So, “Where to start with Customer Success”, is likely to be one of the most frequently asked questions that I’ve come across. I know all of you wanna solve churn, solve renewals problems, solve upsell, do more upsells, grow the MRR, improve your LTV, and also onboard better. But as a Customer Success leader when you’re just starting out or when you’re rolling out the technology, the question gets obvious. In my experience, what I’ve seen is that the lowest hanging fruit out there is definitely going to be your Customer onboarding.
Customer onboarding is by far the single largest reason why customers churn.
If a customer sticks to you in the first 30-60-90 days or whatever is the time period of your onboarding the customer is which will again depend on how large or complexity of your platform, the sort of customers you’re selling into, and the process of adoption during that onboarding period and for all of these concerns your ultimate goal needs to be very clear about -why has the customer purchased the product?
Bonus tip: 30 60 90 day Customer Success framework
Your primary goal here should be to understand the key concerns of your customer, the reasons why they are buying the product. The appropriate person to fetch this detail could be the sales rep, get that information and translate it into activity.
Hence a very specific onboarding plan had to be executed. Because it’s not just about teaching them or training them on every possible feature and enabling them with every possible scenario in the use case that your product can solve. Rather you’ll ask them if their problem is likely being solved and how likely is your product to help them solve your customer problem. And once you have understood that, your customer onboarding process needs to be very very specific. Straight, cut the chase, and make it minimum effort getting to that core value.
We will talk about getting onboarding going for the rest of the features beyond the onboarding time. Onboarding is not the first and the last opportunity where you’re educating the customer on your products, helping them onboarding, helping them get value from your product. Onboarding is crucial to get them to the first success milestone, and that value milestone is going to set the tone of this relationship going forward. So start with your first step to onboarding.
Check out this blog, to know more about –How the right onboarding process can increase the renewal rate?
Things to keep in mind while starting out Customer Success
One of the fundamental things that most of us forget to consider when we are just starting with Customer Success practice is that we forget to nail down the core objective of Customer Success practice. For that, the first things you might be thinking of are retention, onboarding, upsell, and all of that. And believe me, you cannot start with all of these objectives in your First Quarter -First Year. I know we all want to nail that, but that’s not going to happen immediately. I will recommend starting with onboarding, assuming you have a year and you have some degree of hand-holding if not a lot, and some degree of effort that is required before your b2b SaaS customers get to value. But onboarding is usually my first knee-jerk reaction recommendation. So that’s usually my first word. Start with that and nail that onboarding. 
Renewals and Retentions
The second one is going to be renewals and retentions. Now, renewals and retention will require a lot of understanding of how your customers are currently using the product. And you’ll have to make sure if there’s anybody who’s giving you a red alert, somebody from the success team has to jump in and rescue them. In a perfect world, you don’t want to be in that situation. But that is the second most thing that you may want to cover.
Tip: Here’s How CustomerSuccessBox Helped SalesScreen To Increase Their Retention Rate
Upsells
The third can be the upselling arts. Now, that’s where the fun begins. That’s where you’re operating as a cost center and will actually start to contribute towards the growth and profit. And that is the most compelling argument to make for a customer success practice and putting that entire department together, which is going to drive your growth.
You can further check out this blog, to know more about the – 5 Steps that define a perfect Customer Onboarding process for a SaaS Customer.
Conclusion
In my view, you don’t have a choice when you live in a subscription economy, you will need to learn to succeed with this experiment. So when you experiment, you will learn something, you iterate and learn again, you do another experiment and eventually, you nail how to onboard customers and how to improve your retention. Hence you get into that negative churn zone under a positive more than 100%+ MRR zone.
Even if you’re starting with an experiment, don’t look at it as an experiment that three months later, it may not exist, it will exist. It is here to stay.
