It’s never been more important to keenly listen to the customer. At a time of tremendous economic uncertainty and business volatility, executives across all industries are facing pressure to drive profitable growth. There is demand for growth, but meanwhile, budgets, systems, and tools are under scrutiny to reduce costs.
Today’s CEOs are demanding their Customer Success and Service teams do more to drive expansion and growth, in addition to their focus on customer retention. Supporting this requires technology companies to tightly integrate the voice of the customer into product roadmaps in addition to enhancing customer experience during the inevitable disruption of their digital platform.
Customer Experience Drives Growth
Digital infrastructure is critical to generating revenue, and, especially after the experiences of the pandemic, customer expectations have never been higher. Against this backdrop, the customer experience is increasingly critical to business success.
Customer Success teams are not only being tasked with reducing churn but also increasing customer expansion by building stronger relationships and helping those customers optimize their use of products and services. To help them in this, many leaders are using data insights from customer surveys, interviews, and product usage to drive strategic decision-making. The end goal: evolving from a focus on short-term value to one of customer lifetime value.
Yet to get there, it’s essential that customers have an outstanding experience. Data from Bain & Co reveals that organizations who achieve this can grow revenue 4-8% above the market average, and a dollar-based net retention 11% higher. Customer experience goes beyond everyday interactions. It’s how you respond to challenges that define your relationship with customers. The complexity of modern digital infrastructure and the insatiable demand for seamless user experiences means that incidents are inevitable. When customer trust is so hard won and so easily lost, customer success and service need to take center stage.
Opening the Lines of Communication
In this context, it’s not just the Customer Success and Service teams that should be involved in managing and optimizing the customer experience. There’s an important role for the wider organization, especially product and engineering teams, to work collectively on improving and driving customer experience.
This is where the Customer Service Operations (CSOps) domain becomes critical. The goal of CSOps is to reduce the unpredictability of issues affecting customers. Of course, no customer experience is fault-free. Anything designed by humans and powered by technology will always have some unintentional gaps. With good CSOps, organizations can minimize the impact and maintain a good customer experience, even during outages.
Proactive communication is the key to success. There’s still room for improvement in many organizations. Research reveals that 51% of organizations find out about customer-impacting issues from their customers. In an ideal world, companies would be able to detect and remediate incidents before the customer has even noticed. This is further complicated by communication barriers between different teams which may also slow incident response, with agents unsure who to forward tickets to and customers left in the dark over the progress of cases.
Fixing this requires breaking down the walls between product/engineering and Customer Success and Service teams to create direct lines between those who speak to customers and those who can fix problems. Incident processes must also be evolved to make communicating to customers predictable s regardless of the issue. This can help mobilize the right responders, but also communicate and correlate open cases to customers and internal teams.
In unpredictable situations, CSOps can help detect, mobilize, and deliver real-time, predictable incident management along with proactive, and transparent communication that turns a negative experience into a positive experience.
Customers Love It When You Listen
Customer Success and Service teams play a vital role beyond improving the operational capabilities driving the Customer Experience. They can also be powerful drivers for business growth and success through regular alignment with product development. By acting as the voice of the customer, Customer Success and Service teams can significantly influence product roadmaps, ensuring the product is developed with customer needs in mind, not in isolation. A strong connection between Customer Success, Service, Product Management, and engineering teams fosters the delivery of new features and services that customers truly want.
Championing Customer Needs Drives Innovation
At PagerDuty, our core value is Champion the Customer. We put users first, make it easy, and build great products. We actively seek customer feedback on our platform because it’s invaluable. This feedback eliminates guesswork by providing insights directly from the people who matter most – our daily users.
Recently, customer feedback revealed a desire for more than just incident alerts. They wanted automated workflows to handle common, less complex issues. In response, we developed and launched new incident workflows. The most rewarding moment? Telling customers about this new feature and seeing them use it effectively. Their positive feedback validates the importance of listening.
While customer-driven innovation might seem straightforward, it requires a cultural shift. Here’s how to get started:
- Leadership by Example: A customer-centric CEO and Executive leadership team set the tone for the entire organization. When leadership prioritizes the customer, the rest naturally follows.
- Direct Customer Interaction: Exposing product managers, developers, and engineers to direct customer conversations fosters a deeper understanding of user challenges. Record these conversations (with permission) to ensure accessibility for the entire engineering team.
- Regular Communication: Facilitate regular discussions – weekly calls between product and customer success teams are a good starting point – to translate customer feedback into actionable plans for innovation or bug fixes.
Time to Shine
Too many Customer Success and Service teams are working reactively, managing customer retention and churn rather than driving expansion. To drive growth, there must be an organizational shift to championing the customer and their voice. That’s not only the key to accelerating incident resolution and improving transparency, but also to customer-led innovation and ultimately creating the tools your customers cannot live without.
