Food for Thought

The Definitive Guide To Customer Success

December 14, 2019

What is customer success?

Customer success exists at the intersection between customer experience and customer support teams. Success managers constantly work on improving their company’s product or service by anticipating challenges, questions and issues that their customers might have.

However, they do not just anticipate these problems – their primary task is to solve them in advance, before they start troubling existing or prospective clients.

In other words, success teams are tasked with boosting customer happiness and retention, reducing customer churn and improving brand loyalty.

Who needs customer success teams?

As we already mentioned, the cost of acquiring new customers has been growing rapidly in recent years, and the trend is likely to continue in the near future.

This means that all businesses that rely on people purchasing their products or services need customer success teams.

Why is customer success important?

Customer success is important because it allows your customers to experience the best quality of service and enjoy using your product. You may be thinking that customer success is just a fancy new term for customer support.

However, although the two terms bear many similarities, they differ in one important aspect. Customer success teams are proactive and customer support is reactive.

In other words, customer success attempts to identify and solve issues before they’re noticed by customers who contact your support agents for help. They continuously work on improving the customer experience by aggregating data from existing clients.

If this has you confused, there’s no reason to worry. We will now explain how to execute customer success concepts in your company.

How to execute customer success activities

Although businesses can differ significantly, every customer success team breaks down their work into five basic steps. These principles remain the same across all industries, but you may need to tweak their execution or focus on certain specifics to better fit the needs of your particular niche.

Step 1 – Outline clear objectives

As with anything else business related, planning is the mother of success.

Develop a customer success strategy that your employees can follow to ensure that your customers are always happy with the service that you provide.

Make sure that your strategy centers around the needs and desires of your specific customers. Don’t box yourself into a specific set of tactics either – feel free to experiment to find the best solution. Your customers will know when you get it right.

Step 2 – Educate the customers

In the ideal world, every customer would spend hours researching each product and finding the best solution. In reality, many customers don’t want to spend that much time on a purchase.

To ensure that your customers are always happy with their purchase, you need to anticipate the questions that they may have. Educate them about your product’s features and benefits.

This is essential if you’re selling a software-as-a-service (SaaS) product. Consider creating a knowledge base and implement a live chat on your website to allow your customers direct access to the support team.

Step 3 – Provide customer onboarding

Getting used to a new product or service can be very hard for new customers, especially if they’re used to certain standards.

To ensure customer success, you need to guide your customers through the initial steps. Provide them with all the resources, tools, or training that they may need.

This way, your customers will know that you care about them and accustom them to a certain standard of service. It will also allow you to proactively deal with the most common objections and questions.

Great examples of customer onboarding include step-by-step tutorials or one-on-one guidance with company representatives.

Step 4 – Facilitate communication between all departments

Customer success teams can’t work on their own.

They require communication and help from virtually all company departments. Your staff needs to behave a clear line of communication with customer support, product development, sales, and marketing teams.

This communication will allow them to identify the pain points of your customers and the weak points of your product. Marketing teams can collaborate with client success agents to develop promotional content that explains how to best use the product or outlines specific features that are often overlooked.

Customer support and customer success are two sides of the same coin. They need to discuss their interactions with clients on a daily basis to ensure a consistent quality of service across the board.

The best way to facilitate this communication and ensure customer success is to implement a CRM system, like Simply CRM. CRM platforms offer an all-in-one solution that provides all team members with access to the same customer information, which can be used to guide their everyday work.

Step 5 – Promote loyalty

Customer loyalty is a direct consequence of their positive experience with a brand. You need to make sure that your customers always feel they’re getting decent value for their money.

The easiest way to promote loyalty is to create a customer loyalty program, offering discounts and special deals for long-term clients or customers who are making more than one purchase.

However, be careful with your loyalty programs. Do the math before offering any discounts and only provide deals that your business can sustain in the long run. You don’t want your loyalty program to generate losses.

Source: Simply CRM

How To Find The Best CRM For A Small Business

October 12, 2019

In our earlier articles, we covered topics that dealt with CRMs in general, when it’s the right time to invest in CRM software and why companies decide to implement such complex systems. In this piece, we will explain what to look for in a CRM and how to choose the best CRM for a small business or a startup.

