The customer Success Model or engagement model refers to the process in which your organization approaches the management of the customer during their journey post-sales.
Typically in SaaS, there are two models, High touch and Low Touch customer success. This further divides into two level parts of the customer journey. The first part is onboarding a customer and the second part is driving adoption (value).
What is the definition of engagement models?
When I use the word “engagement model” in this essay, I’m talking about the way your company handles client management after the sale.
There are two high-level aspects of the client journey in the Software as a Service (SaaS) concept. The first step is to onboard a customer, and the second is to encourage adoption (value). Watch our webinar to learn how to master onboarding and adoption.
Some SaaS providers don’t require anyone to onboard their product (low touch), while others do require a human to drive implementation (high touch). Following that, you’ll often see two strategies: One is a high-touch model that involves numerous touchpoints and check-ins during the customer’s path to renewal. Number two is a low-touch strategy that only responds to consumers who are at risk, based on factors such as product consumption, engagement, and health scores.
How Do You Begin Using the Correct Engagement Models?
When considering how you’ll interact with customers, it’s necessary to take a step back and examine the following questions: What is the ARPU of your company? Will a high-touch team with a large number of CSMs and contributors be able to sustain revenue growth? Or will it require a lower-touch engagement strategy?
We’ll look at the two main engagement models and their variations in this post so you and your team can figure out which one best suits your company’s needs.
How High-Touch Engagement Models Works
High-Touch engagement requires human intervention. Here, the customer success manager helps customers achieve their goals starting with high touch onboarding. High-touch digital engagements will more often be personalized for the customer.
Enterprise software companies use this model. They solve a somewhat complex solution where multiple individuals participate in the buying process.
A high-touch engagement model example would be giving a walk-through of a new product feature.
How Low-Touch Engagement Works
While this approach is still applicable to B2B software, it usually applies to software or tools that are unified to use with a little needed configuration that can be purchased directly through a website or even an app.
A customer, rather than working with a dedicated resource, learns how to use the application via a training or onboarding tool or what we call – self-serve or low touch onboarding. Sometimes even using a resource as simple as a video tutorial.
A low-touch engagement model example can be sending an email to a group of customers who are not using a particular feature in the product. This mail can describe the benefits as well as how to use that feature.
Difference between High and Low Touch
High Touch Customer Succes in SaaS
In SaaS, a high-touch engagement model requires more of your strategic methods employed towards serving customers along with more personal attention. It is more costly to maintain, hence it makes more sense to use this model for high-end customers giving you high revenue.
This is also helpful for those cases where the customer needs are more complex than the others.
Low Touch Customer Success in SaaS
In SaaS, a low-touch engagement is mostly automated. It is the tech-touch model. You can use a customer success platform like CustomerSuccessBox to monitor as well as engage effectively with a large number of customers. Tips and recommendations can be sent through automated emails that help drive further engagement in the product.
Onboarding playbooks can help with Onboarding Automation. Also when the customer success manager needs to take the action by re-onboarding a customer into another new module, the automation alerts and all those signals will automatically hit your inbox anyway.
Similarity
Both approaches make use of the judgment, vigilance, and creativity of customer success (CS) team members. Both models also rely on the data collection, analysis, and solutions provided by CS software in their preparation, and digital engagement is used in both cases as well.
As a SaaS company, the end goal for each model is to deliver value to customers by helping them use your product efficiently to achieve their business goals.
A scenario where both are required
Let’s take an example. You send an email to the customer for Onboarding detailing the steps to importing data, creating a new report, starting a new project, etc. Once the email has been sent, how many of your customers have actually acted upon the action mentioned and got the desired outcome? How have they adopted the product? How many have actually created the report or imported the data? And monitor that piece.
So actually you automated one and monitored the other so that you can trigger the right human intervention for the right accounts at the right moment. And that is how automation helps. You automate the messaging and monitor the product adoption and create subsequent tasks to bring in Human intervention.
Help High-Touch and Low-Touch Customers Reach their Goals
Low-Touch Customers should also feel important all the time irrespective of their financial worth to your organization. Customer personas are a lot different from buyer personas. These are the daily users of your products. At different levels, customers need varied communication. Giving them an appropriate experience is what you should aim for. Some of the low touch tools that you can use are- DRIP email tools, Video recordings, Digital Adoption Platforms to automate your processes, Customer Success platforms to automate the journeys and likewise.
Whereas high-touch engagement model is more than just conducting meetings. Since you can implement this model mostly for high-value customers, the right strategy demonstrates the value you are adding to them.
For anything standard, a low touch customer success is enough. And for dealing with valuable or complex customers, the high touch model is useful. Your goal is to satisfy customer needs, reduce churn and increase retention.
Suggested Reading: 6 Exclusive Hacks Of CustomerSuccessBox To Accelerate Customer Retention For Your SaaS
How to Drive Digital Engagement with Low-Touch and High-Touch Engagement Model
It isn’t realistic to add a new head to the CS team whenever you add a patron, despite the fact that each new consumer wants attention. The alternative is to make more efficient use of your existing sources.
Engaging a digital method offers you that efficiency. With an information-pushed version in location, the common CS manager can remain attentive to both high-touch and low-touch customers. The secret is keeping a system that is walking for you 24/7 to cause engagements. That has an effect at each stage of the patron adventure.
In case you are performing, you may hire whichever form of patron fulfillment engagement version better prepares your purchaser for achievement.
Wrapping up
High touch and low touch customer success engagement models are not in opposition to each other. At different times it is the combination of both that is useful. A CSM must be proficient in deciding when to reach the customer in person or through automated communication. And sometimes both.
P.S. – The main image has been taken from pexels.com
