Published on: 16 Oct , 2024

How to Scale Customer Success in Your Organization in 2025

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Chethna NK

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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.

What Exactly is Scaling Customer Success?

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.
Scaled Customer Success

Why Scaling Customer Success is Crucial for Business Growth?

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:

  1. CSMs being forced to ‘Do more with less’: As the ratio of customers over CSMs increases by a lot, CSMs have no other choice other than to take more and more accounts under their wing. This leads to rushed interactions, burnout, and ultimately decreased job satisfaction.  
  2. Quality of service and support decreases as CSMs struggle to keep up with the growing demands of customers. These demands overwhelm the team, leading to increased response times, unsolved issues, and poor customer experiences.
  3. An increase in customer churn: Deteriorating service quality will create a storm of dissatisfied customers who are more likely to explore alternatives in the market. This affects the revenue growth and at the same time damages the company’s reputation and potential for future growth.  

Understanding Scaled Customer Success

Scaled customer success comprises of

  • The right balance of incorporating technology-led and CSM-led approaches to customers
  • One-to-one, one-to-few, one-to-many interactions
  • Building a system applicable to all customer tiers
  • Data-driven insights

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.

Key Benefits of Scaled Customer Success

Key Benefits of Scaled Customer Success

Frees Up CSMs for Strategic Work

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:

  • Setting up a self-service knowledge base with reader-friendly resources like video tutorials, interactive guides and help articles.
  • Sending out emails based on their product activity.
  • Implementing a chatbot and integrating it with your knowledge base.

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.

Offers Self-Service Experiences

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.

Insightful Customer Data

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:  

1. Customer Success Platform

Tools: Churnzero, Gainsight Customer Success.

Data provided: Customer health scores, and product usage.

Insights drawn:

  • Health score helps to track at-risk customers and address their issues proactively.
  • Product usage data allows for personalized engagement, and insights from customer interactions highlight potential upsell opportunities.

2. Customer Relationship Management

Tools: Salesforce, Hubspot

Data provided: Customer information, interaction history, Sales pipeline

Insights drawn:

  • Customer data helps create customer segments
  • Sales pipeline data gives insights on sales forecasts which aids in better resource allocation for your customers and their goal setting.  

3. Product Analytics Tools

Tools: Pendo, Whatfix

Data provided: product and its feature usage

Insights drawn:

  • Product and feature usage data reveals which features customers struggle using, offering opportunities for creating help resources.

4. Customer Feedback Software

Tools: SurveyMonkey, Hotjar

Data provided: feedback from surveys and reviews section.

Insights drawn:

  • Direct feedback provides insights on key metrics like Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT), helping identify your customer pain points and address their needs more effectively.

Scalability

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

How to Build a Scaled Customer Success Strategy

Strategies to Scale Customer Success

Step 1: Understand Your Customer Segment

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:

  1. Based on the role
  2. Based on their industry
  3. Based on their preferred language

But, as customers go deeper into your funnel, your segmentation must also go deeper.

Value-based Segmentation

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

  • Low-tiered Customers

They use the basic plan of your product, contributing to the minimal revenue margin.

  • Mid-tiered Customers

They use your regular plans with higher pricing, contributing to a better revenue margin.

  • High-tiered Customers

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:

  • High-touch experience

It involves better human interactions that are personalized, and frequent, and happens when the issues and walkthroughs are complex.

  • Low-touch experience

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:

  1. Product usage:
  • What features are used frequently?
  • What is the overall engagement with the product?

2. Growth potential:

  • Which customers have a high potential for expansion?
  • What’s their likelihood of expanding their use of your product?

3. Customer health:

  • To detect customers who are not using your product regularly
  • How long have they not been interacting with your product?

Step 2: Pen-down CSM Challenges

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:

Handling Repetitive Support Tickets in Large Volumes Daily


As you acquire more customers, your support queries will also double. Eventually, your CSMs and support teams will end up firefighting common queries daily.

Unable to Maintain Personalization at Scale

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.

Identifying Customers at Risk

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.

Step 3: Set Clear Goals

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

Step 4: Build an Executable Strategy for Each Goal

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

  • The right balance of incorporating technology-led and CSM-led approaches to customers
  • One-to-one, one-to-few, one-to-many interactions
  • Building a system applicable to all customer tiers
  • Data-driven insights

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.

Step 5: Measure and Iterate

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:

  1. Define your scaled CS team’s North Star metric.
  2. Identify leading and lagging indicators that drive your North Star metric.
  3. Continuously test and iterate your strategies for ongoing improvement.

The Most Common Challenge in Scaling Customer Success

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.

  1. Start by discussing with your entire team to identify the simple, repetitive tasks they regularly perform and note the time each one takes. This will help you pinpoint areas that are ripe for automation. Review the list and evaluate each task based on factors like:
  • Repetitiveness
  • Complexity
  • Time-consuming nature, especially if the task doesn’t require a personal touch.

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.

Scale Your Customer Success Effortlessly with Trainn

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:

  1. Create self-service resources —videos, guides, and walkthroughs remarkably fast. Organize this content for self-serve onboarding, support, and customer training.
  2. Launch an always-available Knowledge Base without writing a single line of code.
  3. Launch a digital Academy without engineering dependencies. Turn your 1:1 training into 1:many programs.
  4. Measure and optimize. Track customer-level and LMS metrics such as courses enrolled, engagement, and completion rate. Analyze how your scaled CS initiatives are boosting revenue, product adoption, and customer retention.

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.

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