As the CEO of an SME business, 2020 wasnt exactly smooth sailing.
It wasnt easy, but it looks like we survived.
We werent the only ones, and most of our peers obviously felt the same trauma.
As a B2B business, everybody found themselves in the same boat rocking back and forth.
This meant that the way we communicated with, sold to, and dealt with our customers changed.
The year 2020 was one that changed B2B business forever.
It required the adoption of new approaches and techniques to get by.
We realized that businesses would minimize their costs, meaning they might want to stop using our software.
It’s free, every week, in your inbox.
Its a strategy that involves being proactive to customer problems, instead of reactive.
I could go on about CS strategies until the cows come home.
But in the interest of your interest, Ill break it down into some smaller points.
A perpetual education and re-education of customers
CS revolves around shared education.
After educating yourself, educate your customers… and never stop.
Stay in touch
Were proactive.
Were always adding features and tweaking our system.
Above all, a successful CS strategy requires complete internal cooperation of the business that is practicing it.
We do not doubt that our Customer Success strategy was one of the main reasons we survived this year.
Its no longer impressive.
If anything, its the bare minimum.
In 2021, we need to go further in our personalization efforts.
This all starts with immediate lead enrichment upon a users registration with a brand.
Put some effort into it.
In my opinion, the definition of personalization got lost when Mail Merge was invented.
In business, personalization should mean giving your brand a personality; humanizing it.
Simply put, our different buyers have different preferences.
This means we cant expect the same approach to work for everybody.
In 2021, we plan to experiment with even more promotional, distribution, and purchase channels.
Eventually, it just became a general user community, rather than being focussed on pandemic response.
Our community empowered us in so many different ways, giving us benefits that we never planned for.
The pandemic drove both brands and consumers into deeper relationships with technology.
Above everything else in 2020, we understood just how nice it is to be nice.
Our users, the exact ones that gave me this platform to share my advice, needed us.
Now, its more important than ever to close feedback loops promptly and satisfactorily to our customers.
In return, we were able to ask our customers for something in return.
A business can get bogged down in bad times at any time, not just during the pandemic.
Sometimes its easy to get lost in the suit-and-tie of it all; to lose faces behind company logos.
Overall, were grateful that we were fortunate as a SaaS business.
Were blessed to be online, with the coronaviruss impact kept to a minimum.
Were blessed to have been able to learn from it, rather than to be beaten by it.
Im blessed to be able to share the lessons Ive learned from this year with my fellow business community.
After all, as I said in the article… we need each other.
I hereby proclaim 2021 to benormal.
Story byAndrei Petrik
Andrei is a customer relations expert with vast knowledge about business processes.
When he’s not churning out code, he’s out on the water catching some fish!
