Building a customer success function

Keep the customers you win: onboarding, service, feedback and retention habits that grow lifetime value.

Who it is for: Growing businesses with repeat or subscription customers that want to reduce churn and increase referrals.

Intermediate · 7 articles · about 50 minutes

What you will learn

  • Design an onboarding experience that gets customers to value quickly
  • Set service standards and handle complaints well
  • Collect feedback and act on it
  • Measure retention and customer lifetime value, and improve both
  • Use a CRM to manage relationships at scale

Articles in this path

  • Customer onboarding – The first weeks after a customer says yes decide whether they stay. A simple onboarding process sets expectations, delivers an early win and prevents the quiet cancellations that follow a messy start.
  • Customer experience – Customer experience is the sum of every interaction a customer has with your business. Learn to map the journey, find the moments that matter and fix the friction that quietly costs you repeat business.
  • Customer service – How to help customers well when they have a question or a problem: channels, response standards, complaint handling and your obligations under the Australian Consumer Law, sized for a small team.
  • Customer feedback – How to ask customers what they think in a way they will answer, make sense of what comes back, act on it and close the loop, without drowning in surveys or chasing a score.
  • Customer retention – Keeping the customers you already have is the cheapest growth available. Learn to measure churn, spot the customers about to leave and build the habits that keep them coming back.
  • Customer lifetime value – Customer lifetime value tells you what a customer is really worth over the whole relationship. Learn to calculate it simply, compare it with acquisition cost and use it to decide where to spend.
  • Customer relationship management – Customer relationship management is a discipline before it is software: one shared record of every customer, what they bought, what they asked and what happens next. Learn how to set it up without overbuying.

Next path: Scaling from 5 to 50 employees