Customer Success Strategies: From Key to Advanced Tactics

In today's hyper-competitive market, acquiring customers is only half the battle. The real challenge? Keeping them happy, engaged, and coming back for more. To achieve this, companies strive to have a culture of customer-centric approach throughout their operation.

Did you know that companies with a strong customer success focus can see up to a 125% increase in customer lifetime value? That's the difference between barely staying afloat and thriving in turbulent economic waters.

Consider these scenarios:

• Company A relies on reactive support, addressing issues only when customers complain.
• Company B proactively engages customers, anticipating needs and solving problems before they arise.

Which company do you think will have loyal, long-term customers singing their praises?

Customer success isn't just a nice-to-have—it's a critical driver of sustainable growth and profitability for organizations. It has now become the secret sauce that transforms struggling startups into industry titans and turns good products into category-defining solutions.

But here's the million-dollar question: How do you build a customer success strategy that doesn't just retain customers but turns them into passionate brand advocates?

That’s exactly what we are diving into and seeing how to implement that secret sauce - from key strategies to advanced techniques on how you can create lasting value for your customers.

Whether you're a scaling startup looking to establish a strong foundation or an established enterprise aiming to stay ahead of the curve, this blog post offers invaluable insights to elevate your customer success game.

1. Key Customer Success Strategies

A. Understand Your Customer, Their Definition of Success, and Their Journey

To serve your customers to the fullest, you need to walk in their shoes. Understanding your customers means more than just knowing their name or industry, you need to dive deeper - to know their business objectives, the challenges they face, and the reasons they turned to your product.

Why is this so important?

By understanding your customers, you can proactively offer insights and solutions at the right time in their journey.

But how do you know when that ‘right time’ is?

For that, understand each stage of their journey from the moment they first hear about you to post-purchase support.

Here, are common stages of the customer journey and how will you help them at each stage of their journey.

Awareness -> Consideration -> Purchase - Onboarding -> Retention -> Advocacy

Awareness and Consideration

Customers recognize they have a need or problem and start searching for solutions. Once they are aware of your product, they are more likely to sign up for a free trial to check how your product works.

As a CSM, there is not much of a solo performance for you here. Instead, partner with your marketing and sales teams to help move your signups to paid conversions.

Purchase and Onboarding

Congratulations! They have been converted from trial and paid users. Now it's time for you to create a personalized roadmap for your customers based on their expectations to know how well they are near to success.  

Some ideas:

• Create a personalized onboarding experience based on their role and purchase intent to address their pain points more effectively.
• Build a personalized knowledge base with user-friendly resources like videos and interactive guides to experience your product at their own pace.

Retention

Now that your customers are using your product. It's time to achieve the next challenge of keeping them satisfied and engaged.

Some ways:

• Schedule regular check-ins with your customers to know where they are on their success roadmap. Ask them to voice out the difficulties or any issues to be solved and collect their feedback.
• Keep them engaged by conducting webinars or workshops on tips to use your product better.
• Address common industry challenges they face, and position yourself as a valuable partner in their overall success, not just a product provider.

Advocacy

Satisfied customers are now happy customers. They’re more likely to share their positive experiences with peers, leave positive reviews, and share their experiences through social media.

How can you nudge your customers at this stage?

• Encourage them by offering discounts or in-app credits for referring your product.
• Launch a Referral program. These programs not only reward your customers but also bring in high-quality leads because people are more likely to trust a product recommended by their known ones.
• Feature your customer success stories on your website and social media.

B. Define Your Customer Success Goals

What do you want out of customer success for your business? From an overall business aspect, find out the reasons why your business requires customer success. Plan out your customer success goal that aligns with your business objectives.

Without defining your goal, it's like driving on a long lane without knowing directions.

Common customer success goals focus on three core areas

Customer satisfaction

This goal focuses on ensuring customers are happy with the product and service, driving positive experiences and relationships. Here are a couple of ways to check customer satisfaction:

Improve Net Promoter Score

Send out survey questions asking customers how likely they are to recommend your product, on a scale of 1 to 10. Based on the scores and feedback, make necessary changes to provide a better product experience. Keep it as a goal to increase this metric, for example, improving NPS from 30 to 50 over six months.

First Contact Resolution

When a customer’s issues are solved on the first attempt, they’re more likely to be satisfied with the experience. You can enhance their experience by providing links to your knowledge base and how-to videos going over their issues.

Calculation of FCR: No. of tickets solved on the first interaction / total no. of tickets

Revenue growth

This goal focuses on driving revenue growth through better onboarding, product adoption, and expansion revenue.

