How To Guarantee Customer Success [Copy Our Epic Client Fulfillment Process]

Here’s what customer success looks like: Your clients/customers receive the expected value from the product or service that they purchase from your business. Or, in an even more ideal world, they receive MORE than they expected. 

That leads to these customers staying with your business for longer – becoming valuable, loyal fans of your company.

But here’s the kicker: there’s no handbook, guide, or definite metrics that define what customer success might look like for your business. 

The good news is you can develop one. You can tweak the client fulfillment process or reach out proactively to your clients.

If you’ve wondered, “how can I achieve customer success?” You’re at the right place. 

In this post, you’ll learn about the customer fulfillment process, how customer success, support, and experience differ, and pro tips to ignite customer success for your business. 

What is Customer Success?

Making your business stand out is a tough nut to crack in this cut-throat competition. But there will always be some brands who will win this game. 

How do they do it? They focus on customer success.

Customers or your clients are at the heart of any company. What they feel about your brand and how they perceive you in helping them is vital for them to decide to purchase.

The customer fulfillment process has various loose hinges that affect customer success. Long-term company growth depends on knowing how happy your clients and customers are and taking proactive measures to nurture them. 

Think of the brands who proactively reach out to you (not because you created a support ticket or asked for help). These companies are already anticipating any problems you may have with their products and services. These are the brands you’ll remember for their excellent approach.

Customer success is going the extra mile in the client fulfillment process to ensure your clients achieve the expected results using your products and services.

Customer Success vs. Customer Support

Customer success and customer support have one main difference in their approach. The former is a proactive approach, while the latter is reactive.

Suppose you sell SEO services online, and a customer recently bought your subscription. Your team has completed the order fulfillment process and delivered the client’s service.

For less successful businesses, that’s where it ends. 

For companies that care about their long-term growth, they ask: Has the client achieved the results they desired? Have we helped them solve their pain points?

If your customer success managers go the extra mile and keep in touch with the client to understand how satisfied they are with what they received, you’re already ahead of the competition that doesn’t do this.

It’s human psychology — we want to be heard and understood. And remember, your customers are humans, too. 

Customer Success vs. Customer Experience

While customer success involves the proactive practices of ensuring that your client gets the needed results, customer experience is the overall perception of your brand.

Both of the concepts are close-knit, though with some subtle differences. The customer experience (CX) doesn’t happen at a single touch point; rather, it encompasses the clients’ interactions with your brand at various touch points.

Customer experience is based on feelings. The goal of CX is to create loyal customers who keep buying your services. 

Both concepts are crucial in customer fulfillment and creating a positive brand reputation.

Defining The Client Fulfillment Process

The client fulfillment process is a series of steps to complete a request or order by the client. Depending upon the type of business you’re in, the process varies.

For instance, if you’re a product-based business, your fulfillment process will have different steps than a service-based business. But the fundamentals of customer fulfillment remain the same.

The basic steps of a customer fulfillment process:

  • Request: Your business receives an order request. It can be online, in-person, or via call. For example, a customer purchasing an SEO services subscription from an internet marketing agency to help them grow their business is making an order request.
  • Processing: After receiving the request, your business verifies it. Continuing the previous example: this step might involve your business checking the details and company and deciding if you should work with them.
  • Confirmation: When the request is processed, it either gets confirmed or rejected.
  • Order Fulfillment: Once the order gets accepted, your team starts the fulfillment process, which might include providing the service or preparing the product for delivery. For the same example, it might mean your SEO team is working on the SEO of the client’s website.
  • Delivery: Delivery happens after the order gets fulfilled (you’ve completed the service or delivered the product to the doorstep).
  • Payment: Once the delivery is complete, your business requests the due payment after generating an invoice.
  • Customer Support: Your business solves your customer’s possible queries or issues at this step. The aim is to ensure customer satisfaction.

Pro tip: Customer success doesn’t just happen at the end of this process; it happens ALL THE WAY THROUGH. 

Streamlining Your Client Fulfillment Process For Customer Success

Your customers care about the end transformation the most, yet the process that leads them there matters. There are lots of subtasks involved in a customer fulfillment process (in a service-based business), for example:

  • Onboarding/welcome call
  • Meetings with clients
  • Setting up campaigns
  • Reportings
  • Managing client issues.

When it comes to managing these tasks, there are a ton of great automation tools to streamline your team’s workflow. We’ve got some more posts on how to automate your business with tools like Zapier, or Go Highlevel CRM.

Delivering As Promised: Relationship-Focused Customer Success

There are three kinds of business:

1. Businesses that make small claims stay in their lane and don’t upset their existing clientele.

2. Businesses that make bold claims but can’t back them up are called “scammers.”

3. Businesses that make bold claims, fulfill their promises, and earn big cash.

You can guess what kind of businesses high-ticket clients want to work with.

Make bold promises and work hard to deliver on them. Stretch it out but not too much that you lose your reputation.

Customer Fulfillment Process: How To Improve Customer Experience (CX)?

96% of US customers state that good customer service is essential to them, according to research published by Netomi.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise; people don’t want to get stuck with slow businesses in today’s fast-paced environment. 47% of people expect speed and convenience over personalization, according to the same study by Netomi.

Customer experience is about a customer’s overall impression and feeling. It’s crucial to note that top-notch customer experience doesn’t come from a single touchpoint but involves several.

