The Essential Guide to

Customer Success

To understand your customers on a deep level, it’s important to use technology to track user data, gather input, and monitor how your moves are affecting the customer as well as ROI.

In order to spot churn risk and identify customer needs, it’s important to set up a customer health index (CHI) and track customer feedback in real time.

If you want your Customer Success plans to flourish, it will take a company-wide adoption of outcomes-based metrics and processes.

In a nutshell, Customer Success is about a business being proactive while customer service is about being reactive. A common place where customer service pops up is when customers have problems. In those cases, they submit tickets, send emails, and make phone calls. Hopefully, the Service or Support team resolves those problems, and customers continue on their way. That’s customer service.

Account management is a fairly dated concept from the agency era. In this model, account managers woo dissatisfied customers and handle problems as they arise. Like customer service, it focuses on case-by-case interactions, and it’s reactive. Also, the account management mindset is often different from Customer Success management—focusing more on money coming in rather than meeting customer needs.

Customer Success goes miles beyond account management. Rather than focusing on problems, it seeks opportunities and solutions proactively, by collecting and leveraging as many data points as possible about the customer. What’s more, Customer Success informs strategy; it helps businesses better understand the customer experience and lifecycle, so they can improve it. On top of all that, Customer Success team members focus on the customer and how that customer can succeed as opposed to only focusing on how the company can succeed. It’s a mindset shift that sparks big rewards for everyone.

In the technology industry, the days of locking customers in for life with contracts and technological barriers—à la traditional enterprise sales—are over. Instead, customers hold the power. Most SaaS companies now rely on free trials, freemium models, or other recurring revenue models to succeed. Within these models, companies need their customers to see the value in their product right away and stay engaged with it consistently in order to grow.

Tech businesses that can manage renewal conversations better are able to grow faster and require less capital. And Customer Success provides the insight, organization, and team to set up productive, meaningful, and successful renewal exchanges.

Recurring revenue models require companies to start by crafting a minimal viable product (MVP). Then, through an iterative process—typically driven by user feedback—you need to improve that product over time. That means you have to understand your users and work to cut down churn to thrive. Customer Success focuses on spotting churn red flags, but it also actively uses data to enhance the customer’s experience.

Ultimately, CS teams glean valuable feedback from customers. When they combine that information with the customer health data, they can inform product and development teams to create proactive enhancements and additions. Done right, customers will have resolutions to problems they didn’t even know they had yet. Simply put, if customers don’t have any problems, there’s no reason to leave.

Customer Success doesn’t just keep revenue in the business; it also helps generate more revenue at a lower cost. That’s because, with technology companies, opportunities to upsell and cross-sell are sitting within the product. Customer Success provides a mechanism for not only creating these chances but also capitalizing on them.

Customer Success software connects with your business’s customer relationship management (CRM) software and your company’s product. From there, it monitors product user activity and CRM inputs. And through intelligent algorithms, the software maps trends, reports stats, and makes predictions. Additionally, it allows CS teams to add context from phone, email, chat, and in-person interactions.

CS support is what makes the client success platform a solution. It takes the software and gives it legs to run. The day of the stand-alone tool in tech business has passed. Now, companies need software and services that work together to identify solutions and turn them into more positive experiences.

Customer Success can make or break a business because it’s the act of proactively retaining customers and strengthening those relationships. And your strategy will lay out a path to stronger relationships as well as more revenue.

Not sure where to start? Here are a few questions to guide your strategy:

• What does your existing customer experience look like?
• How can CS impact your customers and their experiences?
• Which content and communications channels do your customers prefer?
• What’s the appropriate rhythm for engaging customers and monitoring them throughout their lifetime?

Once you have these answers, use them to map out your full Customer Success lifecycle. Once you’ve formed the Customer Success lifecycle, determine whether your organization can support it. And then construct the right model for your organization.

CS team members are your doers. They’re the people who transform your company from reactive to proactive. To lead a winning CS team, you can lean on your solution to ensure your customers stay engaged, realize value quickly, and are moving through your product in the best way possible.

Your organizational structure will depend on your company, but here are some functional roles that often make up excellent Customer Success teams:

• Customer Success Managers (CSMs)
• CS Operations Leaders
• Onboarding or Implementation Representatives
• Training Representatives
• Professional Services Experts
• Upsell and Cross-Sell Reps