We all know that for a business to succeed, it needs to have an exceptional sales and marketing team. But in today’s era, where customers have an abundance of options, and effective sales and marketing team alone cannot guarantee the success of a business.
Annual contracts are no longer the primary source to lock customers for businesses anymore, as over the decade the cost of customer acquisition has steadily increased. Because of this companies are moving towards, customer success has become an emerging system for growth opportunities in business, across the industry.
What is Customer Success?
Customer success can be defined as the process of pre-emptively working towards challenges faced by customers or questions they might have, and then proactively provide solutions and answer to those issues even before they arise. This helps boost customer satisfaction and retention, increase business revenue, and solidifies customer loyalty.
Customer Success- the new key for Business Success.
Customers are the fundamental growth asset for a B2B business. For sustainable and repeated business keeping customers loyal, engaged, and happy is crucial. A study by Harvard Business Review showed that acquiring a new customer is anywhere from 5 to 25 times more expensive, than retaining an existing one.
Thus, when taking this into consideration, we can see that customer success is a revenue generator and not a cost center, which is especially true for B2B, as the sales cycle for B2B tends to be more much longer and involves more decision-making than B2C.
Let us look at how Customer Success helps to expand a B2B business.
1. Increases Brand Loyalty and Business
It has been observed that customers will change the place they buy from just from a single bad experience. But at the same time, those same customers are willing to pay more if they get a more premium customer experience. This tells us that, even if the brand needs to charge a bit extra to provide to their customer a better experience than their competitors, they should do it.
Thus, we can observe that customers are willing to pay a higher price to get a reasonably more premium service, this in return helps reduce customer churn, that is, the number of customers that switches from one brand to its competitor’s brand. Thus, it is essential for the company to start planning out an efficient customer success system. A system needs to be developed to identify beforehand customer needs, such as features they want from a product, but are not currently offered by it, then develop those features and roll out consistent to stay ahead of competitors.
More customers will stay loyal to the brand with an issueless, feature-rich product with superior customer service.
2. Increases Long-Term Revenue Generation
When it comes to long-term revenue generation there are primarily two fundamentals was to do it, either gain new customers or sell more to the existing customer base. While both are essential for the growth of a company, it has been seen that selling to an existing customer is more profitable and cost-efficient than trying to acquire new customers.
According to marketing research done by Strikedeck, we get the following data:
- Loyal Customers on average do more than 10 times their first purchase.
- Acquiring new customers on an average is 6-7 times more expensive.
- Prioritized customer success has led to companies to generate 60% profits than their competitors.
Thus, we can see from the above data that it’s crucial to sustaining the existing customer base in order to maintain long term revenues for a country. With the help of a solid Customer Success system, this can be achieved by giving services up and beyond what the customer expects to get.
3. Increases Word of Mouth Marketing
Out of all the forms of marketing, the most effective form of marketing would be that of word-of-mouth marketing. More people are likely to try a service or, but a product recommended to them by their friends or family members, because they believe that the product or service is recommended to them is not out of bias but from genuine customer gratification.
With a good Customer Success system in a company, the goodwill generated among the existing customers gets carried on by their relatives and friends, thus making these existing customers a brand ambassador of the company.
But just having a good Customer Success system is not enough to get the best out of your B2B business, you need a robust integration platform to streamline all business workflows. For that, InSync brings to you APPSeCONNECT, a robust business application integration platform that seamlessly connects to a host of business applications to help streamline and facilitate free-flow of data across various platforms.
Get started with your B2B eCommerce store and gain a competitive edge in the market!
