4 Types of Customer Success Strategies: Helping You and Your Customers

Customer Success can play a big part in the success of your business.

After all, your customers’ success is your success.

But how exactly do you build a customer success operation for your business?

Today, we will discuss some common customer success strategies you can implement right away.

What is Customer Success?

In case you need a refresher of the basics, let’s review what customer success is.

Customer Success refers to a set of practices of procedures that seek to assist your customer in achieving their success. This could be business success, financial success, personal success or any other kind.

The goal is to guarantee the growth of your relationship with your customer as they become more successful.

For example, a company like Shopify, will implement customer success strategies that help their merchants grow their businesses and become more successful. This in turn makes them larger and better Shopify clients.

Want to learn more? Read our guide on what customer success is and how it can help your business.

Types of Customer Success Strategies

Customer success strategies come in many different shapes and forms. Let’s discuss how these differ from each other how and how they seek to help your customers and your business.

Educational Strategy

Educational Strategies are some of the most common when it comes to implementing customer success strategies. As the name suggests, education strategies focus on educating your customer on subjects that will help them succeed and achieve their goals.

This education can happen via blog posts, courses, webinars, coaching sessions, 1on1 training and more.

For example, a bank might run a series of blog posts about personal finance, teaching their customers how to grow their personal finances. These tips could help customers increase their credit score and allow them to qualify for larger mortgage loans from the bank.

If you think about it, this blog post you are reading right now could be considered a part of our customer success strategy. While Moment is not a Customer Success company, we know our customers can use knowledge on customer success strategies to grow their business.

Very meta, I know.

Funding Strategies

Sometimes, all that your customers need to grow is some additional cash flow.

Funding initiatives are more common in the B2B (Business-to-Business) space as they often involve large amounts of capital.

A good example of this strategy is Shopify Capital, where Shopify will provide capital to small Shopify businesses in order to grow its operations. They take no equity in the business and the loan can be repaid via a percentage of future sales.

This strategy increases the chances of smaller businesses to become larger and more successful Shopify customers, therefore increasing the revenue they generate for Shopify in the future.

Collaboration Strategies

Sometimes, two minds are better than one.

Collaboration strategies can help your customers get more involved with your business and vice versa.

While these strategies can be hard to manage and implement, they usually pay off with increased customer loyalty as your customers feel as they are directly involved with your company and product.

For example, software companies can open source their software in order to allow their customers to be involved in the development of the very same tools that will help them succeed.

Resource Strategies

Sometimes, providing additional tools and resources can be more helpful than capital funding.

A good example of this strategy occurs in most colleges and universities.

Most colleges will have a career center where students can access job posts, get assistance through the application process, practice for interviews, have their resumes reviewed and more.

While colleges and universities are not employment agencies, they provide these resources to guarantee the success of their students (and therefore increase their school’s employment rate).

Closing Thoughts

As you can now tell, Customer Success strategies come in many types.

However, the best strategy for your business and your customers will depend on the nature of your business.

Is it better to educate your customers or to collaborate directly with them?

Whatever the case may be, you should be striving to help your customers along their own path to success.