Customer success is the ultimate goal of any business. Ultimately, businesses want customers to purchase a product or service that fulfills their need and leaves them with a positive impression of the company. As Shep Hyken said, “Customer Success is when your customers achieve their Desired Outcome through their Interactions with your company.”
Customer success is defined by factors including customer service, experience and happiness.
“You make sure your customers are successful and they’ll make sure you’re successful.” – Lincoln Murphy
Success is also the leading cause for increased customer lifetime value. There are many ways to ensure customer success but the top 4 are:
1. Friendly, Helpful Staff
The people of any business are the faces of that company and brand. Especially for service or retail businesses, the staff you hire can make or break a customer’s success with whatever you’re selling. The best way to proactively ensure your staff have customer success in mind is through training initiatives and clarity on company goals.
Some opportunities for training or staff meetings are updated or seasonal changes or general weekly check-ins. Investing time into your employees with help build the face of your company and overtime, increase sales and customer success.
2. Interior Design
The interior flow of a store is equally as important as the products in it. Stores should design their interiors with the customer and the customer’s process in mind. If a customer can easily navigate a store to find what they need, businesses are more likely to see an increase in customer success.
Warby Parker, the eyeglass design company, is a great example of a layout designed for customer success. Warby Parker’s retail locations feature a mirrored display with identical products on each side of the store. All of their products are kept at eye level to help customers better examine all their options. Although this layout may seem like an inefficient use of space, Warby Parker designed the store with the customer’s journey in mind. Upon entering the store, customers are guided down one wall side where they can explore all the frames options without needing to reach over other customers. This gives Warby Parker’s customers a more pleasant and catered shopping experience.
3. Use technology to streamline customer experience
Technology is already so closely integrated into customer’s lives, they have come to expect the same integration in their business interactions. Technology can be a great way to guide, inform and assist customers and improve their chances of success while shopping.
One technology to improve customer success is digital signage. Digital signage can be used to display product details, wayfinding information, and other helpful communication to customers. With a modern digital signage solution, businesses can also engage customers via social media walls and Instagram hashtags in order to help them better find the products they need.
Digital POS systems are also a great tool to improve customer success. Portable POS systems on tablets can help make check out a faster and smoother process for customers. The final sale is arguably the most important step in the customer buying process and digital POS systems can make that step easier to achieve and more pleasant to experience for customers.
4. Listen
The most important way businesses can improve their customer success is through listening. Businesses must listen to what their customers want and respond accordingly. In a perfect business model, customers would ask for exactly what they want and businesses would provide that in the most efficient manner possible. One example of listening to customer is redirecting shelf spaces for your most popular products. If customers want more of Product A, it would not make sense to start featuring Product B.
With listening, businesses must also learn to be adaptive and make changes to structure or products as necessary. Adapting is the feedback for customers so that they know they’ve been heard and that a business is responding to their needs. When customers feel heard and that their needs have been met, customer success is almost inevitable.
Overall, customer success should be the main goal of all business. With customer success comes customer loyalty which means more sales for your business.
If you’d like to learn more about customer success and schedule a free digital signage demo, contact us here!