Can Technology Ease off the Role of Customer Success Specialist?
Be it on the product, process, or service, whatever a business’s investment is, it is all directed to one goal – to achieve customer success! Customer success is when a customer can perceive the value of the organization’s offering, i.e., their ROI (return on investment). At a time, it was the job of someone from the finances to ensure that the customer got their ROI. However, as businesses today have become increasingly customer-centric, Customer Success has become more complex; a dedicated Customer Success Specialist (CSS) is appointed to make customers happy.
SaaS products are complex and demand a significant investment; considering the money they put in, customers expect the highest levels of value from the product. This is why SaaS companies should ensure customer satisfaction at each touch-point of the customer journey – and that’s where a Customer Success Specialist comes into the picture.
Let us know more about Customer Success Specialists and if technology can ease off their role.
What is a Customer Success Specialist?
A customer success specialist (CSS) is a professional responsible for building and maintaining
long-term customer relationships. To achieve this, they take several measures to ensure the customer is happy and satisfied at all key customer lifecycle phases. They handle end-to-end account nurturing and management duties from customer onboarding to post-purchase rituals.
The CSS is the key asset for an organization as the professional in the position is responsible for maximizing customers’ lifetime value (LTV). A CSS typically serves as a connection between internal stakeholders and the customer.
These professionals mix their hard and soft abilities to master technology and manage client relationships. They are experts driven to find the source of an issue, assess viable fixes as soon as possible, and offer concise, well-researched advice.
A pro CSS can successfully manage several different and challenging issues at once and exhibit excellent communication, organization, and time management abilities.
Now, the titles customer success specialist and customer success manager are often used interchangeably; the CSS focus is much more narrow. At the same time, it has to be said that hiring a customer success specialist is a worthy investment. The specialist helps create a customer-focused approach to increase engagement strategy, leading to better customer satisfaction during the customer lifecycle.
Customer Success Specialist (CSS) through Customer Lifecycle
As already discussed, a CSS is responsible for ensuring that the customer is happy and satisfied at all the key phases of the customer lifecycle. Among these important phases is the customer onboarding phase.
Customer onboarding is extremely important for a SaaS company. This is often the first touch-point for the customer to perceive the value offered. As a professional ensuring customer satisfaction, the CSS’s job is to ensure that the customer gets the value almost immediately and seamlessly.
During this phase, the customer success specialist is responsible for making it easy for the customers to use the SaaS product or service. To make the process easy, they can hold interactive sessions. For this, they can use several technology-driven tools such as interactive walkthrough sessions, learn-by-doing tutorials, intelligent assistants for support, etc.
By enabling these, customer success specialists can boost customer engagement and build positive relationships right from the start.
Their job doesn’t end here. They analyze customer behavior and their experience during this stage. This information is further used to develop strategies for making the process easier for new customers and reducing customer churn.
The next important phase is the adoption phase. Here the customer success specialist is responsible for ensuring that the customer faces no problems as they start using the product. Once the customer is completely onboarded and becomes a regular product user, the focus shifts to customer experience.
Here, the customer success specialist has to use different strategies to improve customer experience, resolve problems, and boost customer retention. Their ultimate goal here will be to turn the new users into returning, loyal, and long-time customers. At the same time, they are also responsible for finding new upsell and cross-sell opportunities.
A customer success specialist needs to use data to boost customer retention to ensure that the users/ customers aren’t facing problems when using the product. They monitor users’ satisfaction closely and try to detect potential issues and solve their problems. They do this quickly, so the customers don’t churn away.
Again, they will have to take help from technology such as AI & ML to collect and efficiently use the data.
After adoption, the SaaS product lifecycle jumps to the phase of renewal. This phase is about the customers returning to purchase the same SaaS product/ renew their subscription. The role of the Customer Success Specialists here is to collect customers’ feedback and monitor the health of the relationship between the product/ company and the customer.
While the CRM teams, as well as the CX teams, are responsible for collecting and analyzing the feedback from the customers, the focus of the CSS is different. A customer success specialist collects and analyzes user feedback, focusing on the user experience. They will focus more on customer satisfaction and complaints or suggestions on the areas for improvement.
To collect this feedback from the customers, customer success specialists use tools like customer surveys, questionnaires, and interviews. They send these using different digital platforms. Upon collecting the data and preparing reports, the customer success specialist shares them with the product, marketing, and sales teams.
So far, it can be seen that customer success specialists use technology at each phase of the customer journey to fulfill their job roles and responsibility. Technology not only eases their job but also increases their job efficiency. It improves their ability to gather and manage data and analyze it, provides better interactive capabilities, and boosts customer experience.
Conclusion
In conclusion, to build a successful SaaS company, it is of utmost importance to put the customers’ needs and success on the pedestal. This is why it is important to hire a customer success specialist. They develop strategies and processes to enhance customer experience and increase the customer lifetime value.
Technology plays a very important part and helps CSS fulfill its job responsibilities. From helping them manage data to analyzing customer behaviors, the use of technology is critical for them – it improves and eases their job.
About the Author
Jyothi Tulasi Jyothi Tulasi is tech-savvy and proficient in technical SEO optimization for various SaaS products. She has profound expertise in outreach. She loves connecting to people and singing in her free time.
