Published on: 16 Oct , 2024
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In the high-stakes world of SaaS, customer success is considered to be one of the most important pillars of your company’s growth. As you celebrate the growth of your customer base, a critical challenge for your customer success efforts presents itself - to provide the same level of personalized attention and quality support for 1000 customers that you perfected with your first 100 customers.
A good problem to have is that you cannot scale your customer success with the same strategies you used for your 100 customers.
Here are two possible strategies you can invest in while scaling up:
A: Increase headcount by hiring more customer success managers.
B: Leverage technology for your customer success operation —integrating both tech-touch and human-touch.
But before you choose, consider this: as your business scales, the goal is to scale your initiatives smartly. While scaling your team in numbers might seem like the obvious first choice, it is highly costly. The best choice here is to blend human expertise with the right technology to create a customer success powerhouse capable of supporting exponential growth.
Here pops another question: How to effectively leverage technology without losing the human touch in scaling customer success?
This blog will guide you on harnessing the power of AI, automation, and data analytics to create a scalable customer success model that not only keeps pace with your growth but also accelerates it.
Scaling customer success is the process of implementing a strategic blend of digital-led and human-led approaches to your customer success initiatives. This approach optimizes your customer success operation, efficiently nurturing your growing customers without compromising on quality of service.
The fundamental goal of customer success remains constant even while scaling it: to ensure your customers achieve their desired outcomes and realize value from your product. What changes is the approach to achieving it.
Before diving deep into the topic, here are some common misconceptions about the scaled customer success model:
#1 Myth: Scaling customer success means hiring more customer success managers.
Truth: Scaling customer success does not include hiring additional CSMs. It focuses on making your existing CSM team work smarter with automation and tech. Work smarter, not harder.
#2 Myth: Scaled customer success doesn’t include high-touch customer experience. (personalized, one-to-one interactions).
Truth: High-touch interaction is one of the valuable components of scaled customer success. A well-designed scaled approach includes various levels of engagement, from low touch (automation) to high touch (one-to-one, personalized) based on the customers’ needs and objectives.
When a company achieves product-market fit, it typically sees a significant increase in customers. During this phase, companies face challenges in managing the rapidly expanding customer base. Hence, the primary objective of a scaling company is to sustain its growth trajectory while not dipping in its service quality.
However, the existing customer success managers team often find themselves overwhelmed, struggling to maintain the same level of service quality for the growing number of customers. If the same approach of one-to-one, personalized interactions is being followed to handle new customers, problems will start to appear such as:
Scaled customer success comprises of
To get a more clear understanding of scaled customer success, let's compare how scaled customer success is different from traditional customer success.
Aspect | Traditional Customer Success | Scaled Customer Success |
---|---|---|
Nature of services | Human-led services | A balance of technology-led and human-led services |
Engagement | One to one interaction(personalized) | One-to-one, one-to-few, one-to-many interaction. |
Type of support | Reactive support | Proactive support |
Resource requirement | More CSMs | Existing CS team + tools for automation |
Cost | Hiring more CSMs is expensive | Highly cost-effective as all we need are the right tools for the job. |
When your CSMs become overwhelmed trying to maintain a large number of customer accounts, it eventually limits their ability to focus on high-value operations such as fixing churn rates, increasing expansion revenue, etc.
Scaling customer success eliminates this bottleneck by automating simple tasks, enabling CSMs to focus on issues that require proper strategic planning.
Automating can be done by:
Here’s a simple scenario to help you understand how it works:
CSM Problem: For every regular check-in, CSMs have to manually draft emails or go for one-to-one calls with customers, which eats up a whole lot of their day.
How a scaled customer success model helps handle it: Create personalized email templates for different needs (regular check-ins, or milestones) and set triggers (every Wednesday, or after the use of a particular feature) to automatically send them out.
What CSMs can do with their free time: Focus on setting up call sessions with customers who might be ready for an upsell or cross-sell.
Customers prefer to solve smaller issues by themselves like signing up, adding another account, or embedding a code.
A Salesforce survey found out that out of 14000 customers, 61% preferred self-service when it comes to common issues.
Self-service is not only used for support but also used throughout the customer’s journey - from onboarding to product adoption. This helps them to use your product effectively without unnecessary delays and hurdles while contacting the support team.
