“The faster you can help customers understand and extract value from your product that is in line with their business goals the stickier and more successful they’ll be.” – Jeff Gardner

In the realm of delivering exceptional experiences, there’s a common thread that runs through the finest establishments and winning teams: the practice of inspection.

Just as a top-tier restaurant inspects every dish to ensure perfection and a championship-winning sports team reviews every play to refine performance, the world of customer success demands a similar approach.

This week, we dive into the art of inspection in the realm of Customer Success, highlighting key areas to focus on to elevate your organization to new heights.

Customer success is an integral part of the business for its ability to provide a great experience, enticing customers to continue to do business with your organization long-term. Businesses with a growth mindset are very keen on finding a way to attract new customers while keeping the acquisition cost of these customers down.

While this is an important strategy, it all goes to shit if the customer churns quickly and does not renew their contract with the company.

Having a customer-first mindset as a company and a strong customer success organization will allow for numerous benefits such as:

• Customer Referrals
• Great and True Customer Testimonials
• Expansion of Partnerships

Now the real issue is not about having a good customer experience. Everyone wants a good customer experience and everyone believes they have one. The issue is that many do not inspect what they expect out of the experience and confirm that the experience they envision the customer to have is what the customer is actually experiencing.

So what are some of the key areas to inspect for your customer success team?

#1: Customer Onboarding and Relationship Building

The first impression sets the tone for the entire customer journey. Your customer begins to form their opinion of your company instantly.

Are they an easy company to work with? 

Does this tool make my job/life easier? 

Do I enjoy working and collaborating with them? 

Regularly inspect the onboarding process to ensure customers are navigating effortlessly and building strong relationships with your brand.

#2: Renewal and Expansion Opportunities

Having customers and keeping them is great and is a key component of the customer success team. That being said, what really separates the good from the great organizations is the ability to spot opportunities for upsells and keep the renewal on track.

The customer success team is responsible for ensuring that the customer stays in good health and notifying the sales team of upsell opportunities. Having this be seamless between the two organizations is critical to success.

#3: Proactive Issue Resolution

Ensuring the way that issues are addressed is systemized and documented is the first step. After this, inspecting to make sure this is the most efficient way for this process to be handled can make all the difference.

By identifying and resolving challenges before they escalate, you showcase your commitment to your customers’ success.

#4: Customer Feedback and Satisfaction

This is a wild concept but the first crucial step in receiving customer feedback is to ensure that you are asking for it.

Once this is confirmed, regularly inspecting their feedback to gauge satisfaction levels and improve the overall experience is a big separator from the good organizations and the great ones. It’s through their insights that we refine our processes and offerings.

#5. Tools and Metrics

Questions to be asking your organization:

• What metrics lead to the highest renewal rates?
• Is there any commonality between customers who upsell and those who do not?
• Are there metrics or data we cannot see that would be helpful?

These questions are all extremely helpful to maintain and increase spend on your current customers, as well as identify whether your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) is correct.

Consistent inspection is key to consistent success.

Your customer success team can be seen as a cost to the business or a revenue generating piece of the business that is vital to its success.

For any of the above to mean anything, it must be seen as the latter and the guiding principles for its success need to be aligned to the success of the overall business as a whole.

Inspecting customer success initiatives in the context of broader business objectives ensures the organization’s efforts contribute directly to organizational growth. By aligning goals, we ensure our success is shared.

As we explore the art of inspection in the realm of customer success, we invite you to embrace the practice. Just as a chef ensures each plate is without fault and a coach analyzes every move not until it is right but until the team can’t get it wrong, inspecting our customer success efforts paves the way for business excellence.

Let’s get to work.