 The exponential growth of Customer Success has seen enormous benefits for leading businesses all over the world. Traditionally, these benefits have been measured in financial (e.g. net retention), customer satisfaction (e.g. NPS) and adoption (e.g. product usage) terms. However, I would argue that one of the most effective measures of whether your Customer Success strategy is truly delivering on its promise to maximise customer value is advocacy.
The advantages of an advocacy programme can be felt across the enterprise and especially in Sales and Marketing. This is evidenced in research from the Harvard Business Review which showed that 84% of B2B buyers are now starting the purchasing process with a referral, and peer recommendations are influencing more than 90% of all B2B buying decisions. There are several different examples of what could be included in an advocacy programme; examples of which include:
Given the compelling evidence above, it is absolutely clear that advocates make a positive difference, but how can you identify them? Based on my experience of running Customer Success both as an employee and a consultant, here are some key tips that will make the difference:
Finally, one of the most important ways to generate advocates is for CSMs to change their mindset. Often, CSMs are too focused on issue resolution and this can lead to a mind-set of “we need to put everything right” and are relieved when a customer expresses delight. We need to be automatically tuned so that when a customer gives us a glowing review of our solution that we should be thinking “could this be a potential advocate?”.
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 The classic children’s bedtime story “The Three Little Pigs”, was first published back in 1890 and has been told ever since. I’m sure must of us know the basic outline of the story but just in case you’ve forgotten - to escape the attention of the hungry wolf, each pig made a house constructed out of different materials - straw, sticks and bricks. The hungry wolf could easily blow away the houses made out of straw and sticks; it was only the house of bricks that survived. I am reminded of this story every time I speak to my clients and ask them one of the most fundamental and revealing “key questions” that exists for any SaaS business: “What proportion of your customers would say that your solution is: 1) No longer needed 2) Nice to have 3) Essential?” The hungry wolf - or in this case, your client - will continually evaluate whether they need to keep using (and paying for) your solution. Customers who see your solution as being “no longer needed” would be the equivalent of a house made out of straw – it will blow away (or churn) at the earliest possible opportunity. Equally, you are not much safer if your client believes your solution is “nice to have”, although sticks are slightly more resilient than straw, eventually it will go the same way and ultimately result in churn. Only the customers who evaluate your solution as “essential” (i.e. the house made of bricks), can be considered as not at an imminent threat of ROI-based churn. However, when I speak to many Customer Success groups about how they would answer the above question, the answers are revealing and startling in equal measure. Typically, most organisations I speak to believe that the majority of their customer base evaluate their solution as “nice to have” – sometimes as high as 85%. This presents a clear and present danger to every subscription business. In an age where budgets and business requirements are being continually evaluated, if your solution is in the (worst case) “no longer needed” or (not much better) “nice to have” categories, your business is going to suffer from cataclysmic levels of customer churn. This blog will help you understand if this issue exists within your own business and most importantly, what corrective measures need to be implemented: ASK THE QUESTION To begin, you need to understand the scale of the potential issue. As experts on their customers, CSMs are uniquely positioned to give a view on their accounts – how would they proportion their base into the three categories that the key question asks? Of course, this is a purely subjective measure made by the CSM, to be more objective you can also review how customers have responded to previous satisfaction surveys. Net Promotor Score (NPS) would be an obvious example and is calculated based on responses to a single question: How likely is it that you would recommend our company/product/service to a friend or colleague? The scoring for this answer is most often based on a 0 to 10 scale and depending on the response would be labelled as detractors, passives or promotors. I would equate them to the key question using the below scale:
BUILD PERSONAS FOR EACH CATEGORY Once you build a picture of what type of clients fit into each category, you can start to build common characteristics (or personas) for each one. Many leading B2C businesses have made this into an exact science – they can predict the likely future behaviour of their users based on engagement patterns. For example, Facebook would determine an “essential” user as someone who connects with seven people within the first two weeks. At Twitter, it's when a new user follows thirty accounts. At both points, both Facebook and Twitter believe that they will have “users for life” (also referred to as the “True North”). The next logical question to ask is what your organisation’s definition of an “essential” customer is and if you don’t know, how do you figure it out? A great place to start is to take a look back at your book of business; review your churned accounts over the past twelve months and see if there were any common characteristics. For example, did they share any firmographic similarities (e.g. geographic area, number of clients, type of organisation, industry, public/private, etc.), product usage patterns or other types of easily identifiable characteristics. New customers who fall into this profile might well be the ones who fit into the “no longer needed” category in the future. Similarly, what are the common characteristics of clients who tend to have extremely positive traits? For example, they achieve significant early value, have high usage patterns, consistently renew/procure additional services and advocate on your behalf. These are the future customers who are more likely to fit into the “essential” category. EDUCATE SALES (AND THE WIDER BUSINESS) Naturally, every business wants to maximise their “essential” category customers and have very few (if any) “no longer needed” or “nice to have” clients. Once you have identified and categorised your clients into these categories, you should work with your new business teams to review their sales pipelines and use this insight to identify prospects who are the likely churn candidates of the future. One of the core traits of businesses who truly believe in Customer Success is that they will do everything in their power to help their clients maximise their ROI. If you have identified a future “no longer needed” candidate who will churn at the first given opportunity, then I would strongly argue that the short-term bookings benefit will quickly be overshadowed by the longer-term costs (e.g. reputationally, financial, morale, etc.). Ultimately, having Customer Success educate Sales and the wider business on the exact personas of these three categories will lead to increased customer satisfaction, time to value and reduced levels of churn. CONVERTING “NICE TO HAVE” TO “ESSENTIAL” If you have identified a significant number of “nice to have” clients in your account base, it is essential that you attempt to move them to the “essential” category as quickly as possible. Making this happen is clearly easier said than done but is made more likely by following these tips:
Every subscription business should constantly ask itself how many of its customers truly see their solutions as “essential”, and not be satisfied as a provider of “nice to have” services. Left unchecked, the cold winds of churn will constantly blow with increased ferocity; just like the three little pigs, the houses of straw and sticks will eventually tumble. Only where we can unequivocally demonstrate that the customer use case is understood, how their success is objectively measured and clearly show how we are meeting/exceeding it, can we comfortably sit in our house made out of churn-resistant bricks.
