Scaling Customer Success with Melissa Puls

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This episode of Amazing Business Radio with Shep Hyken answers the following questions and more:

1. What is customer success?
2. What is the difference between customer success and customer support?
3. Why is it important to start the customer success process as soon as a deal is signed?
4. What impact does proactive customer service have on customer satisfaction and loyalty?
5. How can businesses use a subscription model to build long-term customer relationships?

Top Takeaways:

• A business isn’t just about making money. It’s about getting and keeping customers. Profit will result when you serve your customers well.
• Customer success is different from customer support. Customer support helps when there’s a problem or technical issue, but customer success aims to keep problems from happening in the first place. Customer success teams work with customers from the beginning of the relationship to make sure they are fully utilizing the features of a product to serve their business. They proactively reach out before issues even become problems.

• The renewals don’t start when a subscription ends. They begin with the very first interaction, making sure that customers are happy and using the product well from the start. When customers are happy, the decision to keep doing business with you becomes easy.

• The best companies try to anticipate issues and reach out before they happen. Checking in, providing helpful information, and teaching customers how to get the most from your product are what create loyal customers.

• Companies can use data and technology, such as AI, to spot patterns in customer behavior and predict what customers will need next. By paying attention to how customers use a product and when they might need help, businesses can step in with support before a small issue becomes a big problem. This reduces customer churn by giving them confidence that your team will be there for them when needed.

• Delivering a great customer experience takes teamwork across marketing, sales, support, and customer success. All parts of the company need to work together to deliver a consistent, high-quality experience.

• Plus, Shep and Melissa discuss how every business, regardless of industry, can successfully adopt a subscription model that keeps customers coming back. Tune in!

Quotes:

“Customers buy from other customers. Create advocates in your customer base.”

“The most exciting thing about customer experience is to be able to correlate and collect information that your customers give you to make their experience better.”

“Many people confuse customer success with customer support. In reality, customer success is about proactively ensuring customers never need to call support unless there’s a genuine technical glitch.”

“Anticipate your customer’s needs before they even know they need it. Use the data and technology like AI to predict issues and churn so that you can get more productive.”

“The best companies out there put customers at the center of everything they do. That is how they are going to grow today and into the future.”

About:

Melissa Puls is the Chief Marketing Officer and Senior Vice President of Customer Success and Renewals at Ivanti, overseeing the entire customer journey from awareness to renewal. She is focused on helping companies enhance every stage of the customer experience.

Shep Hyken is a customer service and experience expert, New York Times bestselling author, award-winning keynote speaker, and host of Amazing Business Radio.