You may think that a little bit of Internet research can do the job and help you choose the ideal CRM for your company. However, that’s a misconception that is common among small business owners and managers.

The reality is that there are more CRMs than you can imagine. The market has grown astonishingly fast in recent years and CRMs now cover an enormous specter of online businesses and organizations.

With so many options available, it’s harder than ever to find the optimal solution that fits a specific business. This may cause you to look into general CRMs that can handle a wide variety of companies, but that is rarely a good decision.

While most CRMs should be able to do the job for a small business or a startup, general CRMs will require much more time and effort to run smoothly. For example, you will probably need to create lots of custom modules, features, and records, if you decide to choose a CRM such as HubSpot or Microsoft Dynamics.

Needless to say, no business can afford to lose precious time like that.

Conversely, if you choose a CRM solution specifically designed for your niche, you will have most of the necessary features pre-installed and ready for use. This alone can save you days and weeks of work on your new platform.

So, let’s delve into the matter and explain how you can choose the best CRM software for your company as well as what you should look into before making the decision to buy a CRM.

What to know before you buy a CRM

Before you buy or even start looking for a CRM, you should outline your company’s goals and objectives, in both the short and the long term.

Consider how a CRM can help your business achieve its goals and don’t hesitate to consult your sales department before you make any decision.

Your sales representatives will spend the majority of their time working with the CRM software you choose. It’s important that they’re on board with the specific solution that you have in mind.

The next step is to specify your budget.

Be realistic. Evaluate how much you can invest and calculate whether or not the investment can help you achieve the goals that you outlined. This is arguably the hardest step for most business owners because they often expect instant returns on the investment.

Keep in mind that it may take some time for your employees to fully adopt the CRM and your company to start reaping the benefits.

What to look for in a CRM

When you start researching CRMs, you’ll want to pay attention to what features and functions each solution offers. You should be looking for a solution that supports the widest array of options, which includes:

  • A customer database that allows you to save all the communication history with every client
  • Sales management tools that allow you to streamline the sales process and monitor your sales progression
  • Access control that will help you assign viewing rights and run multiple teams within your CRM
  • Task management overview of completed, ongoing and planned tasks and activities
  • Automated workflows that send out emails, updates, reminders, etc.
  • Powerful analytics that will let you assess your marketing efforts and adjust your advertising campaigns and strategies
  • Mobile support for smartphones and tablets
  • Integration with the most popular online services, including billing solutions, social media, marketing programs, etc.
  • GDPR compatibility
  • Free demo or trial version that will allow you to test the product for yourself.
  • Exceptional customer support and training program

Once you’ve covered all these features and functions, you may want to look for additional options, such as:

  • Niche-specific modules for your business
  • Mobile apps for Android and iOS devices
  • Integration with other CRMs (in case you need to switch CRMs in the future)

Source: Simply-CRM

CRMs And Marketing Automation

September 13, 2019

What is marketing automation?

Generally speaking, marketing automation represents a software solution that automates repetitive and time-consuming tasks, relieving the workload on the employees. In marketing departments, automation is used to eliminate all types of manual activities, including:

  • Email campaigns
  • SMS campaigns
  • Social media posting
  • Ad placement
  • Data analysis and management

Why use marketing automation?

Marketing automation doesn’t just help you reduce the workload, it also helps increase your productivity and improve the overall work environment.

If your business relies on a list of leads, contacts or opportunities, it represents the ideal candidate for marketing automation. This means you can use marketing automation to:

  • Improve sales conversions
  • Shorten the sales cycle
  • Extend the customer lifetime
  • Improve engagement rates
  • Create a more collaborative work environment
  • Increase ROI

However, a CRM or marketing automation software can help your company in other ways as well. For example, it can reduce the amount of monotonous admin work, such as invoicing, writing proposals, etc.

In addition to that, it can streamline the hiring process by creating an email chain that will automatically recognize the best candidates and contact them. Similarly, it can improve the effectiveness of your email campaigns by segmenting your audience and creating trigger-based messages.

