BLOG
Five Customer Engagement Best Practices to Develop, Retain, and Grow Relationships
Authentic customer engagement is vital to long-term positive relationships with the people who use your products and services. From onboarding to adoption and value realization, your organization should be generating a regular cadence of customer interactions. How do your current interactions stack up to these five customer engagement best practices?
Effective engagement activities start with understanding your customers’ desired outcomes. They continue with interactions that help them plan for success with your products and services.
Within all those interactions, it’s critical that clear expectations be set for the type and level of services you can provide your customer. When all members of your team know these expectations, they can then focus of meeting them—and strive to exceed them.
To accelerate time-to-value, nurture long-term relationships, and drive recurring revenue, leverage these five customer engagement best practices:
1. Sales Hand-Off
Define an effective hand-off from the Sales to Service team.
2. Onboarding
Provide self-guided or assisted onboarding to all new customers.
3. Customer Outcomes Assessment
Identify customer needs and desired outcomes.
4. Success Planning
Provide self-guided or assisted success planning.
5. Regular Interactions
Assess customer health, provide planning and conduct business and technical reviews.
Key Customer Engagement Metrics to Know and Use
To assess the effectiveness of your Customer Engagement activities, consider the following metrics:
- Success Plan Rate – Percent of eligible customers with success plan.
- % Onboarded – Percent of new customers successfully onboarded.
- Time to Value – The average time to achieve outcomes and realize value from product.
- Adoption Rate – Percent of customers to reach adoption milestones.
- Customer Touchpoints – The number and frequency of customer interactions through both digital and personal channels.
How effective are your customer engagement efforts?
I’m here to help you get the answers you need.
Reach out anytime to get answers and insights about the best ways to engage and retain your customers. Use the chat button at bottom right, send an e-mail, or click on my calendar to schedule a specific time to talk.
Ready to commit to a Customer Success strategy? Learn the 5 critical milestones.
Exclusive ServiceXRG White Paper:
Ensuring a Successful Journey to Customer Success
Related Articles
Service Sales Enablement and Overcoming Objections
This article introduces practices to grow revenue by enabling Sales to sell services and to overcome customer objections.
Retention Strategies to Keep the Customers You Have
This article introduces retention strategies to help you keep the customers you have.
How Adoption and Success Services Drive Recurring Revenue
Services are the key to maximizing recurring revenue when companies have the capability to define, sell, and deliver the services customers need. Customers that have access to success focused services are 2.8 times more likely to continue and expand existing relationships. Find out if you offer the services your customers need.
Customer Success Management
Customer Success Management encompasses the practices, programs, resources, tools, and metrics required to help customers successfully use products to achieve their desired business outcomes.
Retention is Paramount – Make it a Strategic Priority!
We have become too dependent on electronic surveys and NPS/CSat scores to tell us that our customers are okay. This cannot always provide enough insights to tell us why we lose customers. To reduce churn, you need to do more.
Service Planning Drives Results
To be successful with Services, you must establish a Service plan. To be effective, the Service plan must clearly define the role of Services within your company, prioritize service initiatives necessary to attain prioritized results, and establish metrics to track service performance and outcomes.