A customer satisfaction survey – the easiest way to get feedback from your customers.

Customer feedback fuels the engine of any business. 

With actionable feedback, organizations can make informed decisions. When you know what customers think about your product and your service, you’re able to plan strategically and make smart bets.

And the easiest way to get customer feedback is by using customer satisfaction surveys. 

Now, there’s no right or wrong approach to customer satisfaction survey questions — it all depends on what you’re trying to understand. That’s why we’ve pulled together this list of essential customer satisfaction survey question examples that you can easily copy or adapt based on your goals. 

At the end of the article, we’ve also shared free customer satisfaction survey templates to inspire you as you create your own.

What is a customer satisfaction survey?

A customer satisfaction survey is a list of one or more questions organizations use to get feedback from customers about their product or service. These surveys can ask about specific features, the customer support experience, or any other area of the business. 

Companies use customer satisfaction surveys to understand everything from the smallest of interactions during the customer journey (e.g., “I find this button confusing”) to big-picture issues such as why a customer canceled their subscription.

There are a few ways to measure customer satisfaction. The most common one? Simply asking your customer what they think.

Why customer satisfaction surveys are important

If you’re reading this article, you probably know how crucial customer feedback is in today’s competitive business environment. More than ever, people choose companies with a top customer experience. 

Not surprisingly, 96% of customers say customer service is important in their choice of loyalty to a brand. And — according to research from Bain & Company and Harvard Business School — an increase in customer retention by 5% can improve profits by 25–95%.

If customer satisfaction is your goal, constant feedback is the best way to improve it over time. 

You need to measure customer satisfaction to verify whether your strategy is working as you planned. Don’t do it, and you risk losing customers along the way. 
As a 2022 PWC survey explained, bad experiences — with products, services, or a customer support agent —were the overwhelming reasons people “stopped using or buying from a business.

Customer satisfaction surveys can help you improve in different areas of the business:

• Improve customer loyalty and retention: A sudden decrease in your customer satisfaction (CSAT) survey results might indicate that some of your customers are unhappy. That’s a leading indicator that they might churn in the near future. Figuring out the source of their dissatisfaction before emerging issues become damaging is crucial. Put simply, you can’t improve your retention strategy unless you have a clear understanding of what makes your customers happy. A CSAT survey can help you get that understanding. 
• Understand customers’ expectations: A customer satisfaction survey is a goldmine because it gives you access to a pool of customer feedback. It’s a direct line of communication with your customer base. And whether that feedback is good or bad, listening and taking action put customers’ needs at the front and center of the decision-making. 
• Deliver products or services customers want: As your product evolves and you release new or improved features, customer satisfaction surveys can help you understand how those features are being received. You’ll gather crucial feedback on what’s working well (or not so well) so that your product is always going in the right direction. 

Customer satisfaction is a top differentiator that businesses can rely on in today’s competitive landscape. As the research shows, the businesses that can offer a consistently good customer experience are the ones that customers will stick with for the long haul.

Types of customer satisfaction surveys

The answers you get depend on the survey questions you ask. That means you need to adjust your survey questions based on the situation you want to understand. 

The surveys below are the most common customer feedback forms you can find, but don’t feel restricted — you can always combine or modify them based on your needs: 

• CSAT: CSAT stands for customer satisfaction. It measures customer satisfaction with a product, service, or customer support interaction by asking: “How satisfied are you with [company]?” In this survey, you ask people to rate their satisfaction on a scale (e.g., 1–5 or 1–10). The customer satisfaction score is then calculated by dividing the number of satisfied customers by the total number of respondents and multiplying it by 100. 

• NPS: Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys measure loyalty and satisfaction by asking customers how likely they are to recommend your product to others. Respondents rate their willingness to recommend on a scale of 0–10. The NPS score is obtained by subtracting the percentage of detractors (0–6 scores) from the percentage of promoters (9–10 scores).

• CES survey: Customer Effort Score (CES) measures how much effort is required from a customer to use a product or service on a scale of “very easy” to “very difficult.” The respondents rate how much effort it takes to solve an issue or do a task (for example, from 1–5 or 1–10).

• Churn or retention surveys: A churn survey asks why a customer stopped using your product or service. For example, if a customer decides to stop using your service and clicks on the “cancel subscription” button, you would ask them several questions to learn more about their decision to leave. 

