Picture for a moment:
You’re in a fancy restaurant, with a table you reserved weeks prior. But when you arrive, the waiter says you have to wait an extra 25 minutes because the table isn’t ready yet. Then when you finally sit down and order your craving for steak, they tell you the steak isn’t available, so you begrudgingly order an alternative. The waiter said it would only take 20 minutes, but it ended up being 40 minutes. When you finally settle the bill, you’re just happy to be done with the restaurant rather than saying “I’m definitely coming back for the steak.” If you’ve ever experienced service as similar as to what I just described, more often than not, you’ll say “They need to work on their customer service.”
Now a lot of people would say that customer service is an integral part of any business, and to that, I say “That is absolutely true!”. It’s the life-blood that keeps a business alive, and if you lose your customers, you lose the business. But in a lot of companies, customer service is primarily contrived into just one group of people. When a client or customer reacts violently, the usual reaction is “better let Customer Service handle this instead.” Now you may be arguing by saying “Well, isn’t that their job as customer service?”. While there is truth to that statement, the role of delighting your customers should never be limited to just one team. It is a task that every single member of your company should be able to do, no matter what their job description says. And in order for customer service (or what is more commonly coined today as Client Success) to thrive, then every person needs to contribute.
CLIENT SUCCESS IN SALES
Let’s have another example:
Your best sales person just closed their biggest deal yet, a deal that many of your other sales people thought impossible to close. So you naturally wonder, how in the world were they able to pull that off? Did they offer the prospect a great rate? Did they promise them some kind of feature or deal that not a lot of other clients get? The answer may be a lot simpler than you think. In closing any sale, many experienced and seasoned sales people will tell you it’s not about what deal you brought to the table, but how you handled the person you were talking to. Now you might be asking “What does ‘handling the person mean?'” Well, let me answer by asking a question myself: “Is it easier to sell something to a friend or a stranger?” Right away you might shout out ‘friend’! And that’s what makes the difference. A great salesperson doesn’t go straight to the deal, but takes the time to actually build a relationship with the person they’re talking to.
CLIENT SUCCESS IN MARKETING
Client Success in Marketing? Does that mean Marketing just advertises how “incredible and ‘customer-centric'” their Client Success team is? Well, there’s a little more to it than that. Remember, building great relationships is the cornerstone of any ideal customer management team, and the marketing department has the opportunity of doing that for an audience that could potentially become your customers. In whatever business you’re in, your product or service is the solution to the problem your potential customers have. It’s in this crucial conversion stage that marketing has a chance to really wow the audience for the simple reason that they have the answer to their problem. Nothing says great branding than when a customer says it about your company.
The list can go on and on, and it doesn’t matter if you’re in a different department or in an entirely different industry: Client Success wins! And the task of delighting your customers doesn’t start or rely solely on your client success team. It’s a job every individual should live up to.