 Although Customer Success has been at the centre of my professional world for well over a decade, I often have to explain its basic premise to colleagues, friends and family alike. I’m sure many people reading this blog will be familiar to the quizzical looks that are often followed when you say “I work in Customer Success”. Typical responses range from “is that like Support?” or “yes, we have Account Managers at our company as well”, followed by trying (and sometimes failing) to articulate that it is actually neither of those functions. I am (unapologetically) a big fan of analogies and I wanted to share the one I use about Customer Success as it often hits home and is followed by “ah…now I get it!”. I ask people to imagine being at the gym and think about the role of a Personal Trainer (PT). When you first meet a PT they ask you what your goals are; for example, losing weight before your wedding, gaining fitness for an upcoming marathon or perhaps gain some muscle mass to look good on your next summer holiday. The PT will then set about building a personalised plan to help you meet (and hopefully exceed) your goals, use metrics along the way (e.g. BMI, weight, etc.) to track your progress and make any adjustments as required. They will assertively encourage progress, celebrate the personal milestones on your journey and then try to remove as many barriers as possible until the end-goal is met. If you are reading this and in you are in a Customer Success role then this should sound familiar! The Customer Success Manager is the PT in this scenario; they understand what end-goals their client is looking to achieve and build a proactive plan to help them achieve it. They will use their own set of metrics to track progress (e.g. usage, survey scores, etc.), ensure that successes are celebrated when milestones are reached and make any adjustments required if the desired progress is not being made quickly enough. The similarities between a fitness centre and Customer Success doesn’t end there. Just as in Customer Success we have “high”, “low” and “Self-Serve” models, so do gyms - for example:  Given the similarities between the role of a PT and a CSM there some crucial lessons to be learnt that will help increase your clients ROI. These include:
Although “Customer Success” as a corporate function is in its early teenage years, it is by no means a new concept. It has been in existence in some way, shape or form as long as merchants were selling their wares and especially since software companies had a function for the post-sale customer relationship. There is an incredible amount that today’s Customer Success professional can learn from this history and how entirely different functions and industries – such as the fitness centres and PTs – have successfully helped their clients reach and exceed their goals. I suddenly feel very motivated to hit the gym – and see if any of the PTs want a career change to Customer Success!  No matter how good your people, tools and processes are, there is a significant lurking danger that will see your CS strategy fail - customer apathy. One of the most common issues that I hear from Customer Success Managers is that their clients are not engaging with them. Yet, when challenged with how they should try to correct the situation, typical responses are often to repeat the behaviour that didn’t work in the first place, for example: "I will email them again” “Let’s get another ‘check-in’ meeting arranged to see what’s going on” “I don’t want to bother them, let’s give it another couple of weeks before we try again” What can you do to convert unresponsive customers into engaged contacts that you can have meaningful, on-going dialogue with? This blog sets out to discuss some of the major causes of customer apathy and what corrective action you can take. Email Blindness You might have seen the illustrative graphic of what happens in a typical “internet minute” in 2018. The numbers are truly staggering, from the 266,000 hours of Netflix being watched to the 1.1 million “swipes” on Tinder. By far the biggest segment of all is the amount of email being sent; according to the research, 187 million emails are sent in an average internet minute during 2018. This trend is on the increase, the “internet minute” for 2017 shows that 156 million emails were sent. Although it is difficult to corroborate the research methods used to create these “internet minutes”, it does point to a significant conclusion – email is hitting its saturation point and losing its effectiveness as a communication tool. However, email is still the de-facto method that many CSMs use on an almost exclusive basis to communicate with their clients. There is definitely still a place for email; indeed for technical, first-level support, contractual or commercial communications it’s vital to have critical points documented. However, if it is used almost exclusively to communicate how the customer is going to get value from your solution, it is going to significantly diminish your key points. Ask yourself whether email is really the best channel to send your message (especially if you have already used it previously but received little or no response). There are a variety of other communication methods that you can use that may yield better results. For example: Direct Customer Interaction: If you need to be further convinced about the importance of direct customer interaction, bear in mind that published studies indicates that 93% of all daily communication is non-verbal. Email alone can never capture strong indicators of customer happiness/displeasure (e.g. facial expressions, gestures, posture, vocal pitch, etc.). Indeed, the sentiments behind how something is written in an email can be widely misinterpreted by the reader. Typically, routine direct customer interactions would include:
Social/Professional media (e.g. LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.):
Email Best Practices Despite the many challenges with email communications, there are some best practice approaches that can help improve your chances of getting a response. For example:
It’s All About the Message Of course, understanding the optimal delivery method for your communications is only half the battle. If your customer does not deem what you are saying is important than it is highly likely that your message will never be acted on. Here are some suggested approaches to ensure that your message will resonate loudly with its intended recipients:
 Moving On
Naturally, there is nothing more frustrating than chasing a customer for an update only to find out much later that they have moved on to a new role; either internally or externally. Here are some suggested methods to help ensure that you keep track of any status changes to your contacts:
In Conclusion Customer apathy is largely driven by two key factors; what you are saying (i.e. message relevance) and how you are saying it (i.e. the communication channel). As the common adage goes, “insanity is repeating the same mistakes and expecting different results”, however very often we do exactly that when it comes to communicating with customers. Take this opportunity to re-asses how you are communicating with your customer base and change-up your strategy to those who have become unresponsive. I sincerely hope that this blog has given you a fresh perspective on how to approach these contacts to re-establish dialogue and create a meaningful relationship going forward. I would also love to hear more about the techniques that you have used to re-engage with unresponsive contacts; use the “Comments” section below to share your thoughts with the wider community.  The Customer Success movement has grown exponentially from being a niche corporate discipline just a decade ago to where it is today, at the very core of some of the world’s leading businesses. A recent article authored by Bob Evans (former VP of Strategic Communications at SAP in 2011, and Chief Communications Officer at Oracle) published on Forbes.com really illustrates this point.  Further evidence of this meteoric rise can also be seen in the huge demand for Customer Success professionals; on LinkedIn alone in July ‘18, there are currently over 1,500 open job vacancies. Another recent poll (also from LinkedIn) has placed CSMs 3rd on the “" of 2018 - up from 19th in 2017.
