Key Takeaways
In the dynamic marketplace that we are in today, building long-lasting relationships with customers is the only way for organizations to ensure the success of their business goals
Customer success, then, becomes critical in not just helping customers achieve success with a product but also in enabling businesses to increase continuous revenue and retention rates
When executed properly, customer success can reshape businesses and how customers relate to them
If 2020 accelerated the shift of companies towards business models that places customer experience front and center, 2021 guaranteed fundamental changes to the world of customer success.
Improving customer experience is the top priority of 72% of businesses, according to the report by Forrester. Customer success solutions are beginning to be massive growth drivers with competition becoming more intense and companies relying more on recurring revenue models.
However, as the popularity of the discipline spikes, many leaders still find it a challenging landscape. As customer success matures in the coming months, enterprises will face more challenges and opportunities.
Let’s look at the top five customer success trends that will dominate 2022 and the years ahead.
The Top 5 Customer Success Trends in 2022
1. The Rise of Customer Success Managers
A capable customer success manager (CSM) is among the company’s most powerful assets.
Skilled in the craft of creating winning customer experiences and product knowledge, CSMs deeply engage with their accounts. The best CSMs will spot opportunities for customer friction and coordinate with the right internal resources from sales, support, and product development to smooth it out.
Unsurprisingly, CSMs have become business continuity advisors, helping organizations to recalibrate processes and optimize technology to meet new demands.
In fact, a LinkedIn report shows a 560% increase in CSM roles year-over-year.
2. Dynamic & Flexible Customer Success
Today, customer success is often coordinated through a variety of roles – such as customer success architects, managers, and specialists – to resolve the varied needs of customers throughout their buyers’ journey. This synchronized effort and streamlined coordination leads to the blurring of functional lines.
As a major customer success trend, experts see more dynamism being infused in the role.
Customer success resources can flex into multiple domains of customer experience, regardless of the customer’s lifecycle stage. This type of flexibility will also require a more dynamic staffing mode where talent is available to be targeted where there is the most significant customer need at any given time.
3. AI-Powered Customer Success
An increasing number of organizations now understand the value of carefully monitoring customer health and gleaning insights and feedback for more precise targeting. This is the core responsibility of any customer success team.
Will artificial intelligence (AI) replace these teams and take over? Not likely. The success of customer success rests on its relationship-based practice. But AI can help teams find patterns and offer quantitative sense out of voluminous data.
Companies can capitalize on AI’s strengths to transform their customer experience strategy and close the gap between customer success and revenue engine through enhanced personalization.
4. A Product Management Mindset for Customer Success
Another trend that experts see in customer success is the increasing adoption of a product management mindset toward customer success offerings. This shift can be credited to customer success becoming a part of an integrated portfolio of services.
Companies will have greater freedom to shift focus to driving outcomes, as opposed to selling individual services.
How can companies achieve this? To start with, organizations will need to build structured engagement mechanisms across teams with well-planned feedback loops.
5. Strong Focus on Personalization
Research by Epsilon highlights that 80% of consumers are more likely to make a repeat purchase when brands offer a personalized customer experience. The first step in personalization is identifying and understanding each of your customer’s unique goals.
Every interaction of your CSM with a customer should include some discussion on these goals.
This will help organizations build a strong base of long-term, high-value customers. Such an approach will also help enterprises tailor their segmentation.
In fact, how you segment your customer has a deep impact on the success of your campaigns. A Mailchimp study shows how email lists segmented by interests have almost 10% more opens, with 74% more clicks.
A Future of CS-Led Growth
A study by Walker in 2020 found that customer experience will overtake price and product as a key brand differentiator for organizations, sector-wide. 2 years down the line, it still stands true.
There is a strong alignment between customer success and sales, where driving sales can only be successful if companies focus on long-term customer retention goals.
Companies that are tapping into the innovations taking place in customer success solutions are the ones that are marching ahead.
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