In recent years, the role of customer success has become increasingly important in various companies, as it provides various kinds of support to existing customers. Customer success is a role that is deeply involved in the business of their clients, promoting the use of their products and maximizing their profits.
The support of a customer success representative can help clients succeed in their business and the quality of that support can be a major reason to use and retain the service.
This article describes the “three touches” that are specific actions to achieve customers’ success: high touch, low touch, and tech touch, and we also explain the “community touch” that works across all three of them.
It has become more challenging to acquire new customers in many industries due to reasons such as maturity of the market and intensified competition. In such industries, increasing sales from existing customers is necessary for growth.
The success of existing client companies will be the source of your companies’ growth and success. As a result, customer success approaches have become essential to support your customer companies’ success.
One of the most important metrics for companies trying to achieve customer success is Customer Lifetime Value (CLV), which is a measure of how much profit a company earns from a customer company over the entire course of their business relationship.
With an CLV perspective, you have to think about the customer marketing costs, i.e., “how much can I spend to keep my customers coming back?”.
In order to achieve customer success, the optimization of actions towards “customer companies”, you need to consider the CLV, an indicator for “your company”. In terms of CLV, customer companies can be categorized into three different models: high touch, low touch, and tech touch.
Customer companies are classified into three segments based on CLV.
High touch: Customer companies with high CLV
Low touch: Customer companies with middle CLV
Tech touch: Customer companies with low CLV
While there is no fixed number to classify companies to the above segments, they should be evaluated in accordance with the CLV of each business.
These segments are all important, however, the resources available for customer success are finite, so taking a clear approach by focusing on high-touch customers with high CLVs is critical to maximize customer success.
High touch customers are the most important ones.
For this segment, you need to provide generous resources and sometimes personalized support to increase their engagement. This includes regular support by assigning individual CS staff, monthly face-to-face MTGs, and sharing information to the management layers.
Since the high touch segment represents the overall customer companies, commitment to their growth will lead to your company’s growth. In addition, by taking this approach, you will gain a deeper understanding of your customers, which in turn contributes to improving your overall approach to customer success.
The low touch segment requires a somewhat more efficient approach.
This often involves standardized support for each industry or job type, assigning a CS representative who is in charge of multiple companies, and face-to-face MTGs every few months. It is important to standardize and streamline the knowledge you gained from the high touch segments.
For the tech touch segment, you need a more efficient approach that includes support without human intervention.
This often includes sending segmented emails to existing customers, automated support with chatbots, and maintenance of FAQs.
Since the churn rate of tech touch customers is generally high, you should focus on how to expand the scale of customer engagement to low-middle touch.
So far, we have discussed the concept of three touches in approaching each segment of the customer companies.
In this section, we will introduce the fourth touch, the “community touch”, which functions across all three touches, not only by approaching your customers, but also by allowing customers to influence each other and provide feedback to your company.
Community touch can be described as “building relationships with customer companies that can co-create value”. It is expected to create a flow where customers can solve their problems by interacting with each other and sharing their know-how, and send appropriate feedback to your company to improve the product and lead to success for entire customers.
In order for community touch to succeed, you need to encourage the organic flow of information spread from customer companies. The high touch customer companies you have a deep connection with often help achieving customer success among the whole community by spreading information, which increases knowledge about the other segments, and encourages information exchanges.
Specific measures include creating a members-only site for client companies, managing user communities using Facebook or Slack, and holding events such as user meet-ups.
We have explained the three touches of customer success: high touch, low touch, and tech touch, as well as the community touch that crosses each of them.
The success of customers is the success of the company, and the growth of customers is the growth of the company.
Community touch is an approach to nurture overall knowledge and support success by fostering connections not only between a company and its customers, but also between customers.
The concept of customer success, especially community touch, will become more and more important in the future business scene where coexistence is essential.