• PMF survey: A product-market fit (PMF) survey measures your product or service’s importance and relevance to customers, validating its desirability. PMF surveys ask customers how they’d feel if they could not use your product anymore. The score is a percentage of all responses that picked “very disappointed” from the total amount of responses.

• Post-purchase feedback surveys: This survey is sent to customers shortly after buying a product to learn more about their shopping experience, product quality, and any issues that might arise. A post-purchase feedback survey typically will combine NPS, CSAT, and CES questions.

Milestone surveys: A milestone survey is a type of customer satisfaction survey conducted at specific points during a customer journey to improve those interactions. They can be time-based — for example, if you send it 30 days after account creation — or event-based, such as after downgrading a membership.

18 key customer satisfaction survey questions 

When you’re starting to measure customer satisfaction, you’ll probably begin by using the default functionality of your support help desk tool. But there are other crucial customer satisfaction survey questions you should consider as your customer feedback program evolves.

For example, if you want to understand customer satisfaction, a key question would be, “How would you rate the support you received?” Similarly, if you’re sending an NPS survey, questions would have a 0–10 scale and be in the form of, “How likely would you be to recommend our service to friends or family?”

The right types of questions to ask are contextual, but we always recommend asking at least one open-ended question. What users tell you outside of a closed scale might surprise you!

In the list below, we’ve organized examples of customer satisfaction survey questions based on the type of survey they belong to. Of course, you can mix and match these questions in one survey depending on your area of research.

CSAT questions

• How would you rate the support you received?
• Please rate the product/services you’ve purchased/received.
• How would you rate your experience across the following areas?

Looking for more Customer Satisfaction Survey Samples? Check out one of our most favorite resources!

Net Promoter Score (NPS) questions

• Based on your experience with our product/service, how likely would you be to recommend us to a friend, family member, or colleague?
• Based on your recent interaction with [Customer Support Agent], how likely would you be to recommend our product/service to friends or family?

Product-Market Fit (PMF) questions

• How would you feel if you could no longer use our product/service?

Customer Effort Score (CES) questions

• How easy did our product/service/organization make it for you to solve your issue?
• How well does our product/service meet your needs?

Retention and churn questions

• How likely are you to buy from us again?
• What’s the main reason you are canceling/downgrading/returning this item?

Post-purchase questions

• What improvements would you like to see in our product/service?
• Have you encountered any problems while using the product/service? If yes, please describe them.
• How, if at all, has your perception of our product/service changed following your latest experience?
• How likely are you to purchase from us again in the future?

General product questions

• On a scale of 1–10, please rank the following features of our product/service in order of how frequently you use them, with 1 being the most frequently used.
• What do you like most about the product/service?
• How well did our product/service meet your expectations?
• How was your experience with our product/service?

Best practices for great customer satisfaction surveys

Ultimately, when coming up with customer satisfaction survey questions, the one thing to keep in mind is that you need to create something that customers want to answer.

When you’re creating your feedback form, be sure to make it as easy as possible for people to complete the form. Aim for low effort. Any extra clicks, mandatory questions (especially if they are open-ended), or images that take too long to load will diminish the success of your survey. 

Your survey’s success depends on the quality of the responses from your customers. Here are our best recommendations to achieve that:

1. Use clear and concise language

Unless customers clearly understand what you’re asking, you won’t be able to get honest answers. The best way to do that is by asking straightforward questions and simplifying your survey as much as possible. 

For example, keep your sentences short, use active verbs, and avoid jargon or technical language. If you struggle with how to do this, check this guide to writing in plain English. 

Notice the straightforward questions from the example above. This tour company chose to make most questions optional and only keep what is strictly necessary as mandatory (the overall rating for the activity).

2. Keep it short and sweet

Create customer satisfaction survey questions that are as focused as possible. Your survey should only contain the questions you need to fulfill your goal.

Remember that the easier a form is to fill in, the more responses you’ll typically receive. 

For example, at Nicereply, we consistently ask a simple question at the end of every blog article. The goal is to determine whether our readers found the post helpful. That feedback contributes to our end goal of creating great content that helps customer support leaders and teams. 

For this reason, we ask a simple question:

Only ask questions that relate to your end goal. Nobody wants to waste time on overly complicated surveys with duplicated questions, and your customers are no exception!

