Customer success representatives are the company’s aftersales and retention team and are tasked with keeping low churn among its users, buyers, and subscribers. In inside sales, highly specialized roles, teams, and processes are an absolute necessity. After all, inside selling is all about product mastery and specialists will edge out generalists in this regard. Some of these roles are based on the customer life cycle. For example, a lead response agent is responsible for the lead development and enrichment stage of the sales process, or a specialized salesperson is responsible for the closing of the deal.
Customer success reps, however, are responsible for following up on a customer after they have purchased or subscribed to a product or service. This could open avenues for an upsell, but mostly customer success is about keeping the custom of an existing client. This is very important, as churn—the annual rate of losing the business of a paying customer—can cause a company to lose more than they gain with new subscriptions or sales.
Increase Brand Loyalty, Promote the Relationship, Reap the Revenue
To combat churn actively, a company’s customer success reps can use relationship intelligence tools to identify and measure their engagement with their best customers and proactively approach and offer them tailor-fit promotions. Additionally, relationship intelligence data can be leveraged to identify red flags with other customers: late payment of bills, long inactivity or sparse use of a product, or expressing negative reactions in social media.
For small companies that cannot afford expensive CRM tools or acquiring intelligence data, customer success reps can still make a difference by preemptively reminding customers of the good use they can get from the company’s services and the importance of keeping it around. A well-placed phone call asking about the satisfaction level of the customer is good enough to gauge product satisfaction. Additionally, for existing customers who are hesitant about renewing their subscriptions, customer success reps can send newsletter about the newest features that they get for free with their current subscription, along with details of the better features they will get with a renewal.
Customer success reps are also the tail-end of the customer life cycle, and are in charge of the revenue generation in lead-to-revenue management systems. The optimal minimum revenue they should acquire is equal the customer’s current subscription, while the optimal maximum revenue is either a longer term of subscription or a higher product/service tier (i.e. upgrading from a team package to an enterprise package).