Another indicator has been the growing number of specialist software solutions designed to help Customer Success professionals proactively manage their account base and consistently deliver their customers desired outcomes. Other often cited benefits of CS software include:
As a Consultant who works with many Customer Success groups, I am often asked “do you think we would benefit from specialist CS software and if so, what one?” As with many questions asked about Customer Success, the answer starts with “it depends…” and this blog will explore some of the key factors that are required to effectively implement CS software. There are many excellent software providers that can be recommended based on a number of key criteria such as budgets, how your CS Team is structured, functionality and ease-of-use. Examples include some of the more established providers such as Gainsight, Totango, Natero, ClientSuccess and ChurnZero as well as some newer entrants (e.g. Akita, Iridize). A full list of is maintained by the Customer Success Association. It is a fallacy to think that CS Software in of itself will help your Customer Success group proactively manage their account base and/or identify clients at risk of churning or potentially upgrading. There is a degree of internal “heavy lifting” required to ensure that you get maximum return on whatever CS software provider you choose. In my experience, here are some of the most critical items that you should consider prior to going “live”: 1. Data/Metrics In order to track the right metrics within your CS software that determine customer “health”, you need to have them populated in your internal systems to begin with. It is not unusual to have these data-points stored in a wide variety of disparate internal systems (e.g. CRM, databases & spreadsheets) and managed by different groups (e.g. Support Marketing, Finance, etc). Irrespective of which system they are in, here are some recommended data-points that you should consider tracking in a CS software:
2. Integration Capabilities Once you have selected the right data-points to track it’s vitally important that your chosen CS software has the ability to integrate them into their platform. Many CS software providers show which third party integrations they offer directly on their website (e.g. Gainsight, Natero, Totango and Akita). Most providers offer large eco-systems of third party integrations (some well over 100) from systems as diverse as CRMs to accounting software, so there is plenty of choice available. It’s also important to consider that some of your data-points will reside on internally built systems and would need to be integrated via an Open API. In addition, you should also consider the number of data-points that you would like to track as this does differ vastly by software provider. 3. Corporate Support Assuming that you already work in a Customer Success role, it is fairly safe to assume that you understand (and are excited about) the benefits that CS software can bring to your organisation. However, it is vital that this same vision is shared with your peers from other groups, especially at C-Level. From a functional perspective, there is always a degree of internal work involved to successfully integrate your internal data to external solutions. As stated previously, most CS providers offers 100’s of integrations however internal Development resources will be required to ensure that these connections work as expected. In addition, resources within your Product, Engineering and Security groups will most likely be needed if the CS software needs to integrate directly into your online solution. The amount of internal “heavy lifting”required should form a key part of your discussions with CS software vendors during the pre-sales process. You should also ensure that you involve the relevant groups/individuals from your organisation into these discussions as well. C-Level sponsorship is also vitally important; you want your organisation as a whole to be invested in the effectiveness of CS software – not just the Customer Success group. As with any systems that requires expenditure or takes up valuable internal resources, if the purpose/benefits of the CS software are not clearly understood then the on-going need for it will continually be re-examined. Any implementation roadblocks that require attention from other internal groups will not get the attention that they require and you will find that progress grinds down to an eventual halt. 4. Creation of “Playbooks” A central proposition of many CS software providers is the automation of “playbooks“ – i.e. predefined activities for customer accounts that meet certain thresholds. For example, new users who have not logged into within the first 7 days would receive an automated email with a reminder of their account details. Although CS software can automate these playbooks, they cannot create bespoke ones that are right for your business (although some providers do have a library of "canned" playbooks that can be utilised or changed). Each organisation should create their own bespoke playbooks that suits their products, customers, customer segmentation/engagement strategy and value proposition. Having multiple playbooks already designed prior to going “live” with your chosen CS software will result in valuable time not being wasted creating them during the deployment stage. Many CS software providers will offer assistance in the automation of your playbooks into their systems as part of their on-boarding processes. In Conclusion It’s absolutely clear that CS software can positively impact the internal performance of your Customer Success group, your wider business as well as help your clients get maximum benefit from using your solutions. However, without the proper corporate foundations in place, your CS software deployment will be seen as a “white elephant” that never reaches the full potential of what it can do. The recommendations outlined in this blog are by no means designed to be an exhaustive list; for those of you who have successfully implemented CS software, please comment below and share your opinions. In addition, CSM Insight works with clients to help implement the topics raised in this blog (and many more besides), please get in touch to discuss how we can help your Customer Success group work at maximum efficiency  Picture the scene – your company’s annual conference is coming up and your MD asks you to nominate a customer who could present on the benefits that they have achieved from your solution. Your mind instantly fixes upon “Customer X” who are a mature client, been the subject of numerous historical case studies, and their usage is “off the charts” positive. In addition, you have worked with your primary contact for so long that you consider them to be a friend as well as a business contact. In short, you are sure that they will jump at your invitation (and tell the MD as much) and immediately pick up the phone to make the request. However, the actual response you receive is something very different – something along the lines of: “Oh boy – this is going to be a tough one. I was going to call you….not sure how to tell you this….but we’re not going to be renewing when the current contract is up” Queue stunned silence – all the indicators – both subjective and objective – point to an extremely mutually beneficial relationship so how on earth could they be leaving? How did you miss the warning signs? How are you going to explain this to your MD? What other “safe” customers could also be at risk? This scenario perfectly illustrates the “Watermelon Effect”; on the surface everything about your client relationship is green and healthy but dig underneath and the reality is that the landscape is almost completely red and that the relationship is in danger. What can you do to identify your clients that are currently suffering from this phenomenon and most importantly, what can you do about it? This blog sets out to identify some of the warning signs and what corrective action you can take. Are your Customer Health Scores fit for purpose? A major challenge for anyone in Customer Success is reconciling so many disparate data-sources that indicate the relative health of a client relationship. This can include (but not limited to) product usage data, support tickets, marketing campaigns, commercial information, contractual status, survey results and the regular on-going vendor/customer correspondence. Customer Health Scores play a vital role in bringing together these various data sources and producing an overall indicator that shows the strength of a client relationship. Whilst this is in principle is positive, like any calculation, the result is only valid if the sum itself is correct. In the case of Customer Health Scores, too much positive weighting can be applied if there is a high level of on-going product adoption. There is a common feeling that “high product usage = high product value” however this concept is fundamentally flawed. Even if adoption appears to be high, it does not necessarily mean that your customers are getting value. For example, I use my local train service almost every day but it ranks among the worse for reliability and customer service. On the surface my usage of this service is high (there is no alternative), but if given a choice, I would take my business elsewhere. If your solution offers something similarly unique that no-one else in the market is offering, then clearly this monopoly will force customers to use it. However, when the competition does eventually catch up, any source of frustration that your customers have with your business will lead to them leaving at the earliest possible opportunity. The key questions to ask when reviewing usage data are “does this fit in with how they should be using our solution?”. Simply adding this to a Health Score and asking CSMs (or whoever is closest to your customer) to enter a “Yes”, “No”, or “More investigation needed”, will ensure that a more appropriate weighting for product usage will be applied to the final score. Do you have a “Voice of the Customer” Programme? Ultimately, customers that can clearly demonstrate a strong ROI from using your solution will see you as a “critical” vendor and will continue to renew/grow their relationship. If your solution is viewed as “nice to have” or worse-case, “no longer needed”, then the eventual outcome will be that they downgrade or completely cancel. It’s imperative that your business has a formalised “Voice of the Customer” programme so that you can go beyond simple metrics (i.e. product usage, support tickets, etc) and get the answers you need as to whether they are achieving ROI or not. In the excellent book “Customer Success” by Nick Mehta, Dan Steinman and Lincoln Murphy, they list the “10 Laws of Customer Success”. The 2nd law is “The Natural Tendency for Customers and Vendors is to Drift Apart” which perfectly illustrates that over time, changes at both the customer and the vendor will mean that what was once a cohesive relationship can be stretched to the point of no return. Having a formalised “Voice of the Customer” programme can be one of your most effective weapons in arresting this “drift” and ensure that both parties remain closely aligned. A great example of a “Voice of the Customer” programme is Win, Loss & Churn analysis. This approach enables you to interview key decision makers and ask them in-depth questions about what motivates their current and future buying decisions. Whether you run this programme internally or externally (such as with CSM Insight) the feedback gathered enables you to make the necessary changes to keep your customer relationships thriving. Build a “Broad and Deep” Customer Contact Network Being over-reliant on too few customer contacts, especially those that do not have the authority to make buying decisions is a significant contributor to unexpected churn. When your existing contacts eventually leave their positions, you leave yourself open to the mercy of others who may understand little about your solutions and their associated benefits. Even worse, their replacements may have a significant bias towards your competitors and look to bring them in at the earliest possible opportunity. Always ask yourself “if my primary contacts leaves tomorrow, how exposed are we?”