{"id":2734,"date":"2020-12-29T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2020-12-29T10:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/138.197.200.24\/resources\/blog\/rocking-customer-success-for-customer-advocacy\/"},"modified":"2026-07-31T12:27:27","modified_gmt":"2026-07-31T12:27:27","slug":"rocking-customer-success-for-customer-advocacy","status":"publish","type":"blog","link":"https:\/\/www.smartkarrot.com\/resources\/blog\/rocking-customer-success-for-customer-advocacy\/","title":{"rendered":"Rocking \u201cCustomer Success\u201d with a simple onboarding survey"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Today customers are flooded with options on products and services, be it range, quality or price. In such a competitive world, sales and marketing alone are not adequate to ensure and sustain growth, neither are annual contracts reliable methods of ensuring customer loyalty. <\/p>\n

<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n

So, what can businesses do to succeed in the long run? This is where the \u201cCustomer Success\u201d methodology is crucial. Customer success aims at providing maximum gains to customers along with boosting the company\u2019s proven value. It is the process of predicting customer\u2019s challenges or doubtful questions and proactively providing solutions and answers prior to their arising or ensuring that a problem if it exists, is quickly detected and fixed before it causes any damage. It is a strategy that helps enhance customer satisfaction and thereby retention, increasing the company\u2019s revenue and customer loyalty. Hence, customer success provides an opportunity for customer advocacy.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

How
\ndoes it work?<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Today, more than ever, customer satisfaction is inevitable for a business to flourish when competitions have become stark. A study \u201cCustomer Satisfaction, Competition, and Firm Performance: An Empirical Investigation\u201d by Daniel H. Simon and Miguel I. Gomez (2013), reveals that rivals\u2019 customer satisfaction influences a firm\u2019s own customer satisfaction and also own and rival customer satisfaction affects the firm\u2019s sales, as the figure below shows:<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n

Organizations have different types of customers. Customers vary in their extent of dependence on the company, the products and services they use, and how much they spend on these products and services. In recent times, it has become increasingly expensive for businesses to obtain new customers. This is one of the main reasons why existing customers need to be kept happy. Satisfied customers become the company\u2019s benefactors. In other words, if businesses have customers, they should focus on customer success. <\/p>\n

Customer success is much more astute and penetrating than the well-known customer support. That is, customer support is \u201creactive\u201d in approach, helping customers if they ask for help or reach out with a problem or question. On the other hand, customer success is \u201cproactive\u201d, focusing on helping identify possible query and facilitate customers to obtain the highest value, as the chart demonstrates:<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n
\n<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n

Some
\nof the most successful emerging and growing companies are already investing in
\ncustomer success. HubSpot<\/a>
\nfound growing companies are 21% more likely than their stagnant counterparts to
\nsay customer success is \u201cvery important\u201d. <\/p>\n

The spearhead of the process\u2014the customer success manager is responsible for day-to-day engagement with clients because involved customers are more likely to renew and purchase more. The nature of engagement includes ensuring clients\u2019 \u201conboarding\u201d, quarterly check-ins, and for many organizations, pursuing renewals and additional sales opportunities. Though the customer success manager\u2019s role and responsibilities vary across organizations and industries, nevertheless, customer success is graded on a few areas; retention rate<\/em>, the percentage of customers that are sustained over a period of time, upsell<\/em>, when a customer upgrades to a better or costlier service, cross-sell<\/em> when a customer purchases a different type of service from the company and overall satisfaction<\/em>, satisfaction of the customer in their overall experience with the company. These responses are often acquired through surveys that ask the Net Promoter question. <\/p>\n

According to business strategist and best-selling author Fred Reichheld<\/a> (2001) known for his research and writing on the loyalty business model and loyalty marketing, a company\u2019s profit can improve by 25% just by improving customer retention merely by 5%. The reason being, return customers tend to buy more from a company over time. As they do, the operating costs to serve them decline. There are also more chances that return customers would refer the company to others. They would often pay a premium to continue to do business with the same company rather than switch to a competitor with whom they are neither familiar nor comfortable. Acquiring a new customer is up to 25 times more expensive than retaining an existing one. The strong correlation between retention and profitability is very evident. <\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

The
\nthree infallible questions <\/strong><\/h3>\n

Early on, Abbott (1955) and Alderson (1957) focused on the broad idea that \u201cwhat people really desire are not products but satisfying experiences\u201d. Furthering this path, experiential theorists in the 1980s like Hirschman and Holbrook (1982) and Thompson, Locander and Pollio (1989) put forward a wider view on human behavior, especially recognizing the importance of the emotional aspects of decision making and experience. Pine and Gilmore (1998) conceptualized the idea of \u201cexperiences\u201d as distinct from goods and services, noting that a consumer purchases an experience to \u201cspend time enjoying a series of memorable events that a company stages \u2026 to engage him in an inherently personal way\u201d. This expansive perspective considers the customer\u2019s experience holistically, incorporating the customer\u2019s cognitive, emotional sensory, social, and spiritual responses to all interactions with a firm. <\/p>\n

Another similar study by Frederick Hong-Kit Yim, Rolph E. Anderson and Srinivasan Swaminathan titled \u201cCustomer Relationship Management: Its Dimensions and Effect on Customer Outcomes\u201d (2004) indicates that customer relationship managers need to think more than the technological components of customer relationship management and focus on four key dimensions to significantly enhance customer loyalty and sales growth:\u00a0 focus on customers, organize around customer relationship management, manage knowledge and incorporate customer relationship management technology. <\/p>\n

All these studies point out that to ensure that customers achieve their desired solution; the customer success team must actively engage with the customers and ask them the right questions to make sure that the product or the service is meeting their expectations. Along with it, improve the product or the service, onboarding processes, customer support, and overall business enhancement. Moreover, if the business is developing a new product or updating an existing one, customers can provide valuable feedback about design and functionality to help enhance it further. Customers often help identify problems that would have otherwise been overlooked. But what do the right questions entail? The \u201cright\u201d and \u201ceffective\u201d questions should be revealing at the same time must be useful for the team to procure accurate and complete information about the product or the service. <\/p>\n

Questions posed by customer surveys should be able to provide certain answers fruitfully in order to achieve the desired goal. These goals can be listed as: <\/p>\n