The Customer Voice
Listening to your customer base is critical to growth
We keep hearing the importance of staying close to customers. If you are a start up, scale up or mature company, the customer's voice is critical in their retention and growth in your product or service.
An existing customer is not only using your product or service, but they also can provide deep insights into the user experience and feedback on what is working well and what isn’t.
The closer to the customer you are, and faster you get their feedback and respond, is invaluable as you build and scale in the market versus your competitors.
Ultimately, customer engagement is a critical strategy that has many layers to it, so this is a brief introduction to a few concepts and ideas to consider when aiming to stay close to existing customers and then grow your customer base:
Invest in building a customer success team
A traditional way of selling has been to engage with a customer, sell your product or service and follow up at renewal time, or at some later date to sell some more. For all the effort in acquiring customers, in many cases the engagement with the customer stops as soon as an order is received until the renewal email comes around.
The customer engagement process is actually far more fluid, and you could argue it really starts once the product or service is sold, if not an essential part of the lifecycle. Onboarding your customer, their users is critical to ensure the product or service is adopted properly, and users being trained thoroughly to sustain and increase use over the long term.
So a dedicated team focused on onboarding, adoption and training is an integral part of the customer life cycle and ensures retention and renewal long term.
Depending on the customer segments, the engagement model will vary from high touch; one to one engagement with large enterprise customers, to more aggregated content for SMB’s and pro-sumers that can be consumed by a user which is simple, easily accessible. eg YouTube.
The upside is that customer service tickets reduce, with a well trained user of your product or service does not clog up your support team with non technical questions.
The most successful companies that I have been with, have invested in customer success and been able to not only have 90% retention rates, but also has led to 140%+ NRR, which means they were renewing at a higher level and buying more.
The customer success team was also used as a strategic tool to be able to provide a preview to customers on what they could expect if they became a customer. It proved to be very impactful when convincing prospects on the support they would expect to receive. For example, at Zoom we would run training for select groups in a Proof of Concept (POC), who in turn would be the biggest advocates internally and assist in moving forward with purchase.
Reduce the number of layers in your organisation
For every layer in your company from the customer to the CEO, the more chances the customer's voice is limited, and stifled. Speed and maintaining integrity of feedback is priority #1 for any early stage company. As is failing fast, learning from mistakes and having tolerant customers willing to get on the journey with you.
In one tech company I was part of, the CEO held out for as long as possible in not having product managers, as the risk of filtering and dilution of feedback increases.
The challenge is as the company grows is meeting customer product feature requests and the prioritisation of requests led by a product manager. The customer voice, especially in non-HQ markets gets impacted and how to stay relevant and top of mind is another critical factor as the customer numbers increase.
Early adopter customers are key to product feedback and development, as well as speed in pushing out features. I cover this further in the next section.
Build strategic engagement
Forums & Advisory boards
Once you have a larger customer base, creating customer forums, user groups, advisory boards and customer councils are great ways to maintain and increase engagement at scale.
They ensure that customer viewpoints are aggregated and presented back into the company.
What is critical is to appoint sponsors with the company to own and be accountable for deliverables. Start from the top, if not CEO or founder, then a senior member of the leadership team who is accountable to the group.
For SMB's, a user group works well, whereas for larger enterprise customers, setting up Advisory Boards, or Customer Councils work best.
It provides an opportunity for your advocates to not only engage at a senior level and be heard, it also provides a chance for a peer to peer relationship to develop amongst themselves.
Remember these are your most valuable customers, so the accountability on the vendor side is just as important to deliver on commitments, and be clear on any feedback to the group.
For completeness, I haven't covered the fact there are executive specific and account team engagements, that exist in many sales orgs.
Staying close over long term
Clearly, as a company evolves and grows its customer base, customer engagement changes along with it.
It is as much about being aware of the factors that start impacting and limiting customer voice and finding ways to mitigate through the various methods outlined above.
Net net, the result of a successful customer engagement strategy not only grows your customer retention and spend, but also provides a platform for strong customer advocacy and a key part in growth of net new customers as well.