3. Use open-ended or close-ended questions (or both) 

Once you know the goal of your survey, you need to choose the best type of questions to reach that goal. 

All customer satisfaction surveys should begin with a quantitative question that asks customers to assign a numerical value to the product or service. For example, how satisfied are your customers from 1 to 5?

This is a close-ended question, and it gives you quantitative data that you can use to easily and consistently measure customer satisfaction.

Often, the more helpful part of a survey comes when using qualitative or open-ended questions. These questions don’t limit customers to a certain format. They remove the boxes and enable customers to share whatever they think or feel.

The bottom line? Ask customers to share their experiences to get more information and insight through open-ended questions. While it takes more time to process, open-ended feedback is a treasure trove of information for your business. 

It’s one of the best ways to hear firsthand what your customers feel about your business.

4. Send it at the right time

Finding the right time to send a survey is a matter of experimentation. 

You don’t want to send a post-purchase survey so close to the purchase that your customer hasn’t received the goods, but you also don’t want to wait so long that they forget entirely about the experience. 

A simple way to send surveys at a specific time is by using automated triggers. 

Here’s one example: Many customer support teams like to send customer surveys directly after a support interaction ends. 
To achieve that, you could use a tool like Nicereply to integrate with your ticketing system and automate these surveys by using a trigger that sends the survey email when certain criteria are met — like a ticket being closed. Automating surveys across your entire customer base helps ensure unbiased feedback and reduces the effort on your support team.

5. Offer an incentive

Incentives can be a mixed bag when it comes to customer feedback. In some situations, they can encourage participation. 

That being said, they can also increase bias or skew your results. If you’re offering a gift card, you’re more likely to get responses from users who could really use a gift card right now. You also might see that they tend to share more positive feedback, because they may assume that positive feedback is more likely to help them get the incentive.

While you need to be careful not to rely on incentives for feedback, they can be a useful tool in some situations. For instance, this example from Ryanair could generate extra feedback, but since completing the survey only enters the user into a drawing for a prize, it’s less likely to skew the results.

6. Keep your audience in mind

Who will answer your feedback form depends on many factors, such as the time you send it, its length, the type of questions you ask, and more. 

For instance, you’ll see different results sending the survey via email than you would as a survey pop-up on your website. 

The example below from a car rental company is aimed at the customers that rented a car with them. If you had just been browsing their website or if the rental had been canceled, the survey wouldn’t make any sense.

Another thing to notice: See how they leave space at the end of the survey to collect valuable open-ended feedback?

7. Follow a logical order

Your feedback form should have a logical flow. Don’t ask for product experience feedback after a user responds that they’ve never used your software. 

For longer surveys, it’s often helpful to create a spreadsheet with the types of questions (multiple choice, Yes/No, free text, etc.) and the logical ordering (for example, if the answer to question 6 is > 7, jump to question 9). 

Your customer survey tool may also include functionality that helps you map out the user’s experience in a logical way.

8. Show a progress bar

Not all surveys need a progress bar, but if your survey involves more than two or three questions, it’s smart to add one. Most people who take time out of their day to start a survey would like to finish it. By showing a progress bar, you’ll give customers a better feeling of how long they’ll need to complete it. 

Imagine you’ve completed five questions and only have one left. You’ll likely make that extra effort to finish it, right? However, if you have no clue how many questions are waiting for you — maybe two, maybe twelve — then you’re more likely to drop out. 

It’s also super helpful to let users know how long it’ll take to complete your feedback form. This transparency sets clear expectations for your customers.

9. Test your feedback form internally 

Asking a few colleagues to test your customer satisfaction survey might seem like a waste of time, but we highly recommend it. 

By taking your survey on a test drive before it’s shared with the real world, you’ll ensure mistakes — big or small — are fixed. By doing so, you’ll ensure your customers only get the best possible version of your survey.

Customer satisfaction survey templates

We’ve seen how to create great customer satisfaction surveys. Now let’s see what it looks like when you put all those tips into action. 

The following customer satisfaction survey templates show you some of the best customer satisfaction survey questions. We’ve also included some templates created with Nicereply, such as the CSAT and NPS score surveys.

If you’re ready to create your survey right now, here are a few top customer satisfaction survey templates you can use with your favorite customer feedback tool.

General product satisfaction survey template

Say goodbye to boring templates and get product insights with our brand new Website Popup surveys! Try a free 14-day trial now. Click below and discover more!

