Member Article

How software companies can combine marketing with excellent customer service to increase revenue

Now more than ever, software companies need strong sales pipelines and to keep customers happy. Coronavirus (Covid-19) has turned the world upside down. With the global economy struggling, the most important thing founders can do is look after customers and keep the revenue flowing in.

Marketing and sales, in software companies and across numerous sectors, have adapted in the wake of the global pandemic.

Potential clients want companies that are helpful, that don’t go for the hard sell. At the same time, marketing teams are working harder to achieve the results founders need to keep growing in a challenging economy.

How to adapt marketing and sales during a global pandemic?

During the initial wave of this pandemic, marketing teams have been forced to adapt under unprecedented circumstances. It was important that companies let customers know what they were doing to keep running, and that the services being provided were still operational.

However, since then, marketing and sales teams have stopped being reactive. Now we have a sense what the ‘new normal’ is, businesses can take a more forward-thinking approach than before. One thing to remember is that most companies in the software sector are working from home (WFH). If they weren’t before this, then keeping everyone safe is the right reason to maintain a WFH policy.

Face-to-face meetings have been replaced with Slack, Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Hangouts, and CrankWheel, alongside other solutions.

When it comes to customers, the outward-facing marketing channels haven’t changed. But how they’re used, and the messaging has adapted. Even though companies are no longer in a responsive, crisis mode, there is an acknowledgment that it’s no longer business as usual.

Customer expectations have changed. Brands need to be more helpful, putting customers first with useful content and information.

Use this more helpful approach to win new customers, and cultivate the pipeline more effectively. Interested prospects are going to take more nurturing time than before this. It’s likely to take longer to get a decision, so use automated email campaigns and newsletters (alongside social media and blogs) to keep prospects interested.

How excellent customer service increases revenue?

Happy customers are loyal. Happy customers spend more, refer others, and prove the most valuable case studies possible. Keeping customers, and keeping them happy, is crucial for revenue.

Studies show that SaaS companies that grow slower than 20% annually (year-on-year growth) have a 90% chance of failing within a few years. Churn is a key part of that.

Other studies show it’s 5x cheaper to retain existing customers, which is impossible if they’re not happy with your service, than to secure new ones. Also, increasing customer retention 5%, whether through them spending more, or staying for longer than previous lifetime value records, boosts profits as much as 95%, according to Bain & Company.

Excellent customer service, delivered consistently, keeps customers happy. Especially in times such as this, when clients could easily walk away, you need to know everything possible is being done to look after customers.

Whenever necessary, go above and beyond what a client would normally expect. Always better to exceed expectations than leave a customer feeling undervalued. Ultimately, that is when you lose customers and revenue, and all that could come from having happy customers, such as up-sell and cross-sell opportunities, and referrals.

Now more than ever, assess your client accounts from the perspective of, “How can I work with them, to help them more, while at the same time, ensure they are helping us more, or spending more with us?”

Deliver excellent customer service remotely

Early into this pandemic, any company that wasn’t already placed to deliver remote customer service had to adapt quickly.

In more forward-thinking companies that operate within a cloud-based tech stack, that was easier than in older corporations. Businesses have got used to staff working from home. The challenge now is maintaining high-levels of service for what potentially up to another year, providing the various vaccines are safe and can be manufactured and distributed at scale.

As many European countries are dealing with second waves, alongside the usual challenges of winter, working from home is the only sensible and safe approach for many. Companies need to maintain excellent service throughout. Technology plays an important role in this.

One solution is instant demos and screen-sharing, which you can do with CrankWheel. Hundreds of companies use this around the world to support customer service teams. Next, we look at how to use instant demos to deliver excellent service and increase revenue.

Increase revenue with excellent customer service

Instant Demos are a way of giving a prospect a virtual demo straight away. This can be used in a customer service setting, giving your team a way of explaining a product or service visually, in an immersive way.

Likewise when it comes to screen-sharing or remote control, your customer service team can interact more effectively. Other options naturally should include Live Chat, self-help services, such as FAQs and videos, and AI-powered chatbots.

Customers need to benefit from a wide range of responsive and customer-centric solutions. Use the data and an understanding of your customers needs to determine what to provide, and then implement analytics and feedback surveys to determine how to serve them more effectively. This might mean improving the user experience, or how agents handle customer queries.

Making customer service experiences more immersive and interactive are better for customers and brands. Especially when dealing with on-boarding, technical queries, or complaints. With the right technology solutions and customer focus throughout customer service teams, you can keep them happy and increase revenue.

When customers are happy they stay with businesses for longer. And right now, brands and small businesses need to do everything they can to keep customers and reduce churn.

Key takeaways

We are living in challenging times, and although everyone has got used to the ‘new normal’, life won’t be safely back to normal for some time. Software businesses need to keep customers happy, to retain revenue and maintain customer lifetime value (CLTV).

Working from home is likely to be the norm for some time to come, potentially years. With the right technology and high-levels of service, you can keep customers happy, reduce churn, and increase revenues.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by CrankWheel .