Companies invest, increasingly, not only in providing a good service or having a product but also in guaranteeing a quality experience, through a good relationship with customers.
Much is said about happiness and customer satisfaction, but have you ever thought about what customers want?
They do not want to be happy or feel fulfilled by being customers, they want to achieve the objectives they have when purchasing your product or service.
This is where the Customer Success team comes in. But one of the major things companies fail to achieve is Customer Success at scale. As the companies grow, customers grow and the complexity of the relationship with them also increases. A customer success department should be able to keep up with the growth of the company (which can be exponential or even a boom).
One of the first steps to achieving customer success at scale is to segment the customers. Let us tell you the example of Wisr. They grew 300% in a single year and their customer success department had to keep up with the growing demand. Amidst this chaos, Wisr’s first step was also segmentation. Distinguishing accounts based on value and revenue growth allows you to engage them better and keep them satisfied.
Extra Resource: Scaling requires a hefty budget. Learn how to get your Customer Success budget approved.
Segmenting Your Customers
It may also appear intuitively obvious, however, the first step in understanding a way to help your clients is having a clear definition of who they are. If your sales team already has tips to outline consumer tiers, then apply those. For groups that have now no longer tiered their consumer base, it’s standard to segregate clients primarily based totally on the quantity of bought licenses/customers and/or the predicted annual recurring revenue (ARR) out of your consumer segments. You may even need to not forget a consumer’s growth capability whilst assigning them to a phase – it may not make sense to position a small commercial enterprise into your “SMB” phase in the event that they display a very high growth factor.
Here is a complete Guide on Segmentation.
After setting up the policies for tiering your consumer base, it’s crucial to understand the average cost per customer segment for your post-sales support. If not then, have your CustomerSuccessManagers measure the quantity of time they spend in step with the consumer for 2 weeks. Average the time spent in step with every consumer, after which divide your overall customer success investment (salaries, bonuses, capital, etc.) by this number. That offers you a gauge of what you’re spending in step with the consumer now.
Analyze your clients in cohorts. Knowing what every consumer tier costs you will help you invest properly for scalability.
Scaling Customer Success Effectively
It’s probably that 40%-50% of your overall quantity of clients will fall into your SMB phase. Because those clients generate much fewer sales for your company, their ratios will differ from that of the enterprise, high-value customers. To scale effectively, you need new tech integration and newer processes being built keeping growth in mind.
There are 3 predominant regions you could focus on whilst scaling your customer success team for SMB clients:
- Automating parts of the customer lifecycle
- Addressing questions and assist requests through self-service tech
- Great quality web training
Automating parts of the customer lifecycle
Most of the role of customer success is to monitor and improve the relationship between the company and its customers. Many companies have a defined plan on how senior CSMs interact with top customers. However, these plans typically do not accommodate a large number of SMB customers. Email automation tools help reach these customers in a cost-effective way. Here are some situations where automation can help:
You can reduce the time it takes to engage your customers by regularly sending new customers tips and ideas to help them use the product. Your CSM team probably knows about the top pain points of the new customers. Teams can create content that addresses these issues. Content can be sent weekly or biweekly via marketing automation software.
Customer Success Platforms may be used to automate the renewal process. On most systems (including CustomerSuccessBox), you can set a date-based trigger to automatically send a renewal letter to your customers. We recommend that you send these letters 40-70 days before the actual update.
There are many analytics and CS tools to help SaaS-based enterprises analyze customer end-user usage behavior. Many of these analytics systems like CustomerSuccessBox can also perform alerts based on user actions. If analysis of the data reveals that a new cohort of end-users is interacting with the tools, or if user adoption has increased or decreased significantly, run workflows on many of these tools. You can send notifications, information, or links to help articles.
Check out- Automation Vs Personalization in Customer Success
Self-service technology
Help desk/call tracking software should provide analytics that allows customers to dig deeper into their questions and problems. Review the data to determine which product (or which area of a particular product) produces the most service requests. From this list, you can have your customer success or technical support team create an article that addresses these questions. If you find that your product cluster questions arise in a particular area (setup, user management, etc.), you need to create a set of FAQs based on the incoming cases.
All of these systems work in slightly different ways, but the ultimate goal is the same. That is, to enable businesses to provide users with answers and insights on how to use the product. Self-service not only reduces service costs but also reduces the overall value of the customer’s efforts. At CustomerSuccessBox, you can design automated customer success workflows for customers through their lifecycle. Based on the milestone achieved/not achieved you can send automated trigger-based emails or videos to bring them back on track. The typical use cases are onboarding Drips, introducing the user to a set of new features, emails when usage drops and likes.
Web training
Providing end-user training over the Internet is a cost-effective and interactive way to teach SMB customers the ins and outs of the product. Customers can ask questions in real-time using the chat tools provided by the web conferencing service. These sessions can be recorded and stored in the company’s customer self-help center. As soon as a new customer joins, we can instruct them (via an automated email campaign) to check the latest “basic training” records available. If there are any further questions, you can invite them to the next live training. In CustomerSuccessBox, we have a special certified training module for all CSM
This customer adds new features to the product on a monthly basis. The CSM and/or marketing team has recorded a “new feature” webinar for SMB customers. These webinars not only demonstrated new features but also explained to customers why they are important and how they can help them be more productive.
Wrapping Up
Customer Success needs to be flexible enough within the organization to change as the business develops and the goals of the organization change. For example, when onboarding a new customer, the customer success feature should focus primarily on onboarding and customer satisfaction. However, if the customer base has recently doubled, these parameters turn into sustainable growth and revenue growth. You can set parameters to measure specific goals, identify customers to evaluate, and set a tentative timeline for customer feedback to receive once you have started those initiatives. Using customer success intelligence software is another way to scale customer success. It helps you with proactive risk detection of customers about to churn, helps you automate processes, provides you insights on how to upsell, cross-sell and expand & allows a single platform for a customer success team to scale off of. This is a glimpse of what CustomerSuccessBox can do for you.
P.S. – The main image has been taken from pexels.com