. If the answer to that question is anything other than “not at all”, then focus on building and nurturing new relationships at multiple levels. Not only does this help off-set the risk when your existing contacts leaves but it also provides multiple viewpoints into how your solution is perceived across your customer’s business. This is especially true when it comes to the person who is responsible for actually signing the cheques. Unless they are acutely aware of the associated benefits that your solution provides they are quite rightly going to challenge the need for it. If it is not possible to have a direct relationship with this individual (or team) it is vital that your other contacts are effectively sharing their “user stories” across with the individual(s) responsible for the final sign-off. How Relevant is your Solution – today and in the future? When your customer first purchased your solution they clearly believed it could help them solve a business pain and/or achieve a desired outcome. However, how true is that statement today? As referenced above, even high product usage does not indicate how much value your customer ultimately receives. In addition to conducting “Voice of the Customer” programmes, another very effective method for understanding your client’s depth of usage is to analyse the “Consumption Gap”. As described in my previous blog post on this topic, this term perfectly describes the gap between what your product is capable of verses what your customers are using. “it’s all well and good having a truly innovative product with regularly scheduled product releases that add a tonne of new enhancements but can your users keep up? Do they have the knowledge, skills and most of all, time to take advantage of these new features or are they destined to gather “digital dust” forever more? Extracted from the Consumption Gap Blog: CSM Insight If your customer’s consumption gap is too high (i.e. 80% of your product capability is not being used) there is a significant risk that your customers will seek out cheaper alternatives. Although your competitors may only be able to offer a fraction of what your solution can do, if they can offer the same core functionality, it would be very difficult to overcome this significant obstacle. To keep the consumption gap at a healthy level, ensure that you are effectively articulating the core benefits of your solution in a language that is going to resonate loudly with your customer. A good rule of thumb when describing your solution is to put yourself in your customers shoes and ask “why should I care?”. If you can describe how each facet of your product is going to make their life easier and more productive then your chances of them actually adopting and getting value from it are going to be significantly increased. It’s also vitally important that your product roadmap is appropriate for your customers future requirements. Unless up-coming product releases significantly increase your customer’s ROI then ultimately you will lose out to new market disruptors or existing competition who innovate at a faster rate than your business. Ensure that you have a formalised process for collecting customer product feedback and then consolidate this list amongst your team. The final stage is to then prioritise this list appropriately (e.g. by revenue of impacted customers) and then present it to your Product Management team to incorporate into their roadmap. In Conclusion A commonly repeated warning when making any kind of investment decision is “past performance is no guarantee of future results". This same mantra rings absolutely true for your customers who you consider “safe” today. Don’t let your customers past successes lull you into a false sense of security that they will stay that way forever more, as the “Watermelon Effect” will eventually take hold. Ultimately, the biggest weapon in combating the “Watermelon Effect” is having a laser focus on ensuring that your customer achieves a significant ROI from using your solution both today and in the future. Always cast a critical eye over your internal processes that monitor customer health and question whether they are giving you accurate results. Take the time to investigate churned customers who previously looked healthy and see what lessons can be learned to help prevent it in the future.
 The growth of Customer Success (CS) as a corporate discipline has been remarkable and continues unabated. Fuelling this incredible growth has been the seismic shift from a transaction economy to the subscription model. No longer do customers typically buy solutions for perpetuity but instead subscribe to them for a fixed period. According to Forrester Intelligence, we are already 5 years into the "Age of the Customer”, where outcomes are expected, not transactions. Customers don’t want to be sold a “product”, they want an on-going partnership with vendors who have a thorough understanding of their business needs and provide solutions that meet and exceed agreed goals. Simply put, Customer Success teams makes this happen; they must constantly demonstrate that they are providing a tangible ROI (Return on Investment) to their clients or they will be replaced. A further illustration of this growth can be seen in recently published research reports by LinkedIn. The Customer Success Manager was ranked fourth in its “2017 U.S. Emerging Jobs Report” and third in the “Most Promising Jobs and In-Demand Skills of 2018”. What is even more staggering was that only a year ago, in the “Most Promising Jobs of 2017”, the Customer Success Manager was ranked nineteenth with significant increases shown in median pay (from $72,000 to $82,300), job openings and (in both years) a career advancement score of 10/10. Given the increased importance of Customer Success as a corporate function and the Customer Success Manager as a credible, lucrative and meaningful career choice, it is absolutely imperative that it actually delivers on its promise to increase lifetime customer value. In order to do this, each organisation with a Customer Success function typically uses checks and balances (i.e. metrics) to ensure that it is performing to an optimal level and if not, will make the changes necessary to do so. Examples of these metrics include Net Retention, Churn rates, MRR / ARR (Monthly/Annual Reoccurring Revenue), Growth, Product Usage, NPS (Net Promoter Score), Surveys and Customer Health Scores. However, what does Customer Success "excellence" really look like from the most important stakeholder of them all - the customer? How do they view the importance of the work carried out by the Customer Success team? Failure to understand this properly will be one of the biggest factors that contributes towards “green churn”, a term that describes an unexpected downgrade or cancellation requests from customers that otherwise appears to be healthy. Here are some key recommendations on how you can ensure that your customers truly understand and appreciate the value that Customer Success brings to their organisation: Collect Customer Success Criteria Subjectively & Objectively
Segment your Customer Stakeholders
Discuss Business Benefits not Features
Identify and Communicate Early Wins
Use Every Customer Engagement as an Opportunity
Perform Win, Loss & Churn (WLC) Analysis
Taking Ownership
Align your Approach
Asking your Customer to be your Advocate
As the “Age of the Customer” continues to mature, it is imperative that you are able to step back from your day-to-day operations and understand your customers’ perspective of both your organisation and your CS function. With that in mind and by the using the methods discussed above, make the necessary positive changes to help your clients truly understand the key business benefits that they are achieving in a language that is going to resonate the loudest. In such a competitive landscape where new entrants are disrupting even the most established markets, doing this right could well be the difference between keeping/growing your customer base or face the risk of having them leave you entirely.  Author Bio: Adam Joseph
Founder of CSM Insight who had previously spent 15 years managing Customer Success organisations for leading businesses. Passionate about all things Customer Success and recently voted as a member of the "Top 100 Customer Success Strategists" in 2018.  Even though the Customer Success bandwagon feels like it has been gathering pace for some time, there are still many organisations at different stages of their business life-cycles wondering when to “pull the trigger” and implement it. If you are a company that has a subscription model and/or relies on reoccurring revenue, in my opinion, the answer is a simple one – “NOW!”. Put simply, Customer Success ensures that your customers achieve their desired aims with your solution and by doing so, will renew, grow and advocate on your behalf to their peers. Given that the cost of acquiring a new customer is in the region of 10x the cost of renewing a customer, this makes both business and financial sense. In the Age of the Customer, you can no longer acquire your way to success Even before you decide to hire an individual Customer Success Manager (or build an entire team), it is important to recognise that this, in of itself, is not a magic fix to a business that is not customer-centric. Customer Success is an ethos that needs to permeate through your entire business; especially for any customer-facing teams such as Sales, Marketing and Finance. This should be led by the CEO and C-Team who should view every single interaction as an opportunity to “wow” your customer and by doing so, build brand loyalty. This is especially important in a world where there is so much choice between software vendors and the differences between products is getting fewer and fewer each day. Customer Success is where 90% of the revenue is If you are still uncertain about whether you are ready to implement a Customer Success framework, here are some of the signs that might indicate your need to do so ASAP: Unexpected Churn:
I try and convince everyone in the world that it boils down to one metric….it is the most important metric in your company if you are a reoccurring revenue business…. that metric is “Net Retention”. What Net Retention means is, if you never sold to another customer, is your customer-base a growing entity?