Further, it lets you plan multi-channel marketing automation and manage it on the go. This way, you can even create dynamic, personalized content for your landing pages and emails

Why incorporate marketing automation in CRM?

You may be wondering why you should incorporate marketing automation in a CRM. Surely, it’s better to have a highly specialized program that deals only with automation and advanced software in the form of a CRM to generate the highest revenues.

While this may sometimes be true, it’s often misleading and incorrect. Moreover, it’s the wrong perspective. You should not be thinking about what marketing automation and a CRM can bring individually, but focus on what results they can bring combined.

When you integrate marketing within a CRM or you choose a CRM that comes with integrated marketing automation, such as Simply, you can enjoy the following benefits:

  • Reduced costs
  • Increased productivity
  • Centralized platform
  • Unified data management
  • Improved collaboration

Source: Simply CRM

Learn the difference between IT Security and Cybersecurity

April 9, 2019

Many people think that they are just alternative terms for having a form of security on electronic devices. A group of others believes that they are complementary to each other and no system can continue if not connected for the safety and security purpose.

Cybersecurity and IT security are related to each other; they create excellent protection and efficiency when linked together.  Despite similarities, there are key differences that distinguish both.

IT security

IT security can be understood as information or data security. It’s implemented to confirm the security and safety of all information created and available to an organization. The security process includes all electronics along with physical data.

IT security offers processes and methods to be in place to ensure that all information is protected. This prevents unauthorized intruding, misuse, damage or interruption of data.

The main objective is to guarantee that information remains of high integrity, encrypted and accessible. This is much needed to ensure that the quality of information is not compramised, along with ensuring that personal or valuable information remains confidential and only available to the authority.

IT security combines various forms of technology and strategies to guard all information and information systems. Physical data is often easier to protect in lockers, but digital data requires enhanced safety.

This data can be anything like personal credentials, logins, credit card details, etc. To access specific transaction details, one must assure about the 2-3 factor verification along with digital file signature for all electronic devices along with establishing secure individual and organization networks.

IT security norms allow data to be shielded while assuring the quality and truthfulness of the information. Incorporating security rules for information and systems reduce the risk of unauthorized access or misuse of confidential information.

Cybersecurity

Cybersecurity comprised of technologies, processes and handles intended to protect systems, networks, and data from cyber attacks. Efficient cybersecurity reduces the risk of cyber attacks and protects against the unauthorized stealing of systems, networks, and technologies.

Reliable cybersecurity can be achieved by implementing checks and balances among the three pillars: people, processes, and technology. This approach helps organizations to protect themselves from both organized attacks and general internal threats & data breaches, such as accidental infringements, human mistakes, etc.

Cybersecurity’s primary purpose is to protect digital data from unauthorized access received through cyberspace. Unauthorized access can be considered as cyber-attacks and there are n numbers of them to access a company’s data that corrupt or damage the integrity of the data.

Cybersecurity ensures that all confidential, valuable or vulnerable information cannot be downloaded, shared or utilized by an unknown person.

Cybersecurity controls and prevents this threat or attack to a company’s information. It allows the necessary precautions and protocols to be in place to ensure the safety of all electronic data. Hacking or corruption of data not only affects the quality of the data but can be expensive and time-consuming to fix. There are also the loopholes of what a third party can achieve by holding this information, especially if it is financial or highly confidential.

Hacking and unapproved access to networks can happen for many reasons. Cyber threats include downloading files from websites or other app resources that contain viruses.  Having weak or easily guessed passwords or storing data in one place, such as the cloud without backups.

IT and cybersecurity walk hand in hand; both are crucial in protecting the information of your organization.  Both security systems should be consolidated into your company to assure that all mediums being used are secure and protected against any threat, fraud or misuse.

If your organization needs any help or support in IT network and security, please call us today! We will assess and analyze every aspect of its security and provide you the best protection against the cyber threat and data breach possibilities.

Customer Support

5 Tips for Information Technology to Better Manage the Customer Experience

December 28, 2018

To help improve your IT service desk’s customer experience, there are five tips to consider in assessing and delivering a more appropriate level of IT support:

Know and catalog significant and commonly occurring service requests as “service encounters.” 