(Bonus) Customer Satisfaction Survey Examples

Curious to see how other brands have implemented some of the questions we’ve mentioned in this article? We’ve compiled recent examples from businesses across different industries.

Airbnb Survey

Barclays Survey

DENT Wireless Survey

Understanding your customers

If you want to know what customers think of you, all you have to do is ask them! 

Customer satisfaction surveys are a powerful tool in your brand’s fight to win customer loyalty. With the feedback they provide, you can improve your product, your customer service, and the overall customer experience — leading to higher revenue and more loyal customers.

Asking your customers for feedback — combined with other data sources, like your support tickets — will help you shape the evolution of your business.

The post Customer Satisfaction Survey: 13 Essential Questions [ With Templates & Examples] appeared first on Customer Happiness Blog.

Popup surveys are a seamless way to gather feedback from your website visitors.

Learn about the main popup survey tools available in 2023 to find the best fit for your business.

Once you have an established customer base improving your user experience is one of the best ways to increase retention and grow your business.

But it’s not always easy—improving your customer experience requires deep knowledge of your customers. After all, if you don’t know what your customers think about your current product, how can you expect to make it better? 

There may be no easier way to quickly gather customer feedback than by using popup surveys on your website.

What are popup surveys?

Popup surveys are growing increasingly popular as a seamless way to collect customer feedback. As you’d expect from the name, popup surveys pop up on website visitors’ screens under certain conditions. For example, you might:

• Trigger a popup survey if a user has been on your pricing page for over 60 seconds
• Trigger an exit intent survey when a visitor is about to leave your page, helping you understand why they’re leaving.

Popup surveys can come in a variety of forms. Because they’re means of collecting customer feedback directly within your product or website experience, they’re a fantastic way to improve your understanding of your user experience and customer behavior. 

Are popup surveys annoying to users? 

We’ve all seen popups on websites done poorly. Terribly designed websites with spammy ads have given popups of all kinds a bad name. But popup surveys shouldn’t be grouped in with those awful experiences. 

When used strategically, popup surveys can actually enhance the user experience. To get it right, you need to be thoughtful about the timing, placement, design, and quantity of popup surveys that you use. By providing users with a quick outlet to provide feedback on your app, they can actually make customers feel empowered and involved in your product’s development.

And if you’ve ever worked with user reviews or in customer support, you’ll know that many customers have feedback that they are just dying to share! In fact, many companies are now reporting a significant increase in positive outcomes through using popup surveys.

For example, Unbounce reported a 19% increase in conversions after implementing a popup survey, while Campaign Monitor saw a 10% increase in lead acquisition by using an exit intent popup survey on their website.

Must-have features of popup survey tools

When you’re comparing popup survey software, it’s helpful to know the key features you should be looking for. Your organization may have special or specific needs beyond the feature below, but these four features are generally essential across industries:

• Customizable survey questions. While most survey tools allow you to survey customers on common metrics like NPS, the best survey tools allow you to add customized questions to gather more feedback and context from your customers. 
• Optimized for mobile. The majority of website traffic is now coming from mobile devices, which means both your site and your surveys need to be optimized for mobile.

• Granular survey control. Capturing the right feedback is critical to generating actionable insights for your business. A robust popup survey tool will allow you to customize every aspect of your survey, from questions to display options to triggers.
• Includes common KPIs. Metrics like Net Promoter Score and Customer Effort Score are used across millions of businesses. Your popup survey tool should make it super easy to collect and analyze these common customer experience metrics.

The top popup survey tools for 2023

With all of that context in place, here’s our list of the best popup survey tools to try in 2023.  

1. Nicereply

Nicereply is a customer feedback platform with a heavy focus on easy-to-use surveys, which makes it a perfect fit for implementing a popup survey on your website.  

Not only does it let you customize the style to match your own branding, but it also lets you target surveys to specific segments of your audience, such as users who have just upgraded their account or just created their first email campaign.

One big benefit of Nicereply’s solution is that it doesn’t just limit feedback collection to your website! You can also deliver Nicereply surveys through email, chat, and SMS, allowing you to gather feedback from customers wherever they are. 

Once you’ve gathered feedback, Nicereply’s advanced real-time reporting, allows you to track trends and make data-driven decisions with ease in a smoothly designed dashboard. 

