What is Customer Success?
Let me start this article by addressing the question I’m usually asked when I tell people about my role with Intelocate: “What the heck is Customer Success?” Although it might sound like something more familiar, like customer support or tech support, the reality is that it’s actually quite different.
Both customer support and tech support are typically focused on fixing a specific problem a customer is experiencing, and moving onto the next one. They’re both important parts of customer service, but they’re not focused on building direct, and trusted, relationships with customers.
Customer Success, on the other hand, is all about relationship building. Instead of tackling specific, one-off support requests, it’s about understanding the customer’s business, how their organization is structured, how their industry works, and, more importantly, how to help them get the best possible results when they use our platform.
Is Customer Success a New Trend?
As a role, Customer Success is not something that’s been around for all that long. When I started in Customer Success, six or seven years ago now, it was still a very new role. Even now, most businesses run with separate tech and customer support departments, with very little crossover beyond an account manager who acts as a go-between to parlay customer requests, and little else.
At Intelocate, though, we’ve always been all-in on Customer Success, and it’s something that’s woven into our DNA as a business. So how does that benefit our customers on an ongoing basis?
Typically, we deal with enterprise-level, multi-location businesses that are used to the typical account manager’s “let me see what I can do” approach – which they tend to accept as the norm due to the legacy platforms they use which haven’t really evolved to stay in tune with modern business needs.
What Does Customer Success Look Like at Intelocate?
What we provide to our customers from day one is what could be considered a “white glove” approach to Customer Success. Our aim is to build a direct relationship with our customers. We want to let them know that we’re there for them, we’re reliable, we’re hands on, and if they have any kind of problem, we’re here to help them get to the bottom of it.
Our detailed onboarding process is one that we’ve honed over several years, and allows us to get right to our customers’ pain points. What problem do they need Intelocate to solve, and how can we work with them to ensure the platform delivers that solution? To make this happen requires empathy, and understanding of people.
Humans aren’t machines, and there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to building a relationship. In my role I need to understand who I’m dealing with, who the key stakeholders are, who’s “championing” Intelocate internally, and then work with everyone to build trust, and show that we really are here to help them succeed.
What Are the Benefits?
It’s about understanding how our customers use the platform. Working with them daily gives me a great opportunity to identify improvements, whether in terms of user experience, or functionality, and pass that information onto our incredible development team to help improve the platform. Making sure that our customers know, and understand, that their feedback has a huge impact on Intelocate’s direction is extremely important to everyone on the team!
I can’t help but feel a little cheesy when I trot out the line that “our success is measured by our customers’ success”, but that’s genuinely the way we operate here at Intelocate.
Our Customer Success program has proven to be hugely beneficial not only for our customers, but also for the company as a whole. It has enabled us to build real, meaningful relationships with our customers, gain a better understanding of the issues they face running their businesses, and continually improve what we believe to be the best multi-location operations platform on the market today!
We set a high bar when it comes to Customer Success, but our customer satisfaction ratings have made it all worth the effort! By understanding that there’s no cookie-cutter approach to ensuring customer success, and treating every business, and each of their employees, as unique, we truly believe we are building something special here at Intelocate – and we’d love for you to be part of it!
