How To Harness The Power of customer success-driven growth

If you're a business that relies on a recurring revenue model, customer success is everything. It's the most important factor in determining the frequency with which customers renew or cancel and if revenue grows or shrinks.

It is no longer sufficient to propel the growth. In order to build a solid durable, efficient and sustainable enterprise, businesses must shift to a customer success-led growth strategy centered on customer engagement and retention.

Customer success teams are the mainstays of the new growth agenda.

This is how you can grow with purpose by leveraging customer success -- including a 4-point customer success-driven growth model and examples of companies reaping rewards from prioritizing customer satisfaction.

  Continue or go ahead:  

•         The change from recurring to acquisition models
•         The importance of the success of customers in generating revenue
•         Three key areas that drive growth for customers through customer achievement
•         What happens when a customer's success is the key to growth
•         The customer success-driven development framework
•         Success-driven growth driven by customers examples with Plus
•         Start your customer success-driven growth journey
•         Customer success-driven growth FAQs

The shift from acquisition models to regular revenue models

Customer acquisition costs (CAC) could kill companies. According to research by Frederick Reichheld of Bain & Company, acquiring a new customer can cost anywhere from five to 25 times more expensive as retaining customers who are already there -- and costs are rising.

Organizations are looking beyond customer acquisition in favor of longer-term, sustainable models focused on customer retention. The new model is one of models for recurring revenue.

The worldwide Software as a Service (SaaS) market size is forecast to expand by 18.4 percent over the next 10 years -70 percent of business leaders claim the recurring revenue model is essential to their success in the coming years.

What's the reason for this change? Recurring revenue business models provide organizations with a range of advantages, which include:

• Yielding predictable revenue
• Costs of acquiring customers
• Promoting long-term customer relations
• Enhancing the value of customer life

A shift to a model of recurring revenue is crucial to provide long-term stability and growth. Through strengthening and establishing closer relations with customers, businesses can boost renewals and expansion while fostering customer loyalty.

The importance of the customer's success in revenue growth

For businesses focused on customer retention, the customer success teams take center stage. Customer success managers move from acting as facilitators, to being growers.

Customer success managers are linchpins in revenue growth across the entire customer journey. This includes:

• Product adoption
• Contract renewal
• Account expansion

The best part? Customer success management managers are natural growers. They're energized by helping customers succeed -- as up to 89 percent the managers with a focus on customer satisfaction reported finding genuine fulfillment in assisting their customers. They're extremely motivated to lead the growth of businesses.

Companies that take a proactive approach towards the success of their customers can stay over competitors with deeply engaging and impactful customer experiences that extend beyond post-adoption support to personalized interactions throughout the whole customer journey.

Three Key Areas for increasing customer satisfaction by ensuring customer satisfaction

While every stage of the customer experience is important, organizations seeking to increase customer satisfaction and increase annual recurring revenue (ARR) will need to focus on three primary priorities in Adoption, Renew, and Expansion.

Adoption

Teams for customer success have an important role to play in bringing about customers to increase their satisfaction at the adoption stage of the customer journey.

The adoption stage is crucial in recurring revenue models as this is when the customers begin to gain more value from a product or service. In the case of customer success teams, it's a chance to establish stronger bonds with their customers via regular bursts of information, including targeted training and tips as well as generating fast victories.

Each customer has their own preferences for adoption, which is why a personalized approach is important when it comes to this -- for instance the 82 percent of clients feel more content after viewing custom-designed content.

Driving growth requires answering brand-new questions on how you can implement HTML0 within your business which include:

• What kind of user is most likely to adopt?
• What is the best way to ensure that their process of boarding be speeded up?
• How can we help clients learn how they want to learn?
• Are they setting themselves to be successful?
• Which of our customers is deeply engaging in our products?

Ensure your clients are ready for success with comprehensive training programs designed to inspire users to fully engage with your service -- and deliver maximum ROI with the least amount of effort.

1. Renewal

Once customers have reached the point of renewal, success managers can be make-or-break in promoting renewal and reducing the risk of customer churn.

To help companies increase their the ARR of their customers through customer satisfaction renewal should be a major priority area. the majority of customers state that they'd prefer not to renew a subscription without warning. This means that customer success teams need to be proactive in identifying and addressing churn before it takes place.