We need to get every part of the company to understand why the business exists (beyond creating value for stakeholders) and that's to ensure customers achieve their Desired Outcome. Fail to do that, and you won't exist for much longer  Author Bio: Adam Joseph
Founder of CSM Insight who had previously spent 15 years managing Customer Success organisations for leading businesses. Passionate about all things Customer Success and recently voted as a member of the "Top 100 Customer Success Strategists" in 2018.  During my commute into the office this morning, I had a surprising, uplifting and unpredicted moment that really brought home to me the concept of delighting your customers in the most unexpected of ways. To help set the scene, I am waiting alone at a busy bus stop on an extremely wet and blustery autumnal morning waiting for a bus to take me to my local train station. The bus was running late and it was looking extremely unlikely that I was going to make my train. After a couple of minutes, a taxi pulled alongside the bus stop, lowers the front passenger-side window and calls out to me, “Hello?”. With a little trepidation at this unsolicited approach, I walked forward to his passenger-side window. “Hello mate”, he begins, “I’ve dropped you home a few times from the train station and recognised you; I am heading back there now, jump in – I’ll give you a lift”. Now at this point, I’m afraid to say the cynic in me immediately thought, “what’s the catch?”, “is this free?”, “what’s he after?” but feeling completely in shock at the generous offer, I put those feelings aside and jumped in the taxi. He then proceeded to drive me the ten-minute journey to the station and we chatted merrily along the route, engaging each other and discussing our plans for the day ahead. When we arrived at the station, I thanked the driver profusely for his extremely kind act of generosity and just about made my train to continue my commute which otherwise, I would have missed. What really struck me on the rest of my journey was how that experience left me feeling. Even in the grand scheme of things, it may have seemed relatively trivial (and of course it is) however this small and completely unexpected act rekindled my belief that even the smallest of actions can have a profoundly positive effect. In the same way that this relatively small gesture from a taxi driver had such a positive effect on my day, a similar low-resource approach (alongside your strategic plans) can be applied to your customer base to help strengthen your relationship in the most unexpected ways. Here are some recommendations as to how you can put this into action:
 Author Bio: Adam Joseph
Founder of CSM Insight who had previously spent 15 years managing Customer Success organisations for leading businesses. Passionate about all things Customer Success and recently voted as a member of the "Top 100 Customer Success Strategists" in 2018.  Anyone working in a Customer Success role should be well used to the roller-coaster ride that comes with the job. From that amazing feeling and thrill of helping your customer achieve (and surpass) their desired outcomes to the desolate low of dealing with failures when they occur. When something does go wrong and with the benefit of hindsight, you typically arrive at the conclusion that it was not the result of one individual factor but a combination of much smaller events that at the time seemed incidental but when combined, culminated in something much more sinister. There is actually a name for this principle - the “Black Swan” theory - which was coined by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a Lebanese-American essayist, scholar and statistician. It describes a terrible event that comes as a complete surprise, has a major effect, and is often triggered by something relatively minor. From a personal perspective and as a parent to two children, my wife and I spent much of their formative years constantly worrying about things that hadn’t happened yet and probably never would. When they were babies, were they still breathing in their sleep (every parent would have shared this worry), when they started walking were they going to going to hit their head on a corner of a table, was an open door about to slam shut on them? These worries were exhausting and of course, on the whole, my kids - who are now 13 and 11 - are absolutely fine (even if they have both inherited my clumsy gene). However, as Customer Success professionals, we should all be programmed to think about our customers in a similar way and constantly be looking for the “soft underbelly” (or weak-point) of everything we do. Pinpoint the factors that could go wrong in your internal systems, processes and products and build Play-Books (i.e. process workflows) to deal with each one. Review your customers who have churned or downgraded unexpectedly and ask yourself “why?”. In hindsight, could you have built better controls, checks and balances to prevent it from occurring because if you haven’t, the chances are that the next nasty surprise is not far away. You can see the Black Swan theory in full effect at some very large companies quite recently. It is not often that you can find a common dominator in companies as diverse as Marketo, Foursquare.com, Microsoft, the Dallas Cowboys and financial institutions such as Regions, Clydesdale and Yorkshire banks but there is one. All of these companies have had the embarrassing misfortune to let their domain name lapse. In the case of Marketo, not only was this unfortunate, it also had serious consequences for their large user base who found themselves unable to access their services on which they rely. Given the extremely high value that every organisation places on their brand equity (Marketo was just acquired for close to $2 billion), the consequences of these high-profile gaffes last far longer than it takes to remember to renew their domains with the relevant registries.  In each of these examples, it is highly likely that smaller individual issues occurred that eventually led to a much bigger problem. Where does the fault ultimately lie? How proactive should both parties (suppliers and customers) have been to stop these smaller issues occurring in the first place? Likely, existing processes were already in place to help avoid this exact situation from occurring, such as:
However, despite these types of measures being in place, the “soft underbelly” of these processes made it possible for things to go wrong and eventually – they did – and chaos ensues. This can be for a variety of reasons; some of which are highly predictable; such as:
Remember, no matter how good any process is that tracks key customer metrics and health, there is one vital component that is critical to its overall success; does it apply common-sense? Just taking a “ticking the boxes” approach (e.g. looking at usage statistics in isolation, sending out regular product announcements, automated alerting when specific events occur, etc.) will never be enough. Sometimes, just picking up the phone and having a direct conversation can yield fantastic results. Just think what a call would have meant to someone at Marketo, Foursquare.com or Microsoft to let them know that their internet domains were about to expire. If as a CSM you are concerned that your customer is not getting value - and ultimately heading for downgrade/churn – you need to be creative in your approach, move away from the “tick box” mentality and be resilient to keep going until you see more positive results or at the very least, ensure that key stakeholders in your business are aware so they can forecast accurately and do everything in their power to assist you in your efforts. In my experience, here are some creative techniques that I have seen leveraged to help build customer value that yield results:
I’m off to check when the domain on CSMInsight.com expires or chances are, you will never get a chance to read this blog anyway!  Author Bio: Adam Joseph
