11 Questions Answered About Customer Success Strategies Online and Offline

It was my pleasure to answer questions about Customer Success Strategies Online and Offline today on #startupchats. Here are my answers:

1. What is included in a customer success strategy for online, and offline?
   An online/offline customer success strategy starts by mapping the customer journey with the intention of creating a system that monitors & constantly improves the customer experience and facilitates the feedback you need to succeed.
2. What is meant by the customer experience? When does the customer experience begin and end?
   The Customer Experience (CX) is a term coined to describe all points of interaction between an organization and a customer over the duration of their relationship. A good CX means each point matched or exceeded the individual’s expectations.
3. What’s the importance of having strong customer success strategies? What can happen if your customers are unsatisfied?
   There is nothing more convincing than the words of a raving ran or as damaging as an unhappy customer — especially in the digital age we live in, so customer satisfaction critical.
4. What is shopping cart abandonment and what are the factors that result in your customers walking away?
   Abandoned shopping carts is when someone on your website starts buying then stops. It’s a huge problem with #eCommerce today and I am writing a column on this right now.
5. How can brands interact with their customers outside of the buying experience? Which brands stand out?
   Brands should be interacting with their customers regularly outside of the buying experience… social media, online communities & forums, fun contests, video chats, exclusive content and offers, customer appreciation events, case studies, etc.
6. What are the biggest obstacles to implementing customer success strategies? How do you measure results?
   It’s difficult to implement customer success strategies because there are so many personas and so many paths and as such it’s difficult to measure especially with offline customer service strategies that don’t have analytics baked in.
7. What apps do you use to help with customer engagement and satisfaction?
   I use a plethora of customer engagement and satisfaction apps including; Gsuite, Sales Boom, Survey Monkey, Slack, Sumo, Trello, Zoom, Hootsuite and Bookly for myself and my clients.
8. How are brands innovating in the in-person retail space? What are interactive retail models?
   Amazon, Walmart, Nordstrom, Sephora, Apple, Nike, Adidas, Olay, Ikea, Alibaba, Lego are a few that come to mind when I think of innovators in the in-person retail space. Here’s a blog post on this topic that might inspire… https://shoppingcenters.com/article/7-most-innovative-retailers-2018-taking-look-retail-success-stories/
9. How do you build customer loyalty? What customer success strategies do you employ online and offline to build loyalty?
   Our top customer service strategy is to say what we’re going to do, do what we said we were going to do, and then ask how we did. This builds loyalty as does keeping in touch to ensure they know we value them.
10. Do you have a way of receiving feedback from your customers? How do you let customers know that their feedback is being used to make your service better?
    Customer feedback is the lifeblood of any business so we regularly survey & ask:
    1) What can we do better?
    2) What should we do more?
    3) What should we do less?
    And we offer thanks for taking the time to help us improve and for their loyalty.
11. What are your final tips for providing your customers with world-class buying and engagement experiences?
    Technology is changing our customers’ needs and expectations in record time just as our businesses are changing. It’s critical to have a learning system in place to ensure you’re constantly improving your customer experiences.

Lyndon Johnson, Dr. Helen Ofosu, CEDEC, Deborah Sweeney, Dylan Bartlett, Tina Todorovic, Michael Haynes, DivaGirl Fashion & Amazon Web Services and I had a great conversation, with a total of 22 M impressions,  and a total of 730 tweets within the hour. You can view the wakelet here.