Below are five key questions companies must answer in relation to renewal:

• Who is most likely to churn and why?
• What's the best defence against churn?
• What can be done to ensure that continuously a stream of valuable information be delivered --, not only during renewal?
• How do we get ahead of the game and provide superior services?
• Do we know the value we provide to our clients?

In determining which customers are most at risk of churn as well as establishing a targeted defense strategy against churn, organizations have the chance to revise the renewal rules.

The story should be reframed by shifting towards customer service that is proactive and based around frequent, personal information and bonuses in order to assist customers with quick wins with your product.

1. Expansion

There is no one-size-fits all strategy for expansion. Certain customers are not appropriate for expansion. Different options, such as upsells, or cross-sells are appropriate for different customers.

So how do you manage expansions that maximize growth of your customers and the ARR? It starts by reframing the process of evaluating your customers.

Here are five questions to answer:

• Who is ripe to be expanded and at what time?
• What is the most important feature to our customers?
• Are customers aware of our latest capabilities?
• Are customers using our products to the fullest extent of their potential?
• What are the opportunities within other aspects of our customers' business?
• What problems are we able to help these customers solve?

According to a report published by McKinsey & Company, B2B firms that are highly or moderately efficient in solutions selling are 1.5 times less likely beat the competition. Let customers discover the right solutions for growth, boost revenues from recurring sales, and boost the value of their customers' lives (CLV).

The impact of customer satisfaction on the growth

Customer success teams have an essential role to drive growth for their companies, including increasing customer engagement as well as reducing churn. Four key strategies for that customer satisfaction drives growth

  1. Engagement with customers and loyalty

dedicated customer success specialists are ideally placed to increase the level of customer satisfaction and engagement by providing strategic guidance and training to help your customers open their minds to what's possible with the product you offer.

The average loyal customer are 67 percent more likely to spend money with an organization than new customers. By exceeding customer expectations -by providing individualized training and assistance -- your customer success team will be able to build long-lasting customer loyalty by increasing the ARR of customers and encouraging loyal customers to be customers who are brand ambassadors.

  2. Customer renewals

It's simple. Keep customers happy and they'll be more likely to renew their contract. Teams that focus on customer success and ensure regular contact with their customers and ensure they are engaged throughout their journey can increase renewals and drive the growth of revenue.

Customer success managers have a significant impact on renewals of customers -- research shows organizations with a strong customer success strategy can see the renewal rate of 80-90 percent .

  3. Reduction in the amount of Churn

Churning of customers is among the biggest barriers for ARR growth. In terms of churn, the annual rate for SaaS firms that have less than $10 million annually are 20 percent in the average.

  4. Customer expansion

Your frontline customer success teams play an integral role in customer expansion to enhance the lifetime value of customers already in your database and move the needle on expansion.

The growth driven by customer success framework

In order for businesses to profit on customer loyalty to promote growth, a successful customer driven growth strategy is crucial. Below are the most effective strategies to drive the growth of your customers and boost ARR.

  Adoption and onboarding of users  

The best onboarding programs give customers the knowledge that they require to be started with your products and services in the shortest time possible. In a report from McKinsey & Co, 68 percent of the top-performing B2B companies use both traditional and digital channels in the customer journey that includes onboarding, as well as acceptance.

Companies can focus on customer satisfaction by mixing a modern onboarding experience and a personal touch. The online micro-learning courses and programs designed to meet the needs of different situations lets customers learn independently and on their own schedule, with customer success managers on hand to assist with specific queries and help with any personal need for onboarding.

One of the most successful strategies to onboard are:

• Knowledge bases online
• Self-serve online course academies
• Webinars and masterclasses
• Sessions one-to-one

When you prioritize education for customers during onboarding, you can ensure your users are set for success and start the process of achieving their targets.

"Our clients are more educated and we get better use from our product because they are more confident of what they're doing with our system."

  Learning and Nurturing  

The key to growth driven by customer satisfaction is an active, positive, and inspiring customer learning experiences all throughout the journey of a customer.

Look for ways to help educate and support users at every stage of the customer's journey. This includes:

• Interest: Before prospects are customers, enthralling learning experiences can help potential clients see what is an option -- and present your product as the best choice to help them get where they want to go.
• adoption: Help customers maximize the value of your service by teaching them on how to achieve their objectives through feature-specific lessons from the beginning.
• Expansion Show your existing customers how to take the next step with your product to increase their success -- including adding ons and upselling while increasing revenue growth at the same time.