For example, delivering outstanding service but lacking customer support will only result in a frustrated client.

Here are some of the ways to help you improve customer experience in the customer fulfillment process for your brand:

Delivery Quality With Speed 

People love great quality. When something high-quality is delivered fast, it’s on a whole other level. Clients will pay a fortune to receive quality services or products fast.

Make It Easy & Accessible

Whether navigating your business website or contacting support, make it a super simple process for your clients.

Personalization & Transparency

If you want relationship-focused customer success, personalization is the way to go. Direct your brand’s voice as if you’re focused just on them. For instance, you can personalize support chatbots or emails with the client’s name directly. It is always best to be honest (transparent) with your customer as it incites trust.

Always Consider Customer Success

Customer experience can’t improve unless you are driven by customer success. Become the supporter of your clients and help them achieve their desired results. You shouldn’t wait for them to complain. Instead, be proactive. You can reach out to them occasionally to check if they’re facing any problems with your products or services.

Provide Excellent Customer Service

Problems are doomed to arise – perfection is a myth. Your customers are likely to face issues with your products or services at some point. How you handle those problems will leave an impression (good or bad) on your clients. 

Here are some key points to remember:

  • Respond quickly in one-to-one support
  • Create a knowledge base, FAQs section, and a community where clients can find answers
  • Keep in touch with the customer if the problem is taking longer than expected to resolve
  • Use automation tools (chatbots) to personalize and be available 24/7.

What Are The Priorities For Customer Success? (Key Responsibilities Of A Customer Success Team)

There are specific priorities your customer success managers should keep in mind. These priorities are based on the end goal of the customer fulfillment process.

  1. Get Feedback: Since the customer success team works closely with customers, they should ask customers what is and isn’t working and how the company can improve its products or services.
  2. Focus On Retention: You can turn your customers into loyal fans by helping them get the expected results from your products or services every time. Why is retention so important? Existing customers/clients are 14 times more likely to buy from a company than new customers. That’s why.
  3. Be Supportive: While feedback is essential to improve the product or services of your business, customer satisfaction is much more than that. You must include guidance, support, and training in your customer fulfillment process to create a great experience.
  4. Opportunities Upsell: While interacting with customers, the customer success team will encounter several opportunities to upsell or cross-sell your additional services or products.
  5. Collaborate With Other Teams: Collaborate with other departments of the company to get insights and ensure the process is running smoothly. This includes the teams in marketing, sales, or product/service development.

Why Is Customer Success Critical In Business?

Customer success can help your business generate more revenue and be profitable for years to age. How? 

A happy customer/client will stay with your business longer, and they will share their success with others (hello, organic marketing!) This all adds to the overall growth of your business as you get new clients and increase customer retention. 

When you have an effective client fulfillment process, you can regularly gather vital feedback to continually update your services/products/processes.

Enable Customer Success With These Pro Tips

“The key is to set realistic customer expectations and then not just to meet them, but to exceed them – preferably in an unexpected and helpful way.” — Richard Branson.

By now, you know customer success is essential. 

Here are some of the steps that you need to take in developing a winning client fulfillment process.

Make It An Organization-Wide Goal

Whether or not your company has a dedicated customer success team, make it an organization-wide goal. The simplest way to do this is by educating. Teach each department the importance of customer success and how their work impacts it. When each department understands the essential role they play in delivering client’s the end results, they will be more motivated to deliver high-quality work.

Start As Early As Possible 

True customer success in a client fulfillment process comes from the joint efforts of every department at your company. It means this ideology should be fabricated deeply into the company culture, especially when onboarding new team members.

Start sewing this thread from the earliest possible stage. 

Proactive Onboarding In Your Client Fulfillment Process

As soon as a prospect becomes your customer, the role of customer success managers starts. Proactive onboarding means you actively reach out to clients to ensure everything they need has been set up.

Track Metrics And Sharing Data

Tracking metrics and sharing the insights with the whole team will lead to greater customer success since it’s a data-driven process. Data can help you identify any red flags early on and help you understand if a customer is struggling with using your product or service.

Here are some of the metrics you should track:

  • Customer retention cost
  • Churn rate
  • Customer retention rate
  • Customer lifetime value
  • Repeat purchase rate.

FAQs For Client Fulfillment Process & Customer Success

What are the top 5 priorities in customer success?

In a client fulfillment process, the top 5 priorities that ensure customer success are getting feedback, retaining customers, ensuring customer satisfaction, collaborating with other teams, and upselling/cross-selling.

What are the 5 golden rules of good customer service?

The 5 golden rules of good customer service include: respond quickly, be helpful, show empathy, respect clients, and stay transparent.

What are the 4 P’s that improve customer service?

To improve customer service, here are the 4 P’s of marketing you should be mindful about:

  1. Product: Your product or service should meet the customer’s expectations.
  2. Price: Setting a reasonable price creates a win-win for both the company and the customer.
  3. Promotion: Marketing the value of your company’s product and services.
  4. Place: Your service or product should be available via different distribution channels.

Want To Get More Highly-Qualified Clients For Your Business?

We work with individuals and companies to experience rapid growth and skyrocket their profits through intelligent client acquisition. Whether you’re searching for leads for your business or on your company’s behalf, Scaling With Systems is here to help. 

We build a profitable client acquisition system that is guaranteed to give you new clients consistently. If you’re serious about creating customer success for your business, book a free consultation call, and one of our advisors will get back to you.

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