Every SaaS business wants to expand and succeed. You should connect your company’s targeted outcomes to your client’s desired outcomes in order to do so in a customer-centric manner. Use the Customer Success Playbook to synchronize those two sets of objectives.
As your product evolves, it’s important to provide your customer success team with a successful approach for navigating customer interactions. Customer Success playbooks are one approach to accomplish this.
What is a Customer Success Playbook?
A playbook is a set of actions, next moves, and strategic things that Customer Success Managers (CSMs) can use to assist clients in achieving a scalable goal or aim. CSMs can use playbooks to create repeatable processes to help them get more accomplished with their clients.
A Customer Success playbook is a list of proactive, and best practice actions that CSMs must perform! It is a series of tasks that can be delegated to an account or a group of users at different points of their customer journey to help them adopt your product successfully. At every point of the customer journey, playbooks enable teams to establish repeatable, targeted, and scalable customer journeys.
What should be included in a Customer Success playbook?
Let’s have a look at the different components of a Customer Success playbook.
- Tasks for Customer Success Managers.
- Milestones that the customer will achieve at different stages in their journey.
- Triggers and alerts for mapping the entire customer journey. These help CSMs and the customer success team to bring the customer back on track if there has been a deviation from the original plan.
- Detailed steps/actions. It’s critical to be very clear about the actions in order to allow as little space for misinterpretation as possible.
- The goal, team, and timeline. Crucial to state the intended goal, which team(s) will be managing, and the time required for completing the processes.
How do you create a playbook?
Typically, there are 7 steps in building a customer success playbook:
- Identifying Customer pain points– The very first step is to determine why the playbook is required in the first place. Renewals are required for consistent recurring revenue in our case. To get high renewal rates, you must keep track of all touchpoints.
- Setting a playbook goal– Each playbook’s purpose will be different. You can work on tactics to reduce churn, increase user engagement, or increase product uptake. The list goes on and on. The optimal play is to optimize a part of the client experience from your playbook.
- Defining where the playbook goes along the customer lifecycle– Playbooks serve a variety of purposes. This means they’ll be triggered at various stages along a customer’s journey. It’s crucial to include this information so that there’s no ambiguity about when a playbook should start.
- Segmenting the customers- You’re aware of the problems, objectives, and when to activate a playbook. Because one playbook won’t fit all! The use cases are different, therefore segmentation helps to club clients with similar needs. It also makes monitoring, targeting, and reporting much easier.
- Adding the Tasks and Instructions- You’ve all the information that you need. You understand who the playbook is for, what their difficulties are, and what their end aim is. All you need now are the playbook’s instructions, actions, and “plays.” Sending out notifications, making a phone call, using a particular email template, or creating meeting agendas are all examples of activities.
- Reporting on the playbook’s effectiveness.
- Follow-ups– Keep in touch and follow up! Proactive tactics are the foundation of customer success. Get to the bottom of why a given result did not turn out the way you expected. Your game plans aren’t ideal.
Suggested Read: Guide to creating a playbook
9 Customer Success Playbooks every CS team should have!
Successful Partnership kick-off Playbook
When presenting a new client, the first step should be to set clear expectations. Parties should be aware of what and what not to expect. You only get one chance to make a good first impression. If you can begin your partnership meeting by addressing key themes and harmonizing partner expectations, you’ll almost certainly transform the nature of your relationship.
Check out our Partnership Kickoff template to know more!
Customer Onboarding Playbook
The customer Onboarding stage is the first potential point of churn. So it goes without saying that without a proper onboarding framework, it’s impossible to control the churn. We’ve put together an onboarding framework to make it easier for you to create an onboarding process.
Suggested Resource: Customer Onboarding Template
Customer Health Score playbook
Customer Health Score is a data-driven method of assessing a customer’s overall satisfaction with a product or platform. When you develop from a small business to a large one, it becomes an inextricable component of your customer success process.
Because of the large consumer base, it is hard to reach out to each and every one of them, and as a result, you may miss important warning signs! Even if you reach out, it’s difficult to know whether your consumers will be able to fulfill their goals without a Health Score.
Pro tip: Customer Health Score Template
Customer Journey Playbook
The Customer journey, also known as the User journey, guarantees no important communication touchpoint misses itself. Every interaction with a user holds the potential to increase product engagement. Since, as a CSM you have restricted working hours, it is necessary to create such a template.
Click on the Customer Journey template to check out the framework used at CustomerSuccessBox!
Quarterly Business Review Playbook
A business review meeting is a strategic discussion between two parties at a high level ( Partner & Business). Hence, the alignment of the teams should be with the Sponsor and Champion. The audience is the sponsor, and he or she should keep track of the progress made. The meeting’s co-host is Champion. Ascertain that the CSM and the Champion are both on the same page in terms of preparedness.
Extra resource: QBR Template
Churn Analysis Playbook
Customer churn isn’t solely a Customer Success issue. It affects the product, service, pricing, utilization, customer success, customer experience, and the solution you provide, among other things. It’s necessary to follow a method that requires you to examine your own churn and do it correctly and holistically. As a result, we’ve created a FAIR approach to accomplish the same goal.
Pro tip: Churn Analysis Framework
Renewal Playbook
Renewal is a business transaction. A contract renewal reflects what your customer has accomplished during the journey. As a result, it makes logical to begin to look at it from the moment the consumer joins up with the purpose of “renewing the contract.” Ensure that your customer gets the value your marketing and sales teams promised. For that to accomplish, you need to have a renewal playbook!
Extra resource: Renewal playbook
Upsell Playbook
We all know that in the subscription market, recurring revenue is what makes or breaks a SaaS company. Upselling can increase your revenue by 30 percent or more. You’ll have plenty of opportunities to upsell along the client journey, and you don’t want to lose out.
Check out the Upsell template/framework!
Customer Advocacy Playbook
This is a crucial template to have in your CS arsenal! B2B SaaS is a fiercely competitive market in recent years. Your customers’ voices have a distinct value that sticks out! Customer advocacy is a terrific approach to spread the word about your company while also lowering your marketing costs.
Click here to check out the Customer Advocacy template!
Final Thoughts
Playbooks make it simple to outline the tasks that each CSM must take at key stages throughout their customer’s lifecycle. They’re an important aspect of a competent CS team’s strategy and for advancing Customer Success. A playbook saves time for managers and clarifies processes and goals. So, include the above-mentioned customer success playbooks in your CS toolkit to improve your and your customer’s productivity.
P.S. – The main image has been taken from pexels.com
