This post is part of the B2B Retention Handbook series. To explore more challenges and solutions, check out the series here.
When customers are excited to get started with your software but lose steam over time, they’ll likely feel your product and process didn’t meet their expectations... which could lead to churn. Having the ability to be proactive is likely your best path to prevent losing customers.
This includes understanding early and checking in on their goals in originally signing a deal, but also reinforcing the relationship through value-adding interactions. By being a resource that addresses challenges or supports with the right content at the right time, your brand becomes a source of support in a variety of ways.
Check out the recommendations that promote setting and meeting (or exceeding) customer expectations.
Outline
Reasons
When customers churn, they may be disappointed with the results they were able to produce during the time they used your product.
There is often a disconnect between buyer expectations, and the value your product delivers. That disconnect could come from a variety of sources:
- Customer goals were never specified clearly and reviewed by your team.
- Customers never fully understood your capabilities and requirements.
- They didn’t have the internal buy-in and resources to use your product fully.
- Customer priorities changed and/or key people left or were reassigned.
- Metrics and reports showing progress towards goals were not shared.
- Your Customer Success team failed to monitor progress and provide adequate support to keep your customer on track.
Solutions
- Build trusted relationships with your customers before, during, and after their customer journey. They should be telling you their challenges throughout, and you should be offering them practical solutions - How Brand Trust and Customer Loyalty Are Won and Lost | CMSWire
- Make it clear everywhere what problems you solve, how you solve them, whom they serve best, and what to expect - How Customer Transparency Helps Companies Maintain Loyalty | TechTarget
- Set customer expectations accurately in all customer communications - 5 Steps to Managing Customer Expectations | Sitel Group
- Ask customers what their goals are and focus on helping to achieve them - The Power of Aligning with Your Customer’s Goals | Kapta
- Align Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success on a single source of customer data and insights - Pairing quantity and quality goals | Klearly
- Measure and monitor Customer Success goals and metrics - How Tracking Customer Goals Can Help Your Business Win Big | Kapta
- Continuously add value with content and training to help them succeed - How to Use Content to Boost Customer Success | SmartKarrot
Bonus: Does your revenue team have complete access to customer data and insights?
Klearly is an operational insights system for B2B teams across sales, marketing, and customer support. Customer data is aggregated from a variety of sources, unified at the customer contact and account level, then transformed into actionable insights and messages to support decision making.
By relieving go-to-market teams from time-consuming data processing tasks, they can focus on more important tasks, like identifying ideal customers, reaching out with relevant messages, retaining them, and growing their accounts with upsell and cross-sell motions.
Klearly is applicable to every layer of the B2B customer management process. Individual team contributors get recommended actions, and leaders have a single place to go to see what’s happening across all customer accounts and the actions their teams are taking to retain and grow them.
