Annie Henderson | Head of Customer Success, ProQuo AI
  
  Annie is customer-obsessed. She's always worked with how people think about companies, and now she turns that expertise to making sure customers get the best from brands.