Faster onboarding

The aim is to make them find value in your product sooner, they are more likely to grow their account. Faster onboarding sets the stage for the expansion of revenue. For example, reduce the average Time to First Value (TTFV) from 21 days to 7 days

Increase product adoption

Personalized product walkthrough increases product adoption. Higher adoption increases the chances of renewals and upsells. For example, increase the percentage of customers regularly using advanced features from 40% to 70% within 6 months.

Increase expansion revenue

Creating opportunities for expansion plans based on their product activity increases revenue and is cost-effective compared to acquiring a new customer.

For example, create targeted expansion opportunities for 30% of customers based on their specific usage patterns:

a) For companies with 80%+ user seat utilization: Offer a discounted rate on additional user licenses if they upgrade within the next 30 days.
b) For companies using advanced features frequently: Propose an upgrade to the next tier, highlighting the additional advanced features they'll unlock.
c) For companies with multiple departments using the software: Offer an enterprise-wide license with centralized billing and administration.

Customer retention

The focus is to make your customers engaging and loyal, reducing the likelihood of churning and therefore increasing customer lifetime value.

Increase retention rate

Engage customers across all touchpoints to strengthen relationships. For example, aim to retain 7 out of 10 at-risk customers through personalized outreach and proactive support.

Minimize churn

Implement an early warning system to identify and address potential churn factors before they escalate. For example, try reducing response time to customer inquiries from 24 to 8 hours.

Maximize Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

Identify high-value customers and provide them with priority support, exclusive training, and personalized engagement plans. For example, set a goal to increase average CLV by 25% within 12 months through targeted upselling and cross-selling initiatives.

Tips to get the most out of your goal-setting exercise:

1. Make your goals SMART - Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound.
2. For every goal, choose two or three subgoals that will help you achieve the bigger one.
3. Communicate your goals to internal teams and stakeholders and get buy-in.
4. Assign a clear owner for every goal.
5. Review your goals regularly.

C. Collect and Analyze Customer Feedback

Never miss collecting customer feedback. At every one-to-one meeting, or touchpoint, give your customers space to share their opinions. Here are some ways to collect feedback:

• Check-in calls
• Surveys
• In-app and on-site feedback
• Customer support team
• Emails and SMS

With these insights, you can draw solid conclusions on your product and support performance. Analyze the feedback and act on it to value their feedback. Few ways to analyze feedback:

• Segment feedback - breakdown into categories like onboarding challenges, and product usability to easily identify patterns and work on it.
• Sentiment analysis - whether it is positive or negative or neutral feedback. You can also use some tools like Thematic and Monkeylearn for analysis.

Bonus tip: Dont forget to thank your customers for giving their insights and update them once it's implemented.

D. Engage Proactively To Build Strong Relationships

The proactiveness of customer success teams is what differentiates it from other customer-facing roles. It helps you address their issues quickly and guide them to success. Here are some ways to proactively engage with them:

• During the onboarding process, anticipate and address potential challenges customers might face.
• Conduct regular check-ins to track customer engagement and spot any declines in product usage. If you notice an activity-drop trend, schedule a call to discuss their issues and offer solutions.
• Use feedback surveys to gather insights and measure key metrics like NPS (Net Promoter Score), CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score), and CES (Customer Effort Score). These metrics help identify areas for improvement and enhance the customer experience.
• Provide easy-to-use resources to update your customers with new features.
• Work closely with the support team to identify common product-related issues customers face. By addressing these proactively, you can resolve concerns before they escalate.

E. Measure and Track Your Metrics

To know whether your customer success strategies create impact, then you must keep track of your customer's progress and your goals.

These are some metrics that help measure your customer success initiatives:

1. Customer satisfaction ( CSAT)
2. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
3. Net Promoter score (NPS)
4. Churn rate
5. Retention rate
6. Expansion revenue  

Track these metrics to know whether your current strategy is bettering your customers’ experience with your product

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

What is CSAT? This score tells how satisfied are customers with your product. CSAT is measured from feedback through surveys or interviews.

How to calculate?

Step 1: Survey your customers and ask them to rate their product experience on a scale of 1-10.

Step 2: Note down the number of people who’ve voted for 8 to 10. These are your Satisfied Respondents.

Step 3: Use this formula -

(No. of Satisfied Respondents / Total No. of Respondents) X 100

For example, in a survey with 100 customers, let’s say 65 people have either voted for 8,9, or 10, the CSAT would be -

( 65  / 100 ) X 100 = 65%

Here are some CSAT benchmarks for SaaS companies:

• Above 80% - an excellent customer satisfaction level.
• 60% - 80% - need improvement in specific areas
• 40% - 60% - a decent score, but still need to collect more feedback to make improvements
• Below 40% - in-depth customer satisfaction surveys to be collected to identify issues.

