Company leaders understand that “getting closer to the customer” is crucial to growth.

Buyers and consumers have more choices than ever. Buyers can access online and mobile channels that provide more ways to buy, give and get recommendations, and talk back to companies.

Today’s customer won’t hesitate to walk away from an established company relationship that doesn’t meet their needs. This holds true for nearly all industries today, and is no longer limited to those serving consumers directly. Businesses in every industry, from retail to government services to healthcare, have to focus on a great customer experience if they plan to continue operating effectively.

At BizLibrary, we see a strong customer service focus as the precursor to customer success, and we believe customer success is “shared success.” It’s when clients look at you as a trusted partner to help deliver business results. When you can help the client deliver bottom line benefits – that will reflect right back to you in a variety of ways.

To adopt a customer focus mindset, the entire organization, including the clients, need to be transformed. We’ve found these seven best practices useful for transforming our own organization, and we think they can help you to develop a truly customer focused team as well.

7 Steps to Achieving Customer Focus and Success

1. Get Executive Buy-In

Like anything that is critical to be implemented across the organization, cultural shifts must start with the leadership team. It’s important to share benefits, concepts, and expected results of having a customer focus mentality.

2. Embed It in Core Values

These should be simple to understand, memorize, and internalize, yet long enough to be meaningful. Your core values should cover how customers, employees, and vendors should be treated at all times.

3. Focus on the Customer in Decision Making

Each and every decision must consider the customer. This is when you can see the shift in culture happening – when someone stops and asks about the impact to a customer. Considering the customer in big and small decisions keeps them at top of mind and ensures the correct decisions are being made.

When thinking of the customer first, sales reps are building better connections. Better connections mean stronger relationships and stronger relationships mean more sales and a better customer lifetime value!

4. Customer Success Team

Take time to evaluate your team. You might be reforming an existing team or building one from the ground up. You might need to break existing habits and develop new ones. A plan for training should be put in place to continue to build the skills of this team.

Keep reading to get a detailed look at steps for building your team with a customer focus mindset.

5. Hiring Processes

Ensure your hiring and interviewing processes are adopted to incorporate the customer success mentality. The core competencies of customer service, communication, and dedication to results should be considered. Take time to ensure each candidate is aligned with core values they’re supposed to reflect.

6. Onboarding

Include time in your onboarding plan for every employee to discuss customer success. Sharing and explaining what success looks like develops an inclusive understanding that everyone is working towards a common goal. Take time to incorporate in the training how their role contributes to the success of the customer.

7. Checks and Balances

To ensure the changes and modifications you’re putting in place are having positive impact, it’s important to have data and feedback from the clients on a regular basis. Consider sending out an NPS (Net Promoter Score) survey, developing a client advisory board, or asking for feedback consistently. When receiving data and feedback, take time to evaluate and respond carefully.

Building Your Customer Success Team

Customer success team structures can vary wildly from organization to organization depending on products, client base, and overall revenues.

In today’s highly competitive environment, successful organizations have dedicated teams focused on customers. These teams build relationships, add value, increase satisfaction, serve as internal client advocates, and ultimately help their clients reach successful business outcomes.

At BizLibrary, we’ve worked hard to build a proactive, highly supportive client success model, and we want to share what we’ve learned in key areas of team structure, creating job descriptions, recruiting candidates, interviewing processes, and what to look for with onboarding and training.

Team Structure

In the past, we’ve experimented with a variety of team structures. Our first few tries weren’t quite right, but since we value the freedom to fail here, we allowed those stumbles to lead us toward better options. You may have to try a few things before you get things right for your team, but here’s what our current structure looks like, which is working very well.

The two key business challenges facing our team are the need for mastery of diverse skills necessary to work with the client, and scalability.

Every client at BizLibrary has a dedicated Client Success Manager, who helps them develop strategies and goals, implement our solutions, execute planned strategies on an ongoing basis, and evaluate results. Those managers are supported by Directors and Solutions Consultants to ensure they have all the tools and knowledge they need to help our customers succeed.

Other vital parts of the team structure are Implementation and Technical Support. Everyone interacting with the client contributes to their success in different but integral ways.

Job Descriptions

Once the team structure is in place, you need to write job descriptions. There are many ways to approach job descriptions, but we choose to be specific and elaborate within descriptions as a way to establish clear expectations.

When writing a job description for recruiting purposes, we convert the job description and requirements to include “scientific statements” – meaning that the candidate can prove what I am asking of them. For example, a recruiting statement might be, “has effectively managed 50+ accounts with monthly contact.”

Recruiting Candidates

When recruiting candidates, we promote from within the company through an active development program. We also target existing customers for referrals, and we source from vendors, direct or indirect competition. But no matter the source, the candidate must have a record of success in previous customer-facing roles.

We also look for individuals that have a strong online presence through LinkedIn. This gives us a chance to view how they work, what they take pride in, and what they view as success.

Skills to Look For

There are key traits and skills we typically look for and seek validation of during the recruiting and interviewing process.

• Strong personality: an optimistic and positive attitude is everything
• Passionate about customer success: we need to hear that candidates are motivated by the success of others
• Curiosity: must have someone who is naturally curious and willing to learn
• Strong organizational skills: must be displayed and tested
• Farmer mentality: clearly understand how relationships are built and a willingness to be an advocate for their customers
• Metric driven: need someone who is goal-oriented and focused on results

Onboarding

Regardless of specific roles, all members of your customer success team should receive training during onboarding that covers products/services, processes, and people:

• Products/Services: what do we offer and how does it impact and help customers?
• Processes: what do we follow internally, how do we work, and what makes us unique?
• People: this covers all roles and departments in the company – how do we all work together to ensure customer success?

Once those three areas are mastered, onboarding shifts to understanding the customers they will be working with directly.

Our checklist can help you make the most of your onboarding program!

Training for All-Around Customer Focus

Once the onboarding process is complete, training will still continue – it’s constant and present on a daily basis. Each employee should have an individual development plan to further their skills and work on any gaps.

Training is supported in our organization from the top down. We’ve adopted a mentality of “Smarter Every Day,” and often share with each other different things we’ve learned on our internal communication platforms. This helps with the growth and progression of the team as a whole.

If you’re looking to adopt a training program that provides ongoing learning, helps employees develop a wide range of skills, and brings about positive results for your business, our online training solution can help. We have thousands of videos covering a wide variety of soft skills such as communication and building relationships.

In addition, our personalized upskilling LMS features help employees to get targeted training that is personalized to their current skill levels and what they need to learn to be more successful and move forward in their career.