  Engagement and community building  

The engagement of customers has a significant impact on expansion, assisting in increasing the likelihood of renewals and retention.

A customer-driven expansion framework, engagement with customers includes a range of activities that help to create closer relationships with customers, including:

• Honoring milestones and achievements
• The opportunity to provide feedback
• Making interactive content
• The creation of a community that is supportive
• Recognizing customer needs

Customer success managers are aware of the importance of customer engagement but many don't have time to connect with customers in the way they'd like to -- 64 percentage of respondents would like to have more time to dedicate to client engagement.

Plus, take advantage of digital community spaces that allow customers to interact with brand and community discussions as well as Q&As to ensure maximum results.

  Customer support  

Are you struggling to decrease the number of customers you lose? Offer world-class customer care that is personalized and proactive.

In a customer success-driven growth model, customer support is no longer about helping your customers when they come confronted with a challenge. It's about identifying and eliminating the cause of friction by providing the expertise the customers require to meet their objectives.

Provide omni-channel support for customers. This includes self-service knowledge hubs that offer online courses and digital downloads to actively decrease support ticket numbers while also empowering your customers to support themselves. Businesses can boost the satisfaction of customers and increase product use while freeing up time for support teams.

Examples of growth driven by customer success using Plus

Experience the growth driven by success of customers in action! Two examples are provided of businesses that have successfully pushed sales growth for their customers through leading by satisfaction with their customers.

The development of customer loyalty with Hootsuite

It was initially intended to be a client success plan, Hootsuite's education plan has quickly turned into a revenue engine on its own. With subscriptions and memberships built into Hootsuite's platform Hootsuite was able to profit from the Plus-powered growth of businesses with their extremely popular courses into products that can be monetized to help educate, support and lead their customers to the next level.

In investing in online education to retain customers, Hootsuite has decreased churn and helped convert more customers to engaged brand ambassadors.

• 1 million+ courses delivered
• 500,000 learners enrolled
• 72,000 certificates are issued
• 1000+ universities enrolled

"In 10 years, we'd like to have every one of our customers to be consuming Hootsuite Academy education content. In addition we'd like to be the world leader in the field of social media education. ."

HTML0 - Sarah Whyte, Former Education Marketing Specialist at Hootsuite

    Onboarding of customers in a scale at PayShepherd    

In the midst of the dilemma of how to scale customer onboarding without bringing in new team members, contractor management platform PayShepherd sought the assistance of Plus to improve the process for onboarding customers.

By creating and launching personalized onboarding classes in less than 4 weeks, PayShepherd was able to equip users with valuable training materials to get set up quickly and effortlessly, increasing the time-to-value of their products as well as maximizing the success of customers on the platform.

PayShepherd has streamlined customer onboarding, drastically reducing the time internal teams were taking one-on-one customer-onboarding calls, from 60 minutes down to 15 minutes. The result? PayShepherd has been able to save 350 hours of employees' working time by removing repetitive tasks and focus on strategic projects to drive business growth.

• 75 percent reduction in the time to board
• 350 hours time that employees have reclaimed
• 15 minutes onboarding average call time

"We had an incredibly successful rollout. We were employing Plus within four weeks, and it had returned back 350 hours for our team within three months ."

Jenn Hunter, co-founder and Director of Operations for PayShepherd

Start your customer success-driven growth journey

More businesses are moving to recurring revenue models, focus on relationship-based customer-focused strategies that drive growth and ARR. Customer success initiatives centered around engaging with customers in a deep way by delivering constant value and delivering new experiences that promote the adoption of renewal and growth are the future of growth.

For more information about ways to boost the growth of your business through success for customers in your organization to drive growth, download the Customer Education 101 Guide here:

Customer success-driven growth FAQs

1. What is customer-driven growth?
     Growth driven by customers is a strategy plan that is focused on customer engagement through education, relationships, and engagement to power growth for companies that operate on a recurring revenue model.
2. How does a strong customer experience drive growth?
     If they focus on a positive and positive experience for customers, organizations can reduce the number of customers who leave, increase customer loyalty and boost customers' lifetime value through improving retention and helping increase long-term revenue growth as well as ARR.