5 Customer Success Problems and How to Solve Them

Good customer success is all about communication. The more you understand your clients and help them achieve their goals, the better your service will be.

In fact, that’s a core belief here at Livestorm. We’re building products to help companies solve problems. The more we understand our customers, the better our services will be.

But it’s hard to be in constant communication with every client. Customer success teams are always swamped.

So you need to find ways to interact with as many clients possible, quickly and easily.

Webinars are perfect for this. They let you communicate to groups of users at once, yet still be responsive to individual questions and issues. The result is a low-effort presentation for your CS team, which still feels personalized to the user.

Let’s look at 5 key customer success challenges, and how webinars help you overcome each one.

Problem 1: Insufficient customer visibility

Some CS teams have a high level of one-to-one contact with customers. They know that key accounts are in good shape. They also understand what these key accounts want to achieve, and have a plan in place to help them get there.

If you can maintain this level of care, that’s fantastic.

As you grow and scale, it becomes unreasonable to expect this for every single customer. You may not have the time to constantly check in face to face. Often, it’s just not necessary.

It is necessary, however, to know as much as possible about your customers, and to make sure that they’re happy with your services. Otherwise, you risk a high level of churn.

How to increase customer visibility with webinars

As your customer base grows, you need to think of ways to communicate on a one-to-many level. But you also need communications to feel personal, and for clients to feel like they’ve been heard.

Webinars are perfect for this because:

• You get to speak to a large number of clients at once
• You can ask questions and get a general sense of how people feel
• Customers can ask you questions in return, and you learn about their biggest problems
• They’re far quicker and easier than spending hours on calls

It’s a bit like holding an “all hands” meeting with a group of customers. You touch base, hear their biggest challenges and concerns, and then leave with a better sense of how they feel about your products.

Problem 2: Losing customers during onboarding

Some products are ready to use right out of the box. Even better, they’re intuitive and most clients have used something like them before.

But as technology changes and new options become available, customers need more help getting started. Because no matter how simple and logical your products are, people are still bound to get confused.

So you need to help them get set up. But as we just discussed, you’re unlikely to have time to deal with each new user individually.

Here’s where webinars can be a lifesaver.

Why webinars are so good for onboarding

The best way to get users started quickly is to walk them through the process. If you could only show them where to click and what each section does, they’d be able to use your products to their full ability.

This is actually the perfect way for CS teams to use webinars. You can share your screen and explain the onboarding process step-by-step, with every new customer watching closely.

Plus, you can ask questions and get to know them a little better, and they get to meet the smiling faces behind the company.

Regular onboarding webinars help you show new users how to get started properly, without having to deal with each of them one by one. And you can even pre-record these webinars so that customers can watch them as soon as they sign up, rather than waiting until the next live session.

Problem 3: Too many non-essential tasks

One common theme among customer success managers: there’s just never enough time. You have support tickets to deal with, help documents to write, and even internal training for your teammates. And the real work - helping customers achieve their biggest goals - gets pushed to the side.

This is a challenge even for hyper-organized teams.

You need to find ways to automate some of the simple stuff, and especially minimize tasks that don’t serve your clients directly. They’re the ones who need your attention.

How webinars give you more time for client work

Hopefully you’re starting to see a pattern. The more you can communicate from one to many - clients, colleagues, whomever - the more time you save.

Tasks like training seminars can easily be done through webinars. Is it your job to show the sales, marketing, and administrative teams how to use a new feature? Instead of going team-by-team, have them join you remotely for a webinar.

You can then record these sessions, and you won’t have to painstakingly walk through new processes again. Everyone in the company can access them whenever they need.

And our next problem can be solved in much the same way.

Problem 4: Too many frequently asked questions

Find yourself answering the same questions over and over, and having to walk confused customers through relatively simple issues?

Helping customers is definitely an essential task - in fact it’s the essential tasks for customer success teams. But that doesn’t mean that every one of these calls is time well spent.

Once again, you can automate much of this work, leaving you time for more complicated and pressing issues.

How to solve FAQs with webinars

You can probably predict 70% of the support tickets you’re going to receive each week. You know what the most common issues are with your products or services, and you may even know exactly which users are most likely to hit them.

Webinars give you two great ways to deal with all of these questions at once:

1. Host regular, live webinars where you handle the top 5-10 FAQs from customers.
2. Use pre-recorded webinars to avoid presenting the same topics over and over. You could even create a series of short, 2-5 minute walkthroughs to help users help themselves.

The goal, as always, is to reduce the amount of on-the-phone time you have with customers who can actually handle problems themselves. Since lots of customers don’t actually enjoy phone calls in the first place, this helps them deal with issues in their own time, as soon as they find an issue.

Problem 5: Struggling to explain the product vision

An important job for customer success is to keep clients up to date. When new features or services become available, it’s your job to get the client base using and loving them.

Even when new features aren’t ready yet, clients still need to know what’s on the horizon. A client may be thinking of leaving for a competitor simply because you’re lacking one or two small things.

Show them what’s coming in the next quarter or two, and they may be happy to wait.

This is better for clients, because they learn to use and enjoy the full capacity of your product. But it’s may also be a chance to upsell and increase the value of each account. Which is probably one of your top KPIs.

How webinars help you show your product roadmap

Webinars are the perfect place to demonstrate new features. If they’re technical or nuanced, this can be hard to achieve with a simple email. Your other choice is calling top clients to give them demos in-person.

Instead, webinars let you preview the new features (and their countless benefits!) live in front of as many clients as possible. They can even follow along on their own account and get the new features set up in real time!

As for the wider product vision? Here’s you chance to pull in a product manager or the CEO, and have them present to your full user-base what’s coming up.

In fact, this is exactly what we do here at Livestorm. We love to host end-of-year webinars for our customers, to remind them of all the updates we made in the last year, and to preview what’s coming soon.

And the best part of these product vision webinars is always the live Q&A at the end. This lets you speak directly to clients (once again), and to hear what they’d like to see in the near future.

You come away with a pockets full of new ideas, and happy customers who’ve had a chance to contribute. Win, win.

Make webinars a part of your customer success strategy

Customer support can be a thankless task. You spend the bulk of your time fixing an endless stream of problems and complaints, often without recognition from your colleagues. You have the tough conversations and deal with the tricky issues.

That’s vital, but it’s not customer success. Good customer success means helping as many customers as possible achieve their goals, without wasting too much time on the little things.

In order to do this, you need to be able to communicate on a large scale, while still keeping things as personalized as possible. Luckily for you, webinars are perfect for this.

As we’ve shown, webinars let you present key messages to everyone who wants to listen, and they still have the chance to ask questions and interact. For CS teams trying to inspire customers and encourage good habits, that’s a wonderful tool to have.