Customer Success: What Do Customers and Organisations Really Want?

We know the future of Customer Success is about being customer centric, but what does that mean?

We’ve been saying it for a while: Customer Success is about focusing on the human element. But what does that really look or feel like?

It’s about making the customer the focus of what you do, no matter what part of the business you’re in. This becomes even more necessary as organisations become more decentralised, and organisations move away from working in siloed departments.

Last week, we talked about everything that we learnt at the Totango Customer Success Summit. One of our main takeaways was that with the evolution of technology, we’re finding better ways to work with customer data, and this opens up a whole new world of interacting with them, with the information available to really understand what it is they want.

This is especially relevant with the launch of Customer Bots like Totango’s Zoe, which we also talked about in our last post, and which other conference attendees, like Boaz Maor, have also talked about in more detail.

But What Do Customer’s Really Want?

We all know what it’s like to be a customer, and we all know that we expect certain things, perhaps without even realising exactly what they are or how to express them.

In one of the talks that our CEO Claire Burge attended at the summit, Sam Boonin from Zendesk showed attendees a Venn diagram that neatly puts it all into perspective:

According to this diagram, customers really want the following three things:

• Transparency
• Responsiveness
• Empowerment

By putting together case studies on the work that our Deployment Consultants do, I’ve seen each one of these put into practice. I’ve done this by listening to their stories about working with customers- specifically when teaching them how to use collaborative software tools.

To really wrap our heads around what each of these things look like in practice, here are some insights I’ve gained from regularly chatting to members of our Deployment Team:

1. Transparency: In working with customers in a collaborative software platform, transparency is not difficult to provide. Our way of working with customers in real-time, and within the same workspace, also means that we’re able to guide them to set up more transparent ways of working themselves.
2. Responsiveness: Our Deployment Consultants are based around the world, and many of them regularly work after hours to meet with clients in different time zones across the globe.
3. Empowerment: Deployment Consultants are there to provide tips on best practice, and to help customers think differently about the work they do, so they can find their own way of managing their workloads more effectively.

And Organisations? What Do They Want?

What organisations want is happy customers (obviously), but it’s more than that.

According to Boonin, organisations want the following three things, which overlap with the wants of the customer:

• Loyalty
• Trust
• Engagement

To get a better understanding of what these mean, here are some analogies from our own experiences of running a business:

1. Loyalty: In working with customers and our partners, we focus on developing loyal relationships. We’ve learnt from many experiences what it means to be loyal, and know that commitment to the cause, and to be willing to work on the relationship, are essential to being able to continually move forward. The same applies to our employees!
2. Trust: This one relates to the above, but for us this comes down to communication and setting out crystal clear expectations. When working with partners, clients and employees, it’s so important to make sure that trust is built and maintained, and that open communication takes place to ensure the best possible outcome for all involved, always.
3. Engagement: In working 1-1 with customers every day, we know that engagement is key to a productive working relationship. So many of our Deployment Consultants talk about what a difference it makes when clients make an effort to engage with the tool during a deployment, and this is just one example. With the growth of intuitive software, it’s going to be so interesting to be able to get a deeper insight into how customers engage- taking away even more of the guesswork when it comes to what customers really pay attention to!

So what are the next steps?

We’ve heard incredible speakers talk about Customer Success and we’re excited that everything that we’ve been working on for the past year is all starting to come together. We know that WNDYR‘s approach to “customer centric humanness” is the way forward.

So what now?

Now we keep on doing what we’re doing:

• Offering value to our customers by engaging with them in a transparent, responsive and empowering way
• Keeping up the momentum we have built with the great minds in our team that innovative solutions to optimising processes and workloads every day
• Optimising our service offering by understanding what is really happening in the world, as well as the SaaS and global technology space, and adapting to the latest developments and trends.

We’re also continuing to build loyalty and trust through offering an unparalleled Customer Experience, and using this to consistently refine our decision-making to align with Customer Success principles.

How are you continually working to achieve Customer Success? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Interested in finding out more about our approach to “customer centric humanness”? Get in touch with us to hear more.