Propel Your Team from Customer Support to Customer Success

Customer support, in a traditional sense, tends to be a very reactive experience. When you think of customer support, you likely think of the customer having a question or issue, reaching out to the customer support team, and then getting the answer they need. This experience is completely driven by the customer to initiate the interaction and is typically based on a barrier the customer encountered.

Customer success, on the other hand, is intended to be a more proactive experience. In a customer success managed environment, the customer is ideally getting an answer before they even encounter a problem or have a question. This experience is driven by the company identifying common issues and proactively removing barriers to create a frictionless experience for the customer.

Below are some steps you can use to design a more customer success centered experience within your team – to ultimately increase customer loyalty with your business:

1. Identify the common reasons customers reach out to your team

This can be based on feedback from your support team, insights from account management, data from your operations department, or data from your customer support management platform. The goal is to identify all the issues, bugs, or features customers most recently request.

Example: Customers typically have subscription questions about how to convert their month-to-month subscription to a yearly subscription. The most common time frames for these questions occur after the customer’s first monthly billing cycle.

2. Identify the customer touch points that occur around the time of your most common issues

This could be automated emails, customer support interactions, account manager check-ins, mailings, or even data around when customers log into your platform or return to your site to make another purchase.

Example: In week 4 or 5, an account manager reaches out to the new subscriber.

3. Identify methods to proactively provide support

Given the above scenario, the account manager has a unique touchpoint during the onboarding process to offer the customer a chance to convert to an annual subscription. The account manager pulls the customer’s account up in Salesforce, where outbound sales calls are tracked. This merely provides one small view of the customer when a more holistic view is needed. Alternatively, when the account manager uses Glances connected to Salesforce and their other business apps, they quickly gain a more robust understanding of the customer to improve their interaction, including:

• Subscription data to confirm their plan level (such as from Stripe or PayPal)
• Onboarding email activity to see if they have opened any emails related to plan levels (such as from Constant Contact, Mailchimp, or ActiveCampaign)
• Recent support tickets (such as from Zendesk or Intercom)

Example: In the image below, the account manager uses Glances for an instant view of a customer’s Zendesk tickets, QuickBooks estimates, and Mailchimp data all while continuing to work in the Salesforce platform.

The major takeaways

Spending time to evaluate your opportunities for proactive support can go a long way to reduce customer stress and increase loyalty. With Glances, you have all the data you need at the moment you need it. For support teams that are eager to ensure customer success, this means decreased call times, increased satisfaction, and improved communication between vital departments in your organization.

To see more ways Glances can propel your team forward, such as reducing workflow burdens through Actions or easily accessing internal legacy apps, visit us on glances.com.

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More helpful steps

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If you need to connect a specific app or platform with Glances that is not currently available on glances.com, please send your requests to hello@glances.com.

Find more step-by-step articles with the latest information on our support site.