Founder of CSM Insight who had previously spent 15 years managing Customer Success organisations for leading businesses. Passionate about all things Customer Success and a recent keynote speak at the Gainsight Pulse EMEA conference.  At a recent Customer Success event, I was introduced to a concept called the “Consumption Gap” during a presentation by Dan Steinman from Gainsight. Although it was a term that I had not come across before, it’s not new; in fact, it was first coined by J.B. Wood in his book “Complexity Avalanche” back in 2009. The term perfectly describes the gap between what your product is capable of verses what your customers are using.  In other words, it’s all well and good having a truly innovative product with regularly scheduled product releases that add a tonne of new enhancements but can your users keep up? Do they have the knowledge, skills and most of all, time to take advantage of these new features or are they destined to gather “digital dust” forever more? This gap is not just a business issue – it happens all around us in our professional and personal lives. One of the best personal illustrations that I can provide is the 65-inch Samsung TV which I purchased around 18 months ago and takes pride of place in my living room. This television was a purely luxury purchase however after extensive research, much deliberation and negotiating a good deal with the retailer, I decided to treat myself. Given the amount of time, effort and hard earned cash that I spent on this purchase you would think that I would be using the TV to its maximum capability? Absolutely not - in reality, I probably am only using about a quarter of what the TV is capable of. When I look at the remote control (which is about the length of my forearm), I have absolutely no idea about what half the buttons actually do. I just use my TV for the key tasks that I need and after using it for 18 months, I have no immediate desire to explore further. In this example, my “Consumption Gap” is around 75%. Following Dan’s excellent presentation on this subject, I was left with some fundamental questions about why the "Consumption Gap” exists that I wanted to expand on in this blog. Depending on the type of business and products that you provide there could be several reasons why the gap exists, however here are some keys ones:
When you consider that in the future, it is possible (and some might argue - probable) that today’s typical annual subscription model in the SaaS (Software as a Service) world will give way to an outcome based model where a provider only gets paid when the customer achieves their desired outcomes, the "Consumption Gap” will become even more important. Organisations who get complacent about their customers adopting as much of their products as possible will get replaced by nimbler competitors who have a strong Customer Success ethos and provide innovative, relevant, intuitive and feature-rich products that customers actually want and regularly use.  Author Bio: Adam Joseph
Founder of CSM Insight who had previously spent 15 years managing Customer Success organisations for leading businesses. Passionate about all things Customer Success and recently voted as a member of the "Top 100 Customer Success Strategists" in 2018.  Customer Success (CS) is enjoying a lot of attention, particularly in Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) where CS is a critical enabler of renewal subscriptions. Customer Support, by comparison, is perceived as a reactive (and less attractive) break-fix department. While organizationally, Support may be a separate team, it can also play a key role in customers’ success. Organizations that are willing to lower the silo walls can enjoy significant opportunities for improved Customer Success. Onboarding First, let’s examine the lifecycle of Customer Support and Customer Success in the context of company growth. Most startups look after their customers with one customer team, who onboard customers, deal with customer problems, and probably take care of renewals. As companies scale, there is a need to add more structure and process which leads to formalized teams. Upon reaching a critical mass, SaaS organizations realize that they cannot keep in touch with every customer to manage risks or opportunities, so they form CS teams to ensure their customers receive value – thus protecting renewals proactively. Support teams are formed to manage reactive customer issues. Separate teams allow the kind of focus and specialization that enable scale. However, these siloed teams can lead to trade-offs in teamwork and collaboration. The biggest risks include a lack of leverage and the potential to lose sight of shared Customer Success goals that served the business well initially. This challenge of silos is exacerbated by separate leadership, metrics, process and ultimately subcultures. Smart organizations are rediscovering opportunities to leverage Support departments for customer success, and even combining Support and Success in some cases. The prospect for the Success team is a good one: an army of Support Engineers talking to customers every day, spotting opportunities to reinforce the success toolkit, and helping further the success plan with every interaction. The prospect for Support is good as well: to reduce a recurring cycle of break-fix issues, have their voice and expertise heard, and possibly open up a new career path. Each team still needs to maintain their specific operational focus areas, but aligning on the objective of helping the customer be successful is a subtle but powerful enabler of leverage. Why Does Support Exist? “Why does an organization exist?” – asks Patrick Lencioni in his book The Advantage. This is a great question for any organization wishing to examine its mission and meaning. For many Support leaders, the answer has been “to solve customer problems quickly” with an emphasis on problem resolution in the shortest time possible. Metrics that typically follow this thinking are responsiveness, resolution time, first-time fix rate and overall CSAT or NPS scores. This is not a bad mission and it continues to serve many Support organizations well. But in the context of Customer Success, and retaining customers in a competitive industry – is it the best one? Adding “helping customers be successful” or “ helping customers get their intended value from their product investment” extends that mission to include minimizing the business impact of downtime for the customer. This goes further than simply fixing a broken widget. It allows the Support Engineers to use their experience to prevent recurrence of the same issues through additional tools, knowledge or recommendations. In this way, Support’s role shifts slightly from fixing broken ‘issues’ to one of empowering customers with the right knowledge, preventing repeat issues from impacting their business, and being empowered to take appropriate action to help the customer. Better for Support, better for Success, and better for the Customer. Customer Success as a Linear Process? From an internal perspective, a typical Customer Success process involves Onboarding, Adoption, Expansion and Renewal, almost assuming this linear process unfolds one step after the other. The reality is that a customer’s journey will be on their terms, and they will engage in different ways with your product and with your Customer Success efforts. Challenges will present in various ways and the CS team needs to engage with and leverage several departments, including Support, to deliver a successful outcome. “Smart organizations are rediscovering opportunities to leverage Support departments for Customer Success.” Let’s look at some suggested ways to leverage Customer Support to optimize the Customer Success process: 1. Organizational Alignment In the TSIA’s 2015 Services Organization Structure Survey, they learned that “customer success” is gaining ground as the descriptive term for the complete global services organization, and that support services report into customer success more than 40% of the time. Organization alignment and consolidation are rarely enough on their own. There needs to be supporting process and behavior alignment to realize synergies. It doesn’t have to be large scale change to be effective. Pilot small process and role changes, fine tune with iterations to assess the impact on metrics, and do it again until measurable improvement is achieved. 2. Onboarding Analysis of support tickets that are attributable to underutilized training can be impactful information to include as part of the onboarding process. It can provide an incentive for putting onboarding information into practice, as well as measure the effectiveness of the training itself. You can go a step further by asking support engineers about what they see as the most frequent issues during a customer’s onboarding phase. You can share these anticipated issues with your customers so they understand what could cause them potential downtime. This makes the onboarding content more targeted and increases the likelihood that the training will be put into practice. In fact, a great way to make a training webinar more engaging is to have a support engineer co-present support data with their own perspectives. The customer gets preventative solutions for issues they are likely to encounter, the CSM gets to host a winning webinar, and the support engineer gets a new dimension to their job while influencing a reduction in customer support tickets. 