“Your IT service desk should be able to describe what it does day-in, day-out without even thinking about it. But what about in the language of, and from the perspective of, the customer? What are the most commonly asked for and undertaken services? And are they actually viewed as services for customers or are they just a series of tasks/activities that are undertaken until it’s time to go home? A better customer experience starts with a change in approach and mindset – looking from the outside-in, rather than from the inside-out, with your service encounters built around the customer rather than the service provider,” said Sarah Lahav, CEO, SysAid.

Separate each encounter into its (1) before, (2) during, and (3) after stages, and identify where any of the common six “moments of truth” (MOTs) exist.  

“These six MOTs are customer touch points in the first contact, greet, use, thank you or exit, last contact, and next contact. So, if you consider an end-user issue with a networked printer, the various MOTs in this example will include:
o The incident submission, perhaps via a self-service portal as a “before” interaction.
o Your requests for more information from, and updates on progress to, the end user will likely be part of the “during” stage.
o A personal callback, to check that the issue has been resolved, and the sending of a customer satisfaction survey are part of the “after” stage,” said Lahav.

Discover any other key interactions you know to greatly influence the end-user’s or customer’s emotions, e.g. what makes them happy or angry.

“These are likely to be additional MOTs. This could include the end user contacting the service desk “out-of-hours,” most likely just before they leave the office for the day, for an update – via the self-service portal, telephone, email, chat, or walk-up channels,” said Lahav. “If you think about how this happens with your service desk now – is it a consistent experience? And, does the end user receive a good customer experience?”

Within any encounter and stage, and for each moment of truth, know whether you have a suitable feedback mechanism in place. 

“IT service desk customer satisfaction surveys rarely measure the customer experience. They are also often designed, and distributed, in a way such that end-user response rates are low – usually at 10% or less. To understand the customer experience, there also needs to be greater granularity and a focus on the things that matter most to the end user. Plus, surveys need to be kept simple! The best customer experience gathering mechanisms start with a binary “Are you happy or not?” yes-or-no styled prompt and then seek further, optional, information beyond this. For instance, digging into the reasons as to why there was a poor experience,” said Lahav.

If unsatisfactory, ask what can be done to eliminate, or mitigate, any issues to improve matters. 

“In addition to the low response rates to traditional IT service desk customer satisfaction questionnaires, there is also often neglect to follow up (on both good and bad feedback, because of both offer opportunities for improvement). Which in turn drives the apathy end users might have towards your feedback mechanism (with this being in addition to surveys being too complex/time-consuming for them to complete). So, ensure that you proactively use the feedback information received from end users to make positive changes in how the service desk works and, ultimately, to the customer experience it delivers,” said Lahav.

Finally, these five tips won’t work if enacted alone. Instead, they need to be worked on in unison, ideally as part of an ongoing program or activity to better know, and manage, the customer experience as part of a continuous improvement initiative.

Source: Biz Report

Blockchain Technology and Industrial Revolutions

December 9, 2018

Many people think that blockchain is all associated with monetary transactions and cryptocurrency [It’s a subset only of Blockchain tech applications] and this is the biggest myth currently Blockchain technology is facing. We have already made a few posts on various parts explaining the Blockchain technology. Blockchain technology can increase the efficiency, speed, and transparency of entire industry-specific projects. The most positive effect of everything from basic to advance, all is stored in the blockchain repository.

In industrial revolutions, first of all, we should understand the industrial revolution that is taking place all around us and the types of it. We know that currently, the fourth industrial revolution is going on and before it, we have seen the 3 major changes/types in industrial development. What is special about this Fourth Industrial Revolution and other revolutions that have been in effect already?