A scaled customer success can help offer self-service support through implementing chatbots, knowledge base, and community forums.
A scaled customer success model involves implementing a specific set of tools to automate the mundane part of CSMs' work. These tools offer insights that will help you better understand your customers and constantly refine your engagement techniques.
Different tools give different data and insights:
Tools: Churnzero, Gainsight Customer Success.
Data provided: Customer health scores, and product usage.
Insights drawn:
Tools: Salesforce, Hubspot
Data provided: Customer information, interaction history, Sales pipeline
Insights drawn:
Tools: Pendo, Whatfix
Data provided: product and its feature usage
Insights drawn:
Tools: SurveyMonkey, Hotjar
Data provided: feedback from surveys and reviews section.
Insights drawn:
As you experience hockey-stick growth, you will soon have hundreds of customers every day than you can manage. Which is a good thing. But your customer onboarding, training, and support processes should scale with you, not hold you back.
A scaled customer success model will help you consistently and efficiently manage your ever-growing customer base while helping you offer top-notch support, onboarding, and training.
How Scaled-CSM Model Helps Provide Scalability
Traditional CSM Model | Scaled CSM Model | |
---|---|---|
Support | 1:1 customer interactions; reactive support | Automation, self-service knowledge base, and community-based support |
Onboarding | Manual, high-touch onboarding call with each customer | Self-paced onboarding with automated workflows, video tutorials, and weekly webinars |
Training | Personalized training sessions for each customer | On-demand, scalable training content such as video tutorials, guides, and webinars offered through an Academy |
Not all customers require the same resources or guidance, nor do they have the patience for irrelevant interactions leading to poor customer satisfaction.
Customer segmentation is essential for delivering personalized customer experiences. Personalization can be implemented only when you understand your customers’ needs. It's necessary to segment your customers to help you provide a clear picture of their needs and how to fulfill them.
Initially, you might want to segment your customers based on these criteria:
But, as customers go deeper into your funnel, your segmentation must also go deeper.
This segmentation divides customers based on their revenue contribution and current pricing plan. Factors that affect this segmentation include Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR), Average Recurring Revenue (ARR), and Customer Lifetime Value.
Considering all of these together and segmenting your customers into
They use the basic plan of your product, contributing to the minimal revenue margin.
They use your regular plans with higher pricing, contributing to a better revenue margin.
They use your enterprise plan, contributing to the highest revenue margin.
Your pricing plans will also offer increased feature sets as they move up the ladder. This will help you picture their needs to provide personalized guidance and support.
Alert: Make sure you don’t lock good customer support and success behind higher pricing plans. Good segmentation should allow you to balance the right mix of automation and human interaction for all tiers of customers.
The level of support or guidance can be classified into high-touch and low-touch experiences:
It involves better human interactions that are personalized, and frequent, and happens when the issues and walkthroughs are complex.
It involves fewer human interactions and relies on automated processes to digitally engage with customers, as issues and walkthroughs are repetitive and simpler.
You can further segment your customers based on:
2. Growth potential:
3. Customer health:
Before we draft the strategy, list down the common challenges your CSMs face during a customer base surge. This will help you build a scaled CS strategy to address their problems.
Here are a few common challenges that CSMs face while experiencing skyrocketing growth:
As you acquire more customers, your support queries will also double. Eventually, your CSMs and support teams will end up firefighting common queries daily.
As your customer base increases, it becomes hard to personalize your customer interactions and support. This does not let you fulfill the needs and goals of your customers at scale.
It is difficult to track and analyze customer data effectively when you don’t have the right tools to help you during a customer base surge. So, the chances of you not noticing customers at risk of churning is high and by the time you do, it might already be too late.
Once you’ve penned down your challenges, set goals that help you tackle these issues.
Tip: Don’t limit yourself while jotting down the challenges thinking about the feasibility of solutions. Brainstorm all your challenges, and rank all the solutions based on their feasibility later. This will help you prioritize your goals and let you know what action needs to be taken first.