Nicereply is a great fit if you’re looking for a popup survey solution that’s quick to implement and get results from. 

• Third-party integrations allowed: Yes 
• Good for: Small to large organizations 
• Free trial available: 14-day free trial, no credit card required.
• Pricing: Plans for Nicereply start at $59/mo for 100 responses

2. SurveyMonkey 

You’re probably familiar with SurveyMonkey. They’ve been around for a long time, and their survey products are well-known among enterprise organizations. SurveyMonkey includes a popup survey feature.

SurveyMonkey is geared towards Enterprise use cases. It allows for tons of integrations and includes built-in reporting and analytics that allow for quick understanding of your customer feedback .

SurveyMonkey’s tool can do a lot, but the sheer number of options available means it can quickly grow complex and expensive. That’s why it’s best for larger organizations with complex customer feedback analytics programs.

• Third-party integrations allowed: Yes 
• Good for: Enterprise organizations
• Free trial available: Contact SurveyMonkey for more information.

Pricing: SurveyMonkey’s base plan starts at $75 per month, but the price for their Enterprise plan requires requesting a quote.

3. Qualaroo

Qualaroo is user research and customer feedback software that’s well-known and trusted across many industries. Qualaroo includes some strong features, including a vast template and question library to help you get surveys launched quickly. And when you’re ready for more customization, Qualaroo’s advanced targeting options, flexibility, and mobile optimization are there for you.  

The most common downside mentioned in user reviews is the cost and scaling of the subscription plans offered. If you’re a growing company, it’s likely you will need more than the base level plan to collect a meaningful amount of customer feedback in your surveys.

• Third-party integrations allowed: Yes 
• Good for: Small to large organizations 
• Free trial available: Yes, with limited features
• Pricing: Plans for Qualaroo start at $69 per month.

4. Typeform 

Typeform is a SaaS tool that specializes in online forms of all types. It enables the creation of in-depth surveys for different channels, including a great popup survey feature for your website. 

One thing that sets Typeform apart from the others on our list is the vast number of designs and templates it offers. Granular customization options mean that you can create surveys that are really visually appealing.

Typeform’s conditional logic allows you to ask the right follow-up questions dependent on the customer’s answer. With that said, it does have the downside of limited feature availability and a capped number of responses on basic plans, as well as fewer data and reporting than its competitors.

• Third-party integrations allowed: Yes 
• Good for: Small to large organizations 
• Free trial available: Yes, but only for testing and setup. Typeform does not allow you to go live with your survey until upgrading to a plan.
• Pricing: Plans for Typeform begin at $25 per month

5. Hotjar

Hotjar is a well-known customer behavior analytics tool. It supports the features of branding customization, interactive questions, advanced targeting, and conditional logic. Hotjar’s tool also includes real-time analytics, helping you easily understand your customers’ feedback. 

A unique perk to Hotjar is that not only does it offer you survey options, it also provides heat mapping of your site, enabling you to track your visitors’ actions in a powerful way. This data can be a great supplement to the data you collect through your popup surveys.

• Third-party integrations allowed: Yes 
• Good for: Larger organizations 
• Free trial available: Yes, but only for testing and setup. Hotjar does not allow you to go live with your survey until upgrading to a paid plan.
• Pricing: Free plans are limited to 20 responses per month, meaning you’ll probably need a Plus or Business plan to utilize surveys to their full potential. Pricing for these plans start at $48 per month for 250 responses.

Get started with popup surveys for your business today

As you can see, there are plenty of solid popup survey tools on the market today. Choosing the right tool for your business requires thoughtful analysis of your needs and of each tool’s feature set.

But if you’re eager to give popup surveys a try, you can’t go wrong by starting a free trial of Nicereply’s website pop-up surveys today. 

You can get your first survey set up in mere minutes, moving you forward on your journey to better understand your customers. And the more you know about your customers, the better product and experience you’ll be able to create!

The post 5 Best Popup Surveys to Try in 2023 appeared first on Customer Happiness Blog.

“Remember to take the time to get personal with your customers.“

Company background: 

Salecto is a Danish-based SaaS company that provides full-service Magento webshops to customers who appreciate empathetic support and counseling on their e-commerce journey.

Running a successful business online requires much more than just the right platform. With Salecto, empathetic sparring and eye-level consulting are combined with the right platform to create the best webshops.

