Do you tend to focus more on customer service or customer success? While they may share similar names and overlap in some ways, there's a distinct difference between the two. While customer service is often a reactive approach to a customer problem, customer success means helping your customers avoid the problem in the first place. Ensuring customer success requires you to look at the bigger picture and take a strategic approach. Instead of focusing on short-term solutions, the goal with customer success is to focus on the long-term success of your customers. Since customer success is about growth and not just retaining customers, it helps you bring in more revenue through upselling, cross selling and referrals.

Hiral Atha, founder and CEO of MoveoApps, says that this is the year to transform your content marketing into a vehicle for customer success. Use your content to assist customers throughout their journey with you, from shopping to choosing the right product and effectively using it. We discuss Atha's tips for using your content for customer success in this issue of Promotional Consultant Today.

Focus on self-help content. Half of customers think it's important to solve product or service issues themselves. Give them the tools they're searching for by providing self-help content such as enhanced user guides or resources that answer frequently asked questions. When you can predict problems your customers could run into, you can create content to help them avoid those problems.

Help customers best use your product. Atha suggests writing exciting blog posts about creative new ways customers can use your products or explaining innovative features they may not have discovered. Customers rarely have time to explore, so develop content to help customers maximize their experience with you and your offerings.

Send post-purchase emails. Instead of waiting for customers to find your content, reach out to them with post-purchase emails that include helpful links, free tips and other purely helpful content. The idea isn't to sell them something but create value. Doing this helps you develop a personal bond with your customers and establish trust.

Foresee problems and fix them upfront. Rather than wait for your customers to experience a problem, start working on a solution from the beginning. Use analytics to understand where customers may run into problems and if you discover something you haven't already addressed, include it in an email blast. You can also monitor social media to see what your customers are saying.

When you set out to create content with intent, you stand a better chance of your customers sticking with you, even when they experience an occasional problem. Be sure your blog is updated with helpful information and be proactive about sending customers useful videos or insight-packed emails. Ultimately, if your content helps customers solve their problem, you have successfully created content for customer success.

Source: Hiral Atha is the founder and CEO of MoveoApps, a mobile apps development company. With more than 14 years of experience in tech and software development, she has managed and led several app development projects from ideation to implementation.