A recent report in G2 states that web traffic for their Customer Success product category grew by 42% last year. This surge of interest suggests that businesses are prioritizing customer retention over customer acquisition.
This news isn't surprising. Fears of a recession are gripping the business world. A Twilio Segment report from late last year backs up G2's findings. Their survey indicates 2 in 3 businesses are shifting focus from growth to retention in light of economic issues.
So what can businesses do to improve their customer success?
Statistics suggest that customer self-service is a significant element of customer success. For example:
Almost 40% of customers say they can resolve issues more quickly through self-service.
88% of users expect a company to offer a customer self-service option
Over 80% of customers want more self-service options, but only 15% are happy with existing tools
It's clear what customers want. How businesses meet that need is the central question.
Digital adoption platforms (DAP) are excellent for user onboarding and customer retention.
To get an idea of what's possible, read this case study for how Usetiful helped Ahruf achieve greater customer success.
In this article, we'll focus on ways to use a DAP to enhance customer success after onboarding so you can keep customer churn to a minimum.
What is customer success?
Before we dive into how DAPs can help with customer success, it's essential to define what is meant by customer success.
Customer success refers to an organization's approach to ensuring its users solve their pain points and achieve their goals with the product. It involves things like:
Anticipating and resolving customer problems
Reducing customer churn
Driving renewals, upselling, and cross-selling
Increasing loyalty and trust
Getting regular feedback from users
How to use a DAP to boost customer retention and success
Several different factors are required to achieve customer success. Having a good product is essential. However, some issues are inevitable, and your customers will need help from time to time.
Here is how you can employ Usetiful to help with customer success.
#1. Proactive support
Proactive support has two main elements:
a) Helping your users before they need to contact your human support team
b) Anticipating and resolving issues before they result in customer churn
Usetiful can help in a few different ways.
Firstly, our Assistant widget offers users a customer self-service outlet. By indexing your help, FAQs, or knowledge base to the tool, customers can resolve their issues without speaking to support or sending an email.
The Assistant tool also provides insights into what issues your customers are experiencing. You can use this data to make your help documentation more comprehensive and better meet your user's needs. You can also leverage these insights to improve your product.
Secondly, you can use Usetiful's tooltips to support anyone using your product. These inobtrusive user interface elements can trigger text boxes that provide helpful further information for anything, from forms, app elements, new features, etc.
By providing this information, users get immediate help when they need it. That means they're more likely to understand your product, get value from it, and become loyal users— in other words, they'll become a classic customer success story.
Read this article for more information about how Usetiful's tooltips can help drive your customer success: Smart Tips - a quick and simple solution for customer self-service.
#2: Ticket prevention
Customer support costs a lot of money. If you have human agents responding to each issue, your product can't scale. More users mean more tickets, which means higher staff overheads.
Usetiful Assistant is here to help by providing 24/7 in-app support for your product. Instead of each issue costing your customer support team time and money, Usetiful Assistant acts as a portal to a variety of support materials, such as:
FAQs
Tutorial videos
Product tours
While saving on costs is appealing, reducing tickets has other benefits. As we mentioned above, customer self-service options are what users want.
Additionally, if your user has to request a support ticket, it takes them out of the flow of the product. Depending on how busy your customer support team is, they might not receive a reply or a resolution until the next day.
A day is a long time in an era of endless choice. Providing support from within the product keeps the user engaged. It also stops them from seeking out alternatives. If you're serious about customer retention, an in-app tool like Usetiful Assistant can really help as they can easily search for an answer to their problems.
Of course, not all issues can be resolved through FAQs and help documentation. When users can't solve their problems, you can show them how to contact your support team.
#3: Customer Satisfaction Survey
The Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) are two deceptively simple yet powerful measures of customer happiness. However, as any product manager knows, collecting survey data from users isn't always easy.
Sure, you can fire off an email and ask for a response. But the best success comes with quick, personalized, contextual surveys.
Usetiful helps you collect the data that matters with contextual in-app surveys. You can decide where, when, and who gets asked for a survey. This flexibility allows you to use questions to gauge your user's happiness or drill down into specifics, like new features or product updates.
When it comes to customer success, this feedback is invaluable. Usetiful also allows you to segment your users, which means you can get granular information on the different types of people who use your product.
Running CSAT and NPS surveys is an integral part of customer success. It gives you a chance to intervene when situations are going wrong and resolve issues before they turn toxic.
By compiling all this data, your product team has excellent feedback for improving your product, which will do wonders for retention.
Additionally, you can use this data to power and adjust your proactive support strategies, leading to further customer success.
Final thoughts
The potential of a global recession is on everybody's mind. With customer acquisition costs on the rise, businesses are getting defensive. Instead of plowing money into growth, the priority is shifting to customer retention.
Customer success is about to get more critical. The only way to hold on to your user is by providing consistently excellent experiences and outcomes. Digital adoption tools like Usetiful can help you deliver exceptional customer self-service, which according to surveys, is precisely what your users want.
What's more, it can also reduce the burden on your customer support teams by providing in-app access to support documents, like FAQs, product tours, and walkthroughs.
Finally, in-app NPS and CSAT surveys will ensure you have up-to-the-minute data on how your users feel about your product.
There's no excuse anymore. Get out there and hold on to those precious customers!