2.1 Sharing onboarding resources and customer best practices Make the Support teams aware of the onboarding training schedule and where resources are archived for easy reference. Having CS present these details, perhaps with a short demo at the next Support team meeting, is a simple way to engage support engineers in this effort. Support engineers can share best practices and can often convince customers to take action in the form of attending a webinar or putting the new knowledge into practice. Support engineers can also introduce customers to the CS team to improve engagement or provide re-engagement where required. 3. Adoption People are fundamentally reluctant to change, especially if things are working well. Getting customers to try out a feature takes a multipronged approach, benefits led, and often in small steps. Just because your product is about to launch a cool new feature doesn’t guarantee that your customers will adopt it. Customers are rarely as excited about your product’s new features as you are. In fact, they bought your product for a specific purpose that may be fulfilled without the new features, so why change? People are fundamentally reluctant to change, especially if things are working well. Getting customers to try out a feature takes a multipronged approach, benefits led, and often in small steps. Support engineers are speaking with customers regularly, and senior Support engineers have a level of technical credibility that often puts them in a trusted advisor position. Having Support engineers take a few moments to inform the customer about new feature benefits and how other clients are using new features, could make the difference in getting a customer to take the next step. 4. Expansion A customer will often share some subtle signs of expanding their business in the course of a problem-solving discussion with a Support engineer. Comments like “we are opening a new branch office, and we need this resolved soon,” or more directly “does you platform allow for device management as well as network monitoring?” are potential signals that your Sales team can use to qualify new opportunities. A lightweight process is sufficient for the Support team to capture the key information only, the Sales teams can do the qualification and selling. A word of caution here: it’s important not to dilute the Support engineer’s role from their core job. Careful consideration should be given to any form of incentive for lead generation. A recognition award at the next company meeting may be more appropriate than compensating for the number of leads or converted opportunities – which may drive the wrong behavior. 5. Renewal Organizational silos between Support and Renewal departments can often result in missed opportunities to be more proactive when approaching a renewal event. During this time, it is desirable not to have aging issues open, and that any high impact escalations are closed with robust corrective actions and thorough communications to all customer stakeholders. “Organizational silos between Support and Renewal departments can often result in missed opportunities to be more proactive when approaching a renewal event.” When that is not possible, awareness of significant open issues will at least allow for a status update and resolution plan to be documented, which the renewal team can share proactively with the customer ahead of any renewal notice. 6. Customer Success Plan Reviews Data showing customer support issues broken down by priority and by product can demonstrate the value of the Support department, e.g. the number of issues resolved and time to resolution. Data showing contributing cause, which will likely include a percentage that is attributable to Customer behavior or knowledge, can further reinforce the value proposition of Customer Success resources. 7. Problem-Solving Process While Customer Success may be relatively new in the SaaS context, some of the core Customer Success foundations have been in place for years. The Ford 8d quality problem-solving process and Intel’s 7-step are examples of structured problem-solving process including a step to provide a fix or workaround as an immediate containment step while root cause is being established. This serves to get the customer back up and running as quickly as possible to minimize the impact of downtime on their business. This containment step is a Customer Success focused action in a structured problem-solving process. It sends a strong message to the customer that you want to minimize their business impact as a result of a technical issue, regardless of root cause ownership. Ensuring this is part of your Support team’s problem-solving process is reinforcing the shared goal of Customer Success. 8. Leadership Leadership has an opportunity to create an environment for Success and Support to work towards a common goal, and to provide on-the-ground encouragement and support for innovation. New ideas, breakthrough processes, problem-solving, and all forms of innovation need encouragement and support. 9. Metrics The expression “what gets measured gets focus, and what gets focus gets fixed” is relevant in our context. If the desired outcome is to have an engaged Support department, who are tasked with resolving technical issues but also empowered to act in the interests of Customer Success, then the operational metrics need to be consistent with that goal. Metrics influence actions and behaviors. If all you are measuring are the number of issues closed, that’s what you are likely to get (whether they are actually closed from the customer’s perspective is another matter).  Author Bio: John Kelly
John Kelly is the Managing Director of CustomerLink, a technology and consulting services firm based in Europe that helps companies of all sizes to understand, measure and improve Customer Success. CustomerLink is the exclusive partner for Natero in EMEA. You can get in touch with CustomerLink at www.thecustomerlink.com or connect with John on LinkedIn.  At a recent Customer Success conference in London one of the speakers discussed their organisation’s “True North” moment. Although I had never heard of the specific term, it soon become clear it was describing something that I had contemplated on several occasions throughout my career in Customer Success – at what point do your users become long-term adopters? The answer to this question is your “True North” moment. For example, Facebook determine their "True North" moment to be when a new user connects with 7 people within the first two weeks. At Twitter, it's when a new user follows 30 accounts. At both points, both Facebook and Twitter believe that they will have “users for life”. The next logical question is what is your organisation’s “True North” moment and if you don’t know, how do you figure it out? 1. Get the Fundamentals Done Right If you don’t have the foundations in place to get your customers off to the best possible start, then the “True North” becomes almost meaningless. Failure to do this will lead to prolonged launches, poor customer experience, increased frustration (both internally and externally) and a higher probability of downgrades and ultimately, churn. The key fundamental aspects would include (but not limited to):
2. Use your Customer Metrics What does a “Successful Customer” look like? Although each of us may have our own subjective response to this question based on our previous experiences, it is vital to look at what your customer metrics are telling you. For example, what does your usage data tell you about the customers who renew year after year verses those that churn or downgrade after their initial contract period? Drilling into these metrics should help identify some key usage patterns. Naturally, these data models should also consider critical external factors that will impact their usage of your solutions (e.g. the role/department of your user base, seasonal considerations, etc.) and what end-results that they are expecting (e.g. generating a pipeline of opportunities, sending out Marketing campaigns, etc.). 3. Listen to your Customers As mentioned above, understanding the value that your customers achieve by using your solutions is critical to finding the “True North” moment. Although analysing your usage metrics is an important step, it is even more accurate if you also consider customer feedback as well. There are several ways to collect this data both formally (e.g. surveys, Quarterly Business Reviews, customer forums, customer training sessions, etc.) and informally (e.g. phone calls, emails, etc.). Essentially every customer interaction should be used as an opportunity to check in with your customer to properly understand:
