So you’ve figured out your ideal customer: they have a critical problem your product is perfectly suited to solve, and they have the money to pay for it.
But finding your ideal customer was challenging enough - now it’s time to take on an even bigger challenge...
Keeping them for the long run!
A well-crafted post-sales experience is essential in nurturing customer relationships, boosting customer satisfaction, and ensuring brand loyalty.
By integrating artificial intelligence (AI) into your Customer Success strategy, you can take your post-sales efforts to new heights, providing personalized experiences that keep your ideal customers coming back for more.
Post-sales refers to the set of activities and interactions that occur after a customer has made a purchase.
Its primary goal is to ensure the customer obtains and recognizes value out of your products and services, and is delighted by the experience, building a strong foundation for customer retention and loyalty.
To create a better post-sales experience, there are a few components.
To begin, you need to take your customer through a great onboarding experience.
We’ve talked about the value of working to create an excellent onboarding experience before, and as we’re nearly midway through Q3, it’s as true as ever.
And that doesn’t look the same for every customer. Like we said, customers, including your ideal ones, have varying needs with your product.
So ensuring that onboarding is customized for every customer is a key component to a great experience.
As an example, a setup experience for a smaller company might require deeper interactions with a single admin/product champion, whereas onboarding a larger company might require tiers of education and onboarding based on varying user types.
Another critical component of Post-sales is providing a personalized product support experience - and we know how the lines between CS and Support can get blurry.
At some companies, “support” is delivered by the dedicated Support team; while at others, it’s fully on the Customer Success Manager.
No matter how support is handled at your company, ensuring that customers feel heard and get a quick and satisfactory resolution to their queries is, as always, key.
A personalized support experience considers your relationship with the customer.
It’s frustrating if your customer feels like they must educate your Support team about their use case and usage patterns every time they need help.
That should be on you as the vendor (not your customer).
Once you’ve established a top-notch onboarding experience and defined the roles/responsibilities of your CS and Support teams, finding the right balance of interaction with your customer is the next step.
Some customers hold their quarterly business review in high regard, while others care less.
Some want regular email check-ins each month. This totally depends on who your champion is, and their company culture.
So those are the critical components to post-sales, with the big take-away being that each step in the customer journey needs to be personalized for each customer.
Personalization takes time to get right, but leveraging AI and Predictive analytics from day one can be key to getting you there.
Let’s get into it!
AI has revolutionized the way businesses interact with customers, enabling hyper-personalization, data-driven insights, and enhanced efficiency.
The potential for AI is well known already, especially within the last few months, as we’ve seen tools like Chat-GPT blow up.
It can plan trips, write social media posts, and even tell you jokes.
But, the thing that really gets us fired up about AI here at Tingono is its potential for post-sales teams.
AI has the capability to analyze data much faster than we can - the problems that might take us months or years to accomplish, AI can figure out in seconds.
Because data analysis at scale is so difficult, we’ve traditionally fallen back on limiting the scope of our analysis to a few variables from our overall dataset.
But that leaves us with limited Predictive power and a whole set of explanatory factors that paint a full picture of our customers’ health.
With the amount of customer data that we have these days, we’re remiss to lose out on these richer insights.
When you’re a Customer Success Manager who’s managing fifty or more accounts, and they all have varying needs, indicators of success, and goals, you need an AI-powered tool to help you figure out the next best steps for each of them!
When you’re able to use predictive analytics to your advantage, you can get a better picture of all the data your company is collecting these days.
AI does the heavy lifting of figuring out your customer's possible next moves, what might be their best growth path, and how you can retain them for the long term.
And the combination of Predictive AI and Gen AI can take CS to the next level.
Predictive analytics helps you determine which customer accounts have the highest risks and new opportunities, and why.
Then, using Gen AI, you can figure out what communication content resonates the most with your customer.
Pretty cool stuff... and we think using these types of AI in concert is going to separate the winners from the losers in the coming years.
You’ve probably experienced a well-crafted post-sales interaction without even knowing it - it felt seamless.
But you may have also had others where you knew something was off.
You didn’t feel like you got what you expected from the product, or you had a hard time interfacing with the vendor.
And maybe part of that was you weren’t their ideal customer. But, in reality, you could have been, they just didn’t quite know how to best support your needs.
Excellent post-sales is essential for retaining your ideal customers and fostering brand loyalty.
And integrating AI into your Customer Success is the next level of that excellent post-sales.
Using AI-powered Predictive analytics can take your Customer Success from good to great.
You spent enough money getting those ideal customers in the door, so now you need to retain them and grow those relationships!
If you’re looking for the next step in elevating your ideal customers experience, we want to talk to you.
Tingono can help make the work you’re already doing more valuable, and takes the guess work out of the next best steps.
Ready? Let’s go!