Have you ever felt invisible standing in a room full of people, wondering if anyone notices you? Some want to blend into the background while others want to stand out, but at the end of the day, everyone wants to matter. It is no different for a customer.
From enterprise to smaller organizations, customers want to be visible especially when it matters. Our new Customer Visibility Playbook and Webinar Series explain that it is not only a very solvable pain point but one that should be a priority for every company as it provides the foundation for a solid and impactful Customer Success strategy.
Customers are people. They are in various stages of health and on some measurable continuum. Just like doctors examining patients, businesses can understand customers’ health [alongside other important metrics such as usage and experience] and treat them accordingly.
With all the benefits that customer-centricity includes, it’s no surprise that industry leaders are transitioning to this mindset. One of the first steps in the process of building a genuinely customer-centric company is establishing customer visibility. Why does customer visibility matter? Visibility is a key component to creating a healthy relationship and seamless experience for every customer. You want them to know that they matter and that you understand their unique challenges and goals. They should know you are interested in their progress with the implementation or product adoption and whether or not it is supporting their business objectives. That is a human-first perspective on customer visibility.
It can be easy to gather infinite data points about your customers. What’s more challenging is unifying all of the disparate data points coming in from your various solutions. Analyzing your unified customer data and turning it into actionable insights can provide you a clear picture of their health and success. The more you know about them and the more you can create a single source of truth across your organization the better your company can serve them. At Gainsight, we want success for you and your customer and we believe you can accomplish that by putting CS at the core of your business. Company-wide alignment around a single view of the customers sets the foundation for a successful CS strategy and business growth. The question is, how do you go about achieving that?
The pathway to organizational alignment on behalf of your customers is customer visibility, which allows for superior customer [experience and outcomes] service.
A good step towards customer visibility is understanding the health of your customers using the right technology. At Gainsight, we utilize our platform to reveal customer health levels and create an objective health score for each of our customers. Monitoring customer health is no different from monitoring your health. You are looking for anomalies, abnormalities, and possible symptoms that could lead to something worse. But it is also about encouraging everything you are doing right. Visibility lets you know when you are doing both.
You can formulate customer health scores by inputting customer data, such as usage trends, into a customer success management platform. These enable you to proactively monitor your customer data and then trigger actions to your customer success managers or sales reps to manage relationships that may be at risk. The closer you monitor customer health, the greater chance you have to prevent risk within your customer base, resulting in churn. Reducing churn, of course, is a core component of improving net dollar retention.
Earned customer loyalty is critical to a business long-term. It’s essential to understand and manage customers much more diligently than ever before.
Every time you have an encounter with your customer, not only do you have a chance to influence them and build a healthy relationship based on loyalty, you also have the ability to keep that customer long-term. Returning customers not only impact retention numbers but also are more likely to grow and expand helping your business improve net dollar retention, which is the lifeblood of SaaS business. It is essential then to understand your customers and ensure that they’re realizing value from your product, which you can’t do without visibility into your customer base.
If you are looking for direction about customer visibility and its benefits, then you need to read Playbook #2 of our Executive Playbooks. The Customer Visibility Playbook has powerful insight and advice straight from our own best practices to help take customer relationships to a world-class level. If you are hoping to learn even more, register for our upcoming webinar series “Priorities and Playbooks for Customer Success”. The Gainsight experts will walk through the first 4 chapters of the Executive Playbooks and share actionable insights