Here are some example goals for the challenges we looked at above:
Challenges | Goals | |
---|---|---|
Handling repetitive support tickets in large volumes daily | To reduce the volume of repetitive support tickets by 20% | |
Unable to maintain personalization at scale | To deliver a personalized experience to 70% of your customers | |
Unable to manually identify customers at risk | To implement an automated risk identification system to accurately flag 80% of risk accounts |
Once you get an understanding of what you need to achieve, brainstorm the different ways to achieve those goals.
Remember, scaled customer success comprises of
Here is a list of strategies we’ve built for the respective goals and challenges discussed:
Challenges | Goals | Strategies |
---|---|---|
Handling repetitive support tickets in large volumes daily | Reduce the volume of repetitive support tickets by 20% | Build a self-service resource that can answer repetitive queries on a 24*7 basis (Example: Knowledge Base). Set up a chatbot inside the product to instantly answer common queries. |
Unable to maintain personalization at scale | To deliver a personalized experience to 70% of your customers ( exclusive of different tiered segments ) | To automate feature adoption emails based on each customer’s role. To recommend relevant content in the Knowledge Base based on each user’s use case. To offer personalized learning paths in the Academy. |
Unable to manually identify customers at risk | To implement an automated risk identification system that accurately flags 80% of risk accounts | To implement a customer success platform that provides health scores for each customer. |
For each strategy, it’s important to measure the impact they create. Hence, set KPIs to measure and track them.
Challenges | Goals | Strategies | KPIs |
---|---|---|---|
Handling repetitive support tickets in large volumes daily | Reduce the volume of repetitive support tickets by 20% | Build a self-service resource that can answer repetitive queries on a 24*7 basis (Example: Knowledge Base). Set up a chatbot inside the product to instantly answer common queries. |
Average time to resolve complex tickets Self-service usage rate Low Customer Effort Score |
Unable to maintain personalization at scale | To deliver a personalized experience to 70% of your customers ( exclusive of different tiered segments ) | To automate feature adoption emails based on each customer’s role. To recommend relevant content in the Knowledge Base based on each user’s use case. To offer personalized learning paths in the Academy. |
Customer satisfaction score (CSAT) Net Promoter Score(NPS) Retention rate |
Unable to manually identify customers at risk. | To implement an automated risk identification system that accurately flags 80% of risk accounts | To implement a customer success platform that provides health scores for each customer. | Customer churn rate Number of at-risk customers identified and saved Customer health score improvement |
Here is a 3-step process to measure the effectiveness of your scaled customer success program:
Challenge: Striking the right balance between human touch and automation.
Solution:
Automating simpler tasks like handling repetitive queries through self-service resources provides customer success managers time to focus on more complex activities, such as engaging with potential customers for upsell opportunities.
2. Research and select tools or software that are user-friendly and integrate smoothly with your existing systems. Whether it’s adding new tools to your tech stack or developing custom solutions, make sure the automation aligns with your team’s needs.
3. Communicate any changes in processes to your customers, explaining how automation will improve their experience, such as through faster issue resolution via a knowledge base. However, reassure them that human touch (CSMs) will still be available for more complex issues and relationship-building.
4. Lastly, gather feedback from both customers and team members about the new scaling process. Use these insights to continuously refine and improve your strategy.
Here are some repetitive tasks that Customer Success Managers perform on a daily basis.
Repetitive and Simpler tasks | Automation Techniques | |
---|---|---|
Sending out emails for onboarding, feature usage, celebrating milestones | Use CRM. Marketing automation tools to trigger personalized emails based on their behaviour. |
|
Answering common support questions | Implement a knowledge base and chatbot for frequently asked questions. | |
Collecting NPS and CSAT scores | Use feedback software and CS platforms to send out surveys. Track reviews automatically. Signal negative feedbacks. |
|
Informing about product updates | Automate in-app notifications. Create feature videos and publish them in your knowledge base. Conduct webinars for feature education. |
Trainn is an AI-powered, unified platform to create, manage, and scale customer success initiatives. Trainn helps CSMs offer self-serve onboarding, product training, and technical support with its content creation and distribution suite.
With Trainn, you can ensure every customer receives the attention they deserve while optimizing your CS team’s efficiency and impact.
What Trainn makes possible:
Ready to create a world-class scaled Customer Success program? Then, it’s time to try Trainn for free with our 14-day free trial.