Currently, they have 22 passionate e-commerce consultants in their Danish office and 45 developers in their Indian office. Four pillars form the foundation of their core values. The four pillars are Insights, Quality, Proactivity, and Mutual Respect.

Problem: 

Salecto employees are always interested in tracking and evaluating their own performance. As mentioned above, this includes the four pillars.

“As these are somewhat soft values, it is difficult to quantify our performance within these categories. Before Nicereply, we relied 100% on feedback from third parties and did not have any direct customer feedback. In other words, we had no data on how satisfied customers are with our service and response times. In order to excel at our core values, Salecto needed feedback directly from its customers.”

Solution:

By implementing Nicereply, Salecto gained a platform that allows them to capture timely feedback and react immediately to unhappy customers. “With Nicereply, we were able to easily integrate a CSAT system with our Zendesk ticketing platform. Our customers can now provide us with direct feedback, and we can react quickly if they are unhappy.”

Salecto relies heavily on Nicereply software. “On a daily basis, we use Nicereply in a couple of different ways. As customer satisfaction is one of our goals in the customer success team, we have dashboards that show our CSAT score.

We have also integrated the feedback we get from our customers into our Slack channel. This way, we can all celebrate when someone from our team gets a high score. Finally, we always get notified when someone leaves a negative review so that we can respond immediately.”

According to Salecto, Nicereply was the best solution for them for a number of reasons: “We chose Nicereply because it was easy to integrate with our ticket platform. Zendesk has a way of measuring customer feedback, but when researching it we found it complicated and it didn’t meet all our needs.

Nicereply’s best features are its ease of integration, CSAT, and NPS surveys. We also liked the ability to keep track of how many customers responded to the CSAT mail. 

When we get analytics of how many customers choose to reply, it is much easier to keep track of if we need to make changes to the way we ask for feedback.”

Company culture & the importance of measuring customer feedback:

“Customer satisfaction is the most important aspect of a customer success team. As happy customers breed happy customers, we need a way to get feedback from them, so we know if what we are doing is working.  

Additionally, Nicereply ensures that we catch all unhappy customers. Dissatisfied customers may not express their displeasure over the phone. In the event that they provide negative feedback afterward, we can follow up and handle the situation.”

Salecto prides itself on keeping up with current trends and providing easy access to new information for the entire company.

“All support cases are handled in person. We don’t want long FAQs or a bot that customers have to interact with before getting in touch with us. Our customers appreciate how easily they can contact and speak to our customer success team, which is what differentiates us from our competitors.”

Their response, when asked what motivates them to achieve the best performance, was:

“Nicereply is an integral part of how we motivate our support team as it allows us to quantify their efforts. We have integrated Nicereply with our Slack channels so that everyone knows when we receive a positive review. Additionally, we use the statistics of how well we are doing to “show off” at quarterly meetings.”

Finally, we asked Salecto if he had any advice for other companies to succeed with customer support. The customer should be at the center of your attention, according to them.

“Stay close to your customers. Find out how your customers prefer to receive support and make sure you align with their expectations. Our customers are busy running their own businesses and we know that. That is why it needs to be easy for our customers to contact us, get their answers, and give us feedback.

But remember to take the time to get personal with your customers. If customers truly feel that they know you and you know them, this creates a personal bond. This results in that if something does go wrong, they have a whole new level of understanding and patience.”

The post Salecto Customer Story: Stay Close to Your Customers appeared first on Customer Happiness Blog.

A strong customer success team must be built consistently and with the right tools. In this article, we will tell you how to do it.

Every business knows that customer success is key to maintaining loyal customers and ensuring positive word-of-mouth marketing.

For that reason, building a solid customer success team is essential for your business success. The customer success team helps customers get the most out of your product or service and ensures they are happy with their purchase.

But it can be much more than that. Successful customer relations go beyond just getting customers up and running; it’s about ensuring they are happy and continue to be a valuable part of your business over the long term.

In this post, we’ll share tips for developing a strong customer success team to help you improve customer retention and lifecycle.

1. Create the Perfect Employee Onboarding Process

Ideally, you want your new hires to hit the ground running and be productive members of your team from day one. But to do that, you need to have a well-defined onboarding process.

Here are a few key things to remember when creating an onboarding process for customer success teams: 

First, it’s essential to make sure that the new employee understands the company’s products and services. This can be done through a combination of online training modules, hands-on experience with the products, and one-on-one mentorship from a senior member of the team.