Customer Lifetime Value ( CLV)

What is CLV? This score judges your relationship with your customers. It's the total revenue that can be expected from a customer. By understanding their concerns and needs you can easily understand their value. This can be calculated as

Customer Lifetime Value = Average Revenue per user/Customer Churn rate.

Net Promotor Score (NPS)

What is NPS?

Net Promoter Score tells how likely your existing customers would recommend your product to others. NPS is tracked by directly surveying your customers on a range of scales.

How to calculate?

You can divide your NPS survey results into 3 categories - promoters, detractors, and passives.

• Promoters are the customers who vote for 9 or 10 - they’re happy customers and likely to recommend your product.
• Detractors vote for 1 to 6 - they’re not satisfied and not likely to recommend
• Passives vote for 7 or 8 - they’re satisfied but are not loyal and less likely to recommend.

Formula:

NPS = % Promoters - % Detractors

Churn rate

What is churn rate?

Churn rate is the percentage of customers who stop using a company's product or service within a given time period.

Formula:

(Number of customers lost / Total number of customers at the beginning of the period) X 100

SaaS benchmark:
The typical SaaS churn rate is often around 5%.

Customer retention rates

What is the customer retention rate? When looking at a specific period, retaining customers is the opposite of churned customers. The retention rate looks at how many users still use your product over your churned and total customers in that period.

How to calculate Customer Retention Rate?

To calculate the CRR for a specific time frame, we need 3 things:

The no. of Customers At the Start of the time frame (CAS)

The no. of Customers At the End of the time frame (CAE)

Customers Gained in this period (CG)

Putting these into a formula, we get -

CRR = ( (CAE-CG) / CAS ) X 100

SaaS benchmark
A CRR of 70% is generally considered good for SaaS companies. 80% and above of CRR is considered very good.

Expansion Revenue

What is expansion revenue? Expansion revenue is excess revenue generated from the initial purchasing price or contract. The sample is taken with the same number of customers at the beginning and at the end.

How to calculate?

(Recurring revenue at the end of the month - Recurring revenue from starting of the month ) / Recurring revenue at the start of the month.

SaaS benchmark?
20%-30% is considered a good guiding benchmark for SaaS.

2. Advanced Customer Success Strategies

A. Use Data To Drive Insights

Proactive customer success predicts and addresses your customers' needs before they become issues. This can be done effectively only through quality data. Gathering and storing data about your customers gives quantifiable descriptions rather than concluding with guesses.

You can collect data through:

Customer Interaction

Gather data from emails, calls, chats, and messages to understand the type of queries and concerns customers have.

Customer support metrics

Track key metrics like a number of support tickets, time taken to resolve, and frequent issues. This helps to identify common pain points and areas of improvement.

Feedbacks

Collect feedback from surveys and website reviews to directly understand customer satisfaction, needs, and expectations.

Activity tracking tools

Use in-app tools to monitor product usage and engagement. This helps track customer behavior, feature adoption, and usage patterns.

Billing data

Get data from billing information such as renewal schedule, and contract length to identify customers nearing renewal and those at risk of churn.

By gathering and segmenting these data, you can easily understand your customers’ needs, and preferences, and act on it.

Here’s how data helps you drive insights and create an impact on your customer success initiatives.

B. Personalize Customer Experience

Personalization is more than just sending emails with the user’s name, it is about creating a unique journey that addresses their specific challenges, interests, and goals. Customers who feel they’re noticed are more likely to trust and continue using your product.

Steps to create personalized customer experience:

1. Segment customers based on their preferences, interactions, and purchase history into buyer personas.
2. Understand your customer’s expectations and requirements to fulfill their goals.
3. Create personalized content and messages - emails, calls, chat, newsletters.

Here are some key areas to foster personalization:

Emails

To drive customer interaction, draft emails based on their product usage, profile and more. Determine the email frequency based on their engagement. To personalize emails you can:

1. Segment your audience based on

• Role
• Industry

2.   Trigger email content based on

• Product activity
• Celebrating milestones
• New updates in any specific features
• Referral and other offers

Learning Experience

There is no one-size-fits-all LMS experience. You can personalize the Academy learning experience for customers based on:

• LMS learner portals
• Recommend courses based on

1. Customers’ roles or their industry as a whole
2. Customers’ skill level and interest

• Gamify the learning experience based on their course completion and challenges faced.

Onboarding Journey

A customer’s onboarding journey sets the tone for their entire experience with your product. Personalized onboarding guides customers through the features and tools that are most relevant to their needs, helping them to find success.

