Top 5 Customer Success Trends for 2021

“Customer Success is where 90% of the revenue is.” – Jason Lemkin

After a challenging year like 2020, the importance of customer success has only grown. Customer success is expanding beyond the SaaS and other software verticals and you won’t be able to ignore it in 2021.

It is important because your success is correlated with the success of your customer. When customers succeed using your product or service, they’ll keep using it, and thus, your business will continue to flourish.

Let’s explore the top 5 customer success trends that we think will play a big part to win over customers’ hearts and minds in 2021.

1. Leverage the AI and IoT Guns

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been a game-changer in customer success in 2020 and will continue to be one in 2021 as well. AI-powered chatbots are pivotal in the transition from customer support to customer success. They extend omni-channel support by unifying conversations across multiple platforms that customers use during their customer journey. With AI evolving to be much more accurate in processing data, it can help you analyze your customer data. With the power of AI, your team will see a boost in productivity, a reduction in churn rate, and an improvement in customer experience.

Additionally, the Internet of Things (IoT) can help your customer success teams learn more about your customers’ needs, habits, and behavior to understand how you can provide personalized experiences that delight customers.

2. Harness the Power of Self-Service

The future of customer support is enabling customers to help themselves. After all, it is the age of DIY. So, your first line of defense should be amplifying your self-service practices. The best way to implement self-service is with a knowledge base. This will help reduce friction in the customer journey, deflect tickets, and boost customer satisfaction.

Add relevant support articles and answers to Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs). Include different content forms in your knowledge base. For instance, for questions that require thorough assistance, you can provide step-by-step guides with screenshots or how-to videos.

3. Use Predictive Analytics to Become Proactive

Customer success needs to be proactive, not reactive. The growth of predictive analytics has been a boon for us all. It can help your teams predict customer outcomes and identify customers who are likely to churn, cross-sell, or convert.

For instance, when it comes to predicting churn, there are many factors that indicate a customer may churn like through an incomplete onboarding process, a decline in product usage, an increase in support ticket volume, or negative sentiment during communications. With predictive analytics, you can eliminate risk factors that may hamper your customer’s experience.

4. Be Data-Driven

2021 calls for customer success teams to be more data-driven to understand customers down to a T. You must use all the data sources at your disposal to understand customers better. Share what you learn with your customer success reps so that they can learn how to be proactive in their approach to deliver exceptional service. With insights into real-time data, your customer success teams get a holistic understanding of your customers. Look into key customer metrics such as:

• Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR)
• Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR)
• Retention Rates
• Net Promoter Score
• Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

To gain success in 2021, you must go above and beyond to retain customers and deliver satisfying support to ensure that your customer has a seamless experience.

5. Invest in a Customer Success Solution

Just like a marketer sees a best friend in a marketing automation platform, sales teams have CRMs, it would be fruitful for you to implement a customer success platform if you haven’t already. It will help drive success with better user engagement and experience. Also, it helps to:

• Identify trends to build engagement strategies
• Empower cross-departmental participation
• Reduce churn rate
• Increase customer retention
• Boost up-selling opportunities

Choose a customer success platform that combines all aspects of engagement, onboarding, adoption, customer experience, and more. Make sure your platform is scalable, offers seamless integrations with your CRM, communication, and analytics platforms to support your customer success efforts. Some powerful customer success platforms to consider are Churnzero, Custify, Natero.

With these trends in mind, keep a proactive and personalized approach to hit the customer success ball out of the park in 2021!

Want to stay ahead on the customer success road? Talk to us!