Emma Whitner Florida

Emma Whitner Florida

The Past Industrial Revolutions
The First & foremost Industrial Revolution was considered in the late 18th century and termed as a startup movement towards industrialization, i.e. a decent shift from domestic production to a factory-based production. The Second Industrial Revolution held in the 20th century where applied industrialization was employed to
big corporations.
The Third Industrial Revolution which is in recent times i.e. 21st century saw the digitization of the manufacturing processes for the industries which were established as a result of earlier revolutions.
Today we are in the age of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and we should welcome it because it’s connecting the technologists, industrialists, venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, and even marketers all together! Yes, it’s in the intersection of five latest technologies called: Nanotechnology, Blockchain, AI & robotics, IoT, and biotechnology. The ultimate goal of using these technologies is to transform the way of manufacturing, simplifying the business operations, connecting the businesses for a great outcome and achieving the business goals in a productive way.
As this post is specific to Blockchain technology, we are now going to discuss the benefits of it.
(1) Digital Currency Management- The blockchain technology showing its impact on different industries including the financial market with its super first advanced application called Bitcoin. Bitcoin is a mode of digital payment and nothing but a form of digital currency called cryptocurrency [Encryption enabled for security] as well. This can be used in the place of physical money for the businesses. And the underlying technology behind the success of cryptocurrencies is called the Blockchain. There are so many digital currencies are in trade these days and here is a list you can check and go through it. List of Digital Currencies
(2) Cybersecurity- Creating a keyless security system to enable more privacy and strong protection against the theft is very crucial in today’s scenario and at present so many companies are working on this feature. A lot of devices have been configured with and will be done more in the near future. One of the decentralized authentication system REMME works on Blockchain technology where data is decentralized [Not stored on one central server, & shared to nodes on the network] which aims to replace logins and passwords with SSL certificates stored on a blockchain.
(3) Healthcare Revolution- Blockchain has changed the entire healthcare system with more firm records and ability to access them whenever it requires. The best example can be understood as storing the disease outbreak data into a blockchain [Which acts as a never-ending, permanent database], that staying reliability will increase the effectiveness at the time of disaster relief and response.
(4) Hotel Reviews and rating system- This is one of the best examples of Blockchain technology in a real-time world. This facility will help hotel management a lot and create a great place for actual customer centric permanent feedback. This will generate more scope of income for the writers too.
(5) In Manufacturing and Industrial revolution: Blockchain technology has everything at one place i.e. a record keeping, security, decentralized or distributive power that makes it easily available to the staff, or any user in the loop, transparency, and accessibility. The manufacturing sector is improving with Blockchain technology. India’s biggest corporation, Reliance Industries, has said that it is developing a blockchain-based supply chain logistics platform along with its own cryptocurrency, Jiocoin. Further, in the same niche, blockchain can be revolutionary in logistics, tracking and tracing on a real-time basis. There exists GPS but this technology enhances the analytical power along with the existing technology to optimize the cost.
(6) Eliminating the mediator’s role: We’ve seen and come across so many applications, or services that take help of a third party and we know that there is an additional cost associated whenever a third party is involved. The blockchain is getting this removed using a trusted transaction between the users.
(7) In Automation: As many people think Blockchain is only a digital currency system, we can have a further scope of bursting this myth by understanding with an example of self-driving cars. These automated cars can use blockchain technology to keep a permanent record of tracks, obstacles, machine learning on driving behaviors and more! Self-driving cars, sometimes referred to as autonomous vehicles, function by using complicated machine learning algorithms to ensure the safety and security of the car & its commuters. These algorithms go through millions of hours meaningful user driving data and patterns matching which are further used to make driving decisions. As a fact, self-directed vehicles would need to handle all their events – such as an ability to pay for their fuel cost, parking and other general functions such as stopping by a customer’s call & more. This creates an outstanding opportunity for blockchains as they can help with the development of self-driving vehicles in pooling data and also for a machine to machine payment processing.
The opportunity with Blockchain technology implementation is huge & endless. This has been a self-motivating for the technologists and its stockholders. Also, so many businesses, enterprises, technology honchos have started investing in it and a lot of industries are adopting this future technology into their business operations.
We at Kedjja specialize in developing the future world technology solutions that can help your business grow with this competitive market. Our skills in Blockchain consultancy & development, data analysis, IoT and artificial intelligence etc can demonstrate helpful solutions for your business.
Source: Emma Whitner