Customize your customers’ onboarding journey

• Tailor onboarding paths based on customer roles and objectives
• Highlight features in the onboarding tour that directly address each customer's specific use cases
• Offer personalized milestones to guide users toward their goals

C. Leverage Technology

As your business grows and your customer base expands, you might wonder how to effectively provide consistent, high-quality support to all customers. The traditional approach of simply expanding your customer success team to match this growth may seem like an obvious solution, but it's not always the most efficient or effective strategy.

Enter Digital Customer Success

Digital customer success is a blend of human and digital (tools) touch to find success for all customers from your solution. This is evolved from a one-to-one approach to one-to-many approach.

Here’s how you can start implementing a digital customer success strategy:

1. Understand Customer Segments: Classify customers by ARR, persona, and industry, and align your digital strategy to their needs.
2. Create a Customer Journey Map: Identify key stages. Understand which touchpoints need automation and which need human interactions.
3. Understand CSM Pain Points: Gather feedback, and identify time-consuming tasks that can be solved through automation.
4. Build a Digital CS Strategy: Develop a pilot strategy that clubs customer touchpoints and CSM challenges and introduces automation.
5. Choose the Right Tools: Select tools that integrate with your systems and help automate tasks like onboarding and support.
6. Develop a CS Roadmap: Plan key initiatives, assign resources, and roll out digital solutions in phases.
7. Train CSMs: Provide ongoing training for new tools and processes, and empower internal champions.
8. Monitor & Optimize: Continuously track KPIs, scale successful initiatives, and improve weaker areas with data insights.

Remember, the goal of Digital Customer Success is not to replace human interaction but to enhance it. By automating routine tasks and providing digital self-service options, you free up your CSMs to focus on high-value, strategic activities that truly make a difference to your customer's success.

Further reading: Digital Customer Success 101: What Should You Know about the New Function Brewing

3. Key Aspects of a Stellar Customer Success Strategy

A. Hiring the Right People

A dedicated team for customer success should be people who understand the product and the customers as well.

Hire candidates with these set of skills:

Technical skills: product knowledge, data analysis, problem-solving abilities.

Soft skills: communication, empathy, adaptability, and strategic thinking.

Technical skills can be taught, but it's harder to instill the right attitude and interpersonal skills. Therefore, prioritize candidates who demonstrate strong soft skills alongside their technical abilities.

B. Keeping It Human

In an age of automation and AI, the human touch is more important than ever. While technology can streamline processes, it's the human interactions that build lasting relationships with your customers. This meaningful connection can also turn your customers as advocates.

1. Personalize your communication during customer learning, sending out emails, onboarding journey, and recommending best practices.
2. Listen actively and show empathy while addressing their concerns and pain points.
3. Be proactive in reaching out to them before the problem arises and also anticipate their needs based on their product activity and industry trends.
4. Celebrate customer milestones and success with rewards, and offers and make them engaging.
5. Own up to your mistakes by sincerely apologizing and making things right.

C. Make Customer Education a Part of Customer Success

Customer success team often define their goals to increase engagement, reduce churn, reduce support tickets, increase customer satisfaction, to find opportunities for upsell or cross-sell, and more. At its core, customer success is about helping customers derive maximum value from your product.

Given that customer success understands the customer journey very well, it's also important to be responsible for customer education at every stage of the customer journey. Integrating customer education as a core component of your customer success strategy will elevate your CSM function to among the best in the SaaS world.

Further reading: The Customer Education 101

Here are three effective ways to integrate education into your Customer Success strategy:

Develop a comprehensive onboarding program:

Develop a well-structured, step-by-step onboarding process that educates new customers about your product’s features, benefits, and best practices.

How:

• Implement interactive video tutorials and guided tours
• Personalize onboarding paths based on customer roles and goals

Implement a knowledge base portal:

Empower customers to self-serve and reduce support queries with a robust information repository with a knowledge base.

How:

• Build an easily navigable knowledge base with FAQs, user guides, and troubleshooting articles
• Regularly update content based on common customer issues and feedback

Offer regular webinars and training sessions:

Provide interactive learning opportunities for customers to engage with experts and peers.

How:

• Schedule live webinars focusing on advanced features and industry best practices
• Offer role-specific training sessions to address unique user needs

How Trainn Helps Your Customers Succeed

Trainn is a no-code AI-powered platform that helps customer success teams create and manage their customer training initiatives.

With Trainn, you can -

1. Quickly create personalized Product Videos, and Interactive Guides to educate your customers.
2. Launch a personalized Knowledge Base for self-serve customer support.
3. Launch a dedicated Customer Training Academy to help customers understand and become masters of your product.

Since Trainn is a no-code platform, you can create videos within 5 minutes and launch your knowledge base and academy within weeks.

Up your customer success game - Try out the 14-day trial with Trainn and watch the magic yourself!