From onboarding to expansion, learn how customer success increases revenue and retention. Build a strategy that fuels long-term growth.
Deji Ayoola
Senior Content Marketing Specialist
May 22, 2025
•
10 Mins Read
In the quest for revenue growth, businesses often focus on sales and marketing, forgetting that they are just a part of the revenue puzzle. Many pay little attention to customer success.
In this article, we’ll show you 5 customer success basics that will help you drive retention, increase revenue, and build brand loyalty. The principles we’ll share are broadly relevant and widely adaptable, so they’ll apply regardless of your industry.
Customer success is the proactive engine that turns satisfied customers into repeat buyers, brand advocates, and long-term revenue streams. Unlike customer support (which is reactive), customer success is proactive. It involves anticipating customer needs, identifying roadblocks, and delivering continuous value. It transforms your relationship with customers from transactional to strategic.
Why this matters for your bottom line:
Here are 3 simple statistics that paint a clear picture:
According to Bain & Company, increasing customer retention by just 5% can boost profits by 25–95%.
It costs 5–7 times more to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing one.
Loyal customers are more likely to buy again, refer others, and expand their usage over time. This is why when we think about customers, we don’t just factor in how much they’re bringing in today, we instead consider their life time value
So if your goal is sustainable growth and not just sales spikes, customer success must be a core business function.
How Customer Success Increases Revenue
Customer success increases revenue through 2 direct ways:
Increased customer retention rate: When your customers are happy with your product and feel their needs are comfortably met, they are less likely to churn. Fewer lost customers means more consistent income.
Cross-selling & upselling opportunities:As your customer success team builds relationships, they are empowered with the right insights to recommend premium or add-on services that your customers will be receptive to. This boosts the lifetime value of your customers.
It's important to note that there are many indirect ways that customer success also drives revenue, but we will not be covering those here.
Here are 5 customer success basics that every business must prioritize
1. Onboarding That Drives Adoption
Onboarding is the process of guiding new customers through the first stages of using your product or service. A successful onboarding is quick and seamless, it reinforces customer confidence and prevents customer drop-offs. A smooth onboarding experience sets the tone for the entire customer relationship, and directly affects your ability to retain and grow that account.
Here are some onboarding best practices
Keep it simple: Present your new customers with only what is needed. There’s probably a lot of fancy things they can do/achieve with your product or service, but now is not the time to share any of that. Strip out “nice-to-haves” and focus on what’s essential to get started.
Track drop-off points: Onboarding is usually a multi-step process. Continuously use analytics to see what part of your process your users get stuck.
Check on your competitors: You should constantly check on your competitors' onboarding process. How quick is it? How many steps are involved? How much information is presented? Learn from how their process is implemented and continue to refine yours. Ideally, you should review your onboarding process at least once every year
Execute Cross-functionally: Onboarding should be owned by the customer success team, but good onboarding requires multi-departmental collaboration. Work with your product, marketing, and compliance teams to stay aligned on what the customer needs at this stage.
2. Proactive Customer Engagement
After creating a first impression with onboarding, you need to ensure that you are always in conversation with your customers. Continuous conversation builds trust, helps you understand the customer’s goals and positions your company as a long-term partner.
Here are some simple tips to help you engage proactively:
Segment your customers: Immediately a customer is done onboarding, you should segment them. Your segments should be fluid and can be based on different factors like industry type, customer value, product utilization rate, customer risk level and so on. Segmenting makes it easier to tailor your message for each group and also allows you know what groups to prioritize per time.
Use questions to build long-term relationships: You should constantly be asking your customers questions. You should ask what’s working? What’s not? What can we improve on? By asking these questions and acting on the replies, you build long term trust. It's important that you make your follow-ups personal, consistent and human.
Personalize communication: As much as possible, ensure your customer communication is tailored. You can take advantage of user data to customize emails, make calls and share relevant offers.
One last thing, in many situations it's impossible to personalize communication with your entire userbase. In those situations you should prioritize based on the segments you created. “Start small. Focus on your most loyal or high-revenue customers. Measure the results, then scale.” — Anita Asiedu, Chipper Cash
3. Tracking Customer Health and Success
Simply put, it is impossible to improve what you can’t measure. You should take your 3 most relevant metrics and share them across your company on a weekly basis. Customer health should be company wide information.
Key Customer Success Metrics to Track
4. Listening and Acting on Feedback
A customer feedback culture is essential for long term survival. If you’re not constantly listening to your customers and acting on their feedback, they’ll eventually leave you for a competitor.
Here are some smart feedback tips :
Make it easy to give: Your product or service should incorporate feedback features e.g. Feedback boxes, app prompts, post-chat surveys.
Dig deeper: Always ask “why”. When a customer gives a suggestion it's important to try to understand what they’re looking to achieve or what angle they’re coming from. Don’t always assume you know, you may be wrong.
Categorize feedback: Your feedback should be divided into categories e.g. you can have a must-have and a nice-to-have category. You could also have categories for what is possible based on your product/service roadmap.
Close the loop: Follow up with all customer feedback. If a customer complains you should respond as quickly as possible. If they’re feedback is not actionable, you should find a way to communicate this to them. If their feedback gets implemented you should inform them, this makes them feel heard/seen.
In Anita’s team at Chipper, they often call customers who leave harsh feedback. These calls turn critics into advocates.
“People just want to feel heard. When they know you’re listening, they stay.” — Anita Asiedu
Stage 5: Retention and Expansion
Customer retention refers to keeping already existing customers, expansion on the other hand refers to growing the revenue from existing customers. This can be done through:
Cross-selling (additional products or services)
Upselling (premium or higher-value versions)
Renewals and longer-term contracts
Retention and expansion are two sides of the same coin. You retain by delivering value. You expand by identifying new opportunities to serve.
How to Retain and Expand:
Identify at-risk customers early: Monitor customer activity like reduced logins, fewer purchases, declining engagement, or negative survey responses. These are signs they might be losing interest. Set up alerts so your team can step in proactively before they churn.
Set up escalation systems: If a customer gives a low satisfaction score or raises the same complaint multiple times, that’s a red flag. Build an internal system where these kinds of issues automatically escalate to a manager or someone senior enough to take action quickly.
Use social proof: Sometimes the best way to retain or upsell a customer is to show them what’s possible. Share relevant success stories from similar customers with them.
Reward referrals: Loyal customers can become your biggest advocates, but you have to make it worth their while. Offer discounts, credits, exclusive access, or even public recognition when they refer others.
A single retained customer could represent 5x more value over their lifetime than one new acquisition.
Conclusion
If you're looking to reduce churn, increase revenue, and future-proof your business, investing in customer success is essential. The best performing companies turn their customer success teams into strategic growth drivers, not just support desks.
Want to go deeper?
Talstack’s course, Master Customer Success Fundamentals, taught by Anita Asiedu (Ex Director of Global Operations, Chipper Cash), walks you through everything from onboarding to expansion with real life examples.
