What does customer success look like for you and how to push your customers to that special place!

To retain customers and drive revenue, customers need to grasp that moment where they realise the value your company’s product brings to them or that “aha” moment. But while reaching that “aha” moment is great for business, it’s not the same thing as customer success.

The great news is that you can go beyond this moment by using a few effective strategies. Here are six ways to push past your “aha” moment so you can achieve customer success.

1. Define Your Customer Success Metrics

While it’s still important to identify your customers’ “aha” moment and optimise for it, it’s also crucial to define the metrics that will lead to customer success. Know what makes customer success work for your company and the product. Customer success is defined based on your business needs. But it’s important to measure that success by using the metrics that matter.

Map out a customer health score that includes the financials as it applies to your product. Customer monthly churn is also a metric to use to measure how fast your customers are canceling your service each month and to determine loyalty

It’s also ideal for measuring customer loyalty. You can even use the conversion of free-to-paid customers as a metric to measure moving beyond the “aha” moment.

By having clearly defined metrics, you can identify areas of opportunities for improvement.

2. Make Customer Success a Company Focus

Reaching customer success requires getting everyone on board with your goals. It needs to start from the executive level and extend down to the front-line employees in your business. For instance, you can use the Net Promoter Score or NPS to ensure everyone in your company is focused on customer success.

Make sure to use it throughout different stages of your customers’ journey and use it as a form of regular feedback. By having this constant source of information directly from your customers, you can find out their issues and take the action to find a solution right away.

You can also achieve this the way that email marketing company Campaign Monitor does by empowering your employees. The company ensures their customer service teams can do whatever is necessary to make their customers successful, including unfreezing accounts and issuing refunds. This simplifies the process and helps to drive customer retention.

3. Leverage Technology

Technology helps to increase engagement and improve the customer experience. This all makes a significant difference in achieving customer success and retaining your customers. You can use technology to help your customers get the best value out of your product, including providing explainer videos to demonstrate how to use the product.

Consider using technology to emphasise important metrics. For example, subscription company Cratejoy’s custom built dashboard includes client retention as one of its Key Performance Indicators or KPIs. This helps highlight the importance for merchants–its customers–to focus on achieving client retention to achieve customer success.

4. Prioritise Engagement

When you make engagement a priority, you create more opportunities to build a strong bond with your customers to enhance their experiences and give them the help they need to drive customer success.

For example, Apple’s Geniuses engage with customers as much as they need to so that the customers understand the product and leave the store with the valuable insight about their iPhone, iPad or MacBook. The Apple Genius may take four minutes or four hours, but the point is that they engage with the customer until the customer is successful.

Engagement can also be demonstrated and fostered throughout your online community. For example, ConvertKit includes screenshots of positive customer feedback on their Slack channel. This helps drive the conversation, demonstrate transparency and encourages trust that helps build a bond with your customers.

5. Be a Teacher

To achieve customer success, you have to show your customers how to get the most out of your products and services. You can get this done by driving the benefits of your product. Educate your customers on why your product provides the value they appreciate.

Let them know what problems your product solves and then demonstrate how they can use it in new ways that enhance their experiences. For instance, you can follow up on new sales with a live online coach or an email newsletter designed to address frequently asked questions that new customers may have.

This helps add value and set your customers up for success by saving them time and helping them understand your product from the beginning.

6. Optimise Throughout the Entire Customer Journey

Being able to move your customers past the “aha” moment requires optimising customer success throughout the customer’s entire journey from being a prospect to retaining them as customers as their needs changes.

First, listen to your customers’ concerns via surveys or other forms of feedback they provide. Understand what your customers’ expectations are and define their journey as they use your product. Know what their pain points are and adjust your products and services to address these concerns to achieve customer success.

Also, customise your content to fit the need of your customer. For example, you can use phone calls for high-value customers that use very specific product features frequently versus using email as a touchpoint for customers who don’t use the product as often.

The CEO of Groove optimises customer success during the on-boarding stage of the Groove customer’s journey by making personal Skype calls to every new customer. This enabled the company to customise the experience to the specific client’s needs and even enhance engagement.

This featured post was written by our guest, Rahul Varshneya. Rahul is the co-founder of Arkenea, a custom software development company that helps entrepreneurs and businesses build experience-rich mobile and web apps. Rahul has been featured as a business technology thought leader in numerous media channels such as Bloomberg TV, Forbes, HuffPost, Inc, among others.