Next, ensure that the new employee understands the customer’s needs and how they can handle customer feedback. This can be done through customer support training, which will help the new employee learn how to communicate effectively with customers and understand their issues. 

You can also explain to them the company culture. You might arrange an orientation or cultural training session to educate them about the company’s background, values, and how they are integrated into daily operations. In addition, meeting current workers will provide them with insight into what it’s like to work there. Finally, providing ample moral support to new employees as they transition into their key roles is essential. You can also include regular check-ins with their customer success manager, access to senior team members for mentorship, and plenty of resources to help them learn about the company. We’ll talk about this in the next section.

2. Build a knowledge resource

Giving your team the tools and resources they need to succeed is essential. This includes everything from training on your product or service to customer support materials like case studies and whitepapers to contact information for key stakeholders within your company. 

The goal is to equip your team with everything they need to focus on helping customers achieve their goals.

Your knowledge resource can be a webpage or document containing all the information they need about the product or service. It can include how to set up and use the product, troubleshoot common problems, and contact information for support.

Additionally, having a straightforward process for documenting and tracking customer interactions is helpful. 

For example, if you’re selling a SaaS product, you may give your customer success team a guide to SaaS marketing, covering your business’s whole mental, emotional, and behavioral customer journey. This will help the new employee get up to speed quickly on the ideal customer’s history and needs.

This resource can be updated as needed to contain the latest information. It can also be shared with other company teams to understand what the customer success team does and how they can support them.

Finally, customers should be able to reach out to your team at any time and receive a quick response. So, you should include resources for CRM systems like the call center system, access to customer insights, and training on how to use these tools effectively.

3. Track KPIs through the Customer Success Report Card

A customer success report card highlights areas where customers may need further support.

The first step in progress tracking through the customer success report card is identifying which KPIs to track. This will vary depending on your business and what you are trying to achieve. Still, some common KPIs for customer success include:

• Customer churn – the percentage of customers who leave a company in a given period.
• Customer lifetime value – An estimated value of how much total revenue a business can get from one client. 
• Customer satisfaction – customers’ feelings about the quality of a product or service they receive.
• Net promoter score – A metric that measures how loyal, satisfied, and interested customers are in a company.

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Once you have identified the KPIs you want to track, you need to create a way to measure them. You can use various tools, such as a spreadsheet or dedicated customer success software like Planhat, Guidecx, and Catalyst. 

For instance, Catalyst’s custom dashboards, as shown below, feature the health score and customer success member accountability.

This will help you better understand how your customer success efforts impact your business.  Also, you can identify areas where the customer success team is doing well and areas with room for improvement.

4. Improve planning strategies

Planning and organizing your customer success team can be complex. However, you can follow a few planning strategies to help you build a successful customer success team.

• Identify the goals of the customer success team – what are the specific customer goals that need to be achieved? What are the milestones that need to be reached? Answering these questions will help you determine each team member’s essential skills and experience.
• Identify the right people for the team – The essential skills and qualities of a successful customer success team member are empathy and good communication, and problem-solving skills. You’ll also want to look for people with experience in your industry and a deep understanding of your product or service. 
• Create a process for working with customers – For example, you can segment your customers and create a customer success team for each. This team will be responsible for providing the best possible experience to customers in that segment. 

That process should also include how customers are onboarded, the support they receive, and how their accounts are managed. You can take an idea from this example of a structured customer support team that operates according to a process model.

Last but not least, it is vital to track progress. As stated before, you may monitor KPIs using a customer success report card.  

Project management tools can also help you track and manage your team’s progress and identify areas where additional support may be needed. There are lots of these tools on the market. However, you will find great comparison reviews to help you pick the right platform for your needs. 

Also, regular communication can help identify issues early on so they can be addressed quickly. Creating a safe space for feedback, including customer feedback, will help you make the necessary adjustments to your strategies for customer success.

Conclusion

Building a solid customer success team is essential for any business that wants to thrive. By following these tips, you can create a successful team to help your business retain its customers and grow its reputation.

A robust and cohesive customer success team will ensure that your customer base is happy and continues to be valuable assets to your company.

The post 4 Best Ways How to Build a Strong Customer Success Team appeared first on Customer Happiness Blog.