Customer Self-Service | | Published August 03, 2018

6 Ways to Leverage B2B Customer Success Solutions

Competing in the business world can create excitement. Winning a hard-fought deal over a top rival can be a huge morale boost and lead to new opportunities for your company that weren’t possible before. But, what happens when a competitor comes for one of your key accounts? In this scenario, it’s not up to the sales team to provide the victory, but instead the onus falls squarely onto the customer success group. With customer retention critical to business success, fending off the competition means a healthy balance sheet and minimal churn.

For your customer success team to thrive, they need to have the right solutions in place and also the knowledge of how to efficiently utilize these resources. Here are six ways companies are using B2B customer success solutions to crush the competition…

1) Tracking all communication at both the customer and contact level – If a customer is potentially shopping their business around to a competitor, it’s important to figure out who at the company is looking elsewhere. This is where tracking communication at both the customer and contact levels becomes essential. Here, you can see that even if a B2B customer as a whole appears to be happy, one or two contacts within that company may feel frustrated. Customer success should reach out to these individuals and listen to any concerns they may have with your company.

2) Leveraging Service Level Agreement (SLA) tracking so you’re always in the conversation – If a customer is evaluating the competition, it usually means you’re not fully meeting their needs. One way many companies fail to keep customers happy is by not responding to their inquiries fast enough. With customer support technology, it’s easy to not only establish SLAs but also to track them to ensure you’re promptly discussing key issues that may make or break a customer relationship.

Click here to download our custom template for creating SLAs to use with your own customers!

3) Utilizing sentiment analysis to know instantly which conversations need attention – Even the best customer success teams have days when ticket volumes are through the roof. Don’t let competitors swoop in and capitalize on these moments, instead utilize sentiment analysis technology to prioritize responses. This technology can automatically scan and “categorize” messages – such as happy, sad, or frustrated – and let you know instantly that a customer is annoyed without needing to spend five minutes reading their entire ticket.

4) Tailoring self-service content for specific business needs – A great self-service solution is the backbone of any strong customer success operation and it can also be a key piece in boosting customer retention. Make your B2B self-service portal an asset by focusing on content your customers want instead of what “looks cool”. Don’t just make flashy videos because you saw some on a B2C self-service site, instead create in-depth guides that require little to no assistance so your customers can successfully leverage them at all hours of the day.

5) Deploying a live chat system focused on business interactions – A live chat solution built for B2B can be a game changer in communication and, once customers have great experiences using it, they’ll be hesitant to leave for a competitor without this system in place. B2B chat offers easy file sharing, optional video conversations, and provides one-click screen sharing to solve complex issues faster. Highlighting the benefits of chat and getting customers to use it can be an excellent way to increase retention rates.

6) Simplifying the task management process for customer issues – Many customers in the B2B industry will often judge a company based on how they respond to complex and critical issues. By leveraging customer success technology with a built-in task management solution, it’s easy to create and assign different tasks for complex concerns. In addition, all work surrounding an issue is logged in one place and can be easily tracked. This way, if a customer reaches out via phone for a status update, any employee can quickly look and see which tasks for the issue have been completed and which ones are still outstanding.

 

We hope these customer success solution tips will help as you look to boost your retention rates and keep customers from jumping to the “dark side”. Remember that customer success is focused on keeping the customer happy at all costs!