What is Long-tail Customer Success and why you should care?

Shift Focus to Meet Customer Expectations.

As a business owner or executive, you’ve probably put processes in place that help you scale your product or service offering. But, every rapidly-growing company who is scaling operations to meet with the demand for their service still faces many challenges. Throughout this journey, you may have also identified your ideal customer profile, made leaps in pushing product features out the door, found product-market fit (for your first 50 or 100 customers), and have made a good portion of your customers “happy”. All of this is done in order so you can better target and sell to your next 10,000 customers.Job well-done! Now, in order to continue to scale properly, you have to shift focus to ensure you meet both your current and new customer’s expectations.

It’s not your typical Customer Support.

We are not talking about Customer Support. It is very important to make this distinction early on. Customer support is focused on finding solutions to your customer’s problems.What we are talking about here is called Customer Success. To be specific, Long-tail Customer Success. A practice where you not only provide the best service experience possible but, as an organization, are proactively providing value to your loyal customers at every touchpoint. As a result, creating brand advocates.

Why is Long-tail Customer Success important?

Today, the most effective long-tail efforts make it a priority to service your customers where and when they want, honing in on all areas related to product adoption, account retention, and upsell or expansion.  Furthermore, it succeeds when the Customer’s Experience (CX) is positive from the very first touchpoint through the final interaction a customer has with the brand, which can extend well beyond the sale. Long-Tail Customer Success occurs when the sum of all perceptions and reactions that the customer has with a company result in a positive long-term relationship.

How do you ensure Customer Success for all customers?

As most companies scale, they begin implementing  “automation”, which undoubtedly turns into “set and forget” processes that result in putting the valued customers they spent so much time and money in acquiring on autopilot. Dan Reich, Founder and CEO of Troops.ai, spoke about this particular subject on a recent episode of the SaaStr podcast.

“CS teams manage the relationship, helping with their problems, helping them with the product. Historically, I’ve seen many CS roles throw a body at an account to make customers “happy”.

There are many instances where a business puts so much emphasis in hitting their bottom line KPIs that they swiftly move on to the next shiny sales opportunity as soon as they onboard a customer onto their platform, often forgetting who originally got them to where they are today.

Mostly through quasi-relationship building: sending them discounts, swag, birthday cards… but in the early days, this is actually doing yourself a disservice...if you are not asking yourself “Why?” and getting to the core of the problem, you’re not really understanding them. Most businesses are missing the big picture. The key is understanding your customer’s pain points, and decreasing customer dissatisfaction.  Place  emphasis on their entire customer experience, especially the “long-tail” which occurs post-acquisition, post-login and post-purchase.

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How well do you know your customer? And how do you ensure a positive long-term relationship with them post-acquisition?

If you’re only relying on tracking pixels, templated drip campaigns and annoying push notifications as the core of your engagement mechanics, you are doing yourself and your customers a disservice. The key to delivering a personalized approach is to understand who your customer is and what they want.  According to 2017 Customer Success Trend Report, 55% of respondents say that insight into customer health and user behavior is their biggest challenge to customer retention. Account and usage data allow CS Teams to be more strategic in outreaches. Further, 20% of respondents say that scaling is their biggest overall challenge.  We think that number will continue to increase dramatically.

Why should you care?

Successful Customer Success & Customer Experience efforts have resulted in:

• Increased Profitability and revenue growth of 5-10%
• Cost reductions of 15-25% within 2-3 years
• Good CX programs can exceed gross margins of competitors by more than 26%
• Happier and more engaged employees

In today’s world, your sole focus isn’t your core competency anymore, it’s your customer. Without them, your business would dwindle and fall short of its true potential. Your team needs to invest in creating a solid infrastructure that allows more interaction with your brand.

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swivlStudio is the new standard in Customer Success. We invite you to meet Hoover and explore the possibilities