7 Customer Success Best Practices You Need to Adopt in 2023 

A well-defined and effective customer success strategy can lead to a range of positive outcomes for your business and your audience.

When people who have made a purchase from you feel their needs have been met and go away happy, it leads to knock-on effects including:

• A higher customer retention rate
• Reduced churn
• Brand loyalty and advocacy
• More opportunities for upsells and cross-sells

With many industries offering more choice and seeing higher levels of competition than ever, you need to be sure you're following best practices to drive customer success.

1. Start with understanding

Audience understanding is the foundation on which the rest of your customer success strategy should be built. When you're in tune with your key buyer personas, their goals and the problems they need to solve, you've already taken your first steps towards delivering an outstanding customer experience (CX).

There's no doubt this is a challenge, particularly when you operate in an industry where audience expectations change rapidly. The IFP State of Customer Experience in 2022/23 report shows that two-thirds (66%) of companies see understanding customers as their biggest CX challenge.

On the positive side, there are always steps you can take to know your buyers better, such as running regular surveys, interviewing your customers and harnessing the power of social media to collect real-time feedback.

2. Segment your customer base

Another positive step that boosts buyer understanding and helps you deliver a more personalized customer experience is audience segmentation.

This practice of dividing your customers into distinct groups based on their shared characteristics, needs and success metrics can have a range of benefits, including more targeted, relevant communications.

If a particular segment of your audience is more active on social media at certain times of the day, for example, you can tailor your messaging to engage with this group at the most opportune moments.

There are many ways to approach segmentation, reflecting everything from demographic and geographic factors to your customers' tech preferences.

3. Optimize your onboarding process

The journey towards long-term customer success and retention begins the moment someone makes the decision to buy from you.

It's vital to start the relationship on the right foot and make a positive impression as early as you can, and one of the best ways to do that is through your onboarding process.

Customer onboarding is your opportunity to set the tone for ongoing communications, reiterate the value of your product offering and demonstrate your commitment to ensuring buyers benefit from their purchase.

Make sure you're regularly revisiting your onboarding workflow and collecting customer feedback to drive continuous improvement.

4. Use customer journey maps

A customer journey map is one of the most useful resources to ensure buyers receive a consistent and rewarding experience at every stage of their relationship with you, from initial awareness of your brand to conversion and retention.

Learn more: The Power of Moments: How to Create a Customer Journey Map

Having a visual overview of audience interactions with your business - including clear goals and benchmarks for each stage of the journey - improves your understanding of customer engagement and makes it easier for different teams to take a unified approach to relationship building.

It's important to bear in mind that the definition of customer success can vary across your customer segments, depending on the priorities and expectations of particular groups. You should therefore be prepared to tweak certain elements of your journey maps to reflect these differences.

5. Be proactive with customer contact

It's easy to fall into a pattern of reactive behavior where customer contact is concerned, only getting in touch with people when there's a problem requiring attention, or in response to them reaching out to you.

Breaking out of this mindset and taking a proactive approach to customer support can make a real difference to satisfaction and results. It shows that you're always thinking about your audience and you're ready to go the extra mile to address any issues they might have.

Crucially, proactive customer engagement doesn't need to revolve around fixing problems. Contacting buyers to inform them of new product features, software updates or forthcoming launches, for example, can increase satisfaction and drive upsells.

6. Equip your team to deliver customer success

It's the people in your business who will really make the difference when it comes to delivering an exceptional experience and achieving true customer success.

You need to ensure your team is equipped with all the resources and capabilities it needs to excel in this area. This could be something as simple as making sure you have an adequate number of customer support staff on hand to answer calls and keep waiting times to a minimum.

It could also extend to providing all the necessary technologies, tools and training required for employees to excel in their roles.

7. Track customer success metrics

To take a data-driven approach to customer success, you need to have relevant metrics in place and a clear workflow for collecting and analyzing data.

This will enable you to draw actionable conclusions about key aspects of your performance, such as:

• Your customer churn rate
• The percentage of buyers who make a repeat purchase
• The proportion of customers who complete the onboarding process with no issues

IFP's State of Customer Experience research showed that half of organizations feel customer satisfaction metrics aren't shared across departments and this is hindering the delivery of seamless CX.

Make sure all the data and insights at your disposal are made available to every team that needs this information, so you can take a coherent, company-wide approach to maximizing customer success.