It’s not enough to simply provide customers with a crutch when requested, working proactively to help customers achieve more and be successful is important to sustaining (and accelerating) your business’ growth.
So, it comes as no surprise that Customer Success has become increasingly popular since 2012, with more businesses integrating customer success managers and departments into their organisations.
More businesses are coming round to the realisation that, your customers have considerably more power by authentically reviewing you, than your marketing team does convincing people that they’ll derive value from your product.
At Hopper HQ, the evolution from a Customer Services department, to a team focused on Customer Success, came about in three key steps: better dissemination of user feedback, understanding of customers and customer processes.
“The Birth of the ‘State of Play’”
As a small team, supporting customers in over 70 countries and working from a huge product roadmap – weekly reporting was an important step in our move towards customer centricity and helped to transform my role, from primarily supportive, to focus on helping our customers be more successful.
While weekly reporting isn’t revolutionary, the benefit of reviewing new feature suggestions weekly (rather than monthly or quarterly) and assessing our feature roadmap according to customers’ appetite, has been crucial in ensuring we’re developing in the right direction and delivering the most value possible to Hopper HQ users.
These regular assessments of our product roadmap and customer desire help us to stay agile, in an increasingly competitive market; ensuring we don’t waste time on features our customers have fallen out of love with.
Moving away from simply supporting our customers to really taking the time to listen to them and disseminate what we’ve learned within the team, has been transformative to the way we approach customer services and how it fits into the wider business.
“Customer Personas”
At Hopper HQ, we support thousands of Instagram accounts worldwide and our customers range from individuals establishing their personal brand to some huge agencies, supporting hundreds of clients globally. This is where the importance of well-developed customer personas comes in, as these users have distinctively different needs, desires and interests.
Beyond its status as an important addition to any customer support team’s toolkit, well-developed, realistic customer personas are key to all departments within your business – they certainly helped us to better focus our efforts and steer development on Hopper HQ. Not only are they instrumental in understanding how you should be communicating with your customers, they’re an important step towards optimising your approach to acquiring new customers of all shapes and sizes.
It’s no secret that developing customer personas is time-consuming and takes a considerable amount of research, effort and revision, but the benefits of having them are palpable. Getting to the nitty-gritty of what makes a customer tick can be instrumental in helping you to encourage greater brand affinity, as well as re-affirming the fact your customers are human and should be treated as such (a sentiment I feel particularly passionately about).
Having the confidence to adjust our approach to Customer Services – armed with our detailed personas – allowed us to build rapport authentically and better communicate with our users. After all, customers value human support and we believe that a ‘human-touch’ is fundamental to Customer Success.
“Create More Magic”
Armed with our customer personas, the next stage of our evolution into a team determined to help our customers become even more successful came with an alternative approach to the development of customer journeys.
Already familiar with UX mapping and evaluation (we regularly review various processes on Hopper HQ, to ensure they’re logical and efficient), we were beginning to approach customer journeys equipped with a new philosophy – our mantra: ‘create more magic’!
Logic, practicality and efficiency are still at the forefront of our minds when approaching any new project or update on Hopper HQ, but we were now on the lookout for opportunities to delight our customers and create magical moments. That’s not to say that we haven’t always done our utmost to please our customers and build rapport, but we wanted to ensure that we were doing so across the entire product, ensuring this wasn’t solely the responsibility of customer services.
By proactively seeking to delight our customers and further our relationship with them at every possible junction, we moved away from simply reacting to users’ requests and issues into a new world of Customer Success. This was a really exciting transition as Hopper HQ’s customer base is diverse and one of the best things about my job is having the opportunity to network with awesome people and discover new, innovative brands & agencies worldwide.
Focussing on Customer Success at Hopper HQ has helped us to increase customer satisfaction, reduce churn and better guide development; but most importantly it has forced us to really understand who are customers are in an authentic, human way. Actually investing time into learning names and getting to know our customers’ businesses has been enlightening and incredibly enjoyable!
If you find you’re getting stuck in the monotony of traditional Customer Services and finding it difficult to see your customers as people not numbers, it’s definitely time to invest your efforts into making your customers more successful and rebuilding your relationships with them.