Combining the knowledge gained by interacting with your customers alongside usage metrics should provide you with the required insight to be able to accurately calculate your “True North” moment. 4. Multiple “True Norths” Once you have collected, correlated and understood the customer data, you should overlay this with how you segment your customer base. Although both Facebook and Twitter have identified their one “True North” moment, for other SAAS businesses it needs to be more nuanced to consider the range of variances of their customer base. For example, the value that a small B2C (Business to Consumer) retailer expects from your solution is going to vastly different from what a B2B (Business to Business) Professional Services firm requires. It is for this reason you should consider creating multiple “True North” moments which are focussed on each of your key customer segments. 5.Constantly Update and Refresh Nothing stays the same for long (especially in the SAAS world), everything moves quickly and is in a state of continual flux. Just consider the types of changes that will likely happen in an average year within your business:
When you also consider that your customers will also likely be experiencing the same levels of changes it is becoming ever harder to stay close. Given this, you have a stark choice; adapt to your customers’ needs or become irrelevant and be left behind as they sign a contract with your competitor(s). Continually review your “True North” moment(s) and make the necessary changes to ensure that it continues to be relevant and that you truly capture the moment at which your solution truly becomes the “can’t live without” and not the “nice to have”.  Author Bio: Adam Joseph
Founder of CSM Insight who had previously spent 15 years managing Customer Success organisations for leading businesses. Passionate about all things Customer Success and a recent keynote speak at the Gainsight Pulse EMEA conference.  While all customers are important to a business, not all customers have the same economic impact or potential for revenue expansion. In the early days of any business, you want to be as close as possible to all your customers. But as your company grows and matures, you will have to think about the resources you’re investing in customer relationships, and make that investment appropriate for the customer’s level. In this post we will provide tips and advice on scaling your customer success team to serve your small- and medium-sized business (SMB) customers in a way that is financially viable for your company, yet still drives customer loyalty and helps you retain customers. Segmenting Your Customers It may seem intuitively obvious, but the first step in knowing how to support your SMB customers is having a clear definition of who they are. If your sales team already has guidelines in place to define customer tiers, then it’s best to use those. For companies that have not yet tiered their customer base, it’s typical to segregate customers based on the number of purchased licenses/users and/or the expected annual recurring revenue (ARR) from your customer segments. You will also want to consider a customer’s growth potential when assigning them to a segment - it may not make sense to put a small business into your “SMB” segment if they show significant growth potential. After establishing the rules for tiering your customer base, it’s important to know the average cost per customer segment for your post-sales support. If you don’t know the cost per customer, have your CSMs track the amount of time they spend per customer for a couple weeks. Average the time spent per each customer, and then divide your total customer success investment (salaries, bonuses, capital equipment, etc.) by this number. That gives you a rough gauge of what you’re spending per customer now. Analyze your customers in cohorts to determine the average cost per customer for your post-sales efforts. Knowing what each customer tier costs you to support will help you make decisions about investments for scalability. Scaling Effectively It’s likely that as much as 40%-50% of your total number of customers will fall into your SMB segment. Because these customers generate less revenue for your business, it’s simply not cost effective to cover them at the same ratios you’d use for enterprise customers. To scale effectively, you should use processes and technology to extend the reach of your CSM team. There are three main areas you can concentrate on when scaling your customer success team for SMB customers:
We’ll touch on all these in more detail now. Automating Regular Touch Points A big part of the customer success role is to monitor and improve their company’s relationship with its customers. Many companies have a prescriptive plan on how their senior CSMs should engage with top-tier customers. However, those plans are typically not scalable to the large number of SMB customers you have. Email automation tools can help you significantly in reaching these customers in a cost-effective way. Here are a few situations where automation may help:
Self-Help Service Technology Your help desk/call tracking software should provide you with analytics that allow you to take a deeper dive into customer questions and issues. Review your data to determine which products (or which areas of a given product) generate the most service requests. From this list, you can have your customer success or technical support teams create articles that address these questions. If you find that questions about your product cluster around a specific area (setup, user administration, etc.) consider writing a series of FAQs based on your incoming cases. Many call tracking systems also have a built-in framework for a customer self-help site or user community. All these systems operate in a slightly different way, but the end goal is the same - to help your company provide users with answers and insight on how to use your products. Not only will self-service help reduce your service costs, but it will also help reduce your overall customer effort score. Web-based Training Delivering end-user training via the web is a cost-effective and interactive way to teach your SMB customers the ins and outs of your product. A client of ours offered a quarterly training session called “base training” via the web. The session was open to all SMB customers, and the CSM assigned to oversee SMB accounts walked through the basic use cases of the product. Customers could ask questions in real-time through a chat tool their web conferencing service provided. These sessions were recorded and then stored on the company’s customer self-help center. Once a new customer was on-boarded, they were directed (via an automated email campaign) to review the most recent “base training” recording that was available. They were also invited to the next live training if they had additional questions. This client also added new features into their product on a monthly basis. The CSM and/or marketing team recorded “new features” webinars for their SMB customers. These webinars not only demonstrated the new functionality, but it also explained to the customers why it was important and how it helped them work more productively. Final Thoughts There are many other ways that technology can help your success and support teams effectively scale to your SMB customer base. Engage your teams to help determine where automation will help, and then leverage them for creating content where needed. As you use technology to manage and help your SMB customers, make sure your communication isn’t impersonal. Emails, webinars, etc., should all come from the CSMs on your team assigned to SMB customers. The customers should also have a route to connect directly with their CSM - but if the self-help and automation tools are the customer's’ path of least resistance, you’ll be able to direct them there first.  Author Bio: Jim Jones
Jim Jones is the founder and CEO of Voyant Consulting, a Chicago-based firm that helps clients improve customer loyalty by improving their Customer Success organizations. In his previous roles with multiple international technology companies, Jim has a history of increasing customer loyalty, and improving customer retention by building world-class customer success and customer support groups. He has also been a featured speaker and blogger on the topics of customer success, voice of the customer programs and customer experience. Voyant Consulting can be found on the web and you can follow Jim on Twitter at jtj3tweets or connect via LinkedIn  Getting your Customers off to a "Fast Start" is critical to your mutual long-term success There is a psychological term known as the “seven-year itch”, it suggests that happiness in a relationship (at least for some people!) declines after seven years. Unfortunately for those of us who work as vendors in the SAAS Customer Success world, we don’t get the luxury of seven years (or anything like it) to prove our worth. In all likelihood, unless you are helping your customer get significant return on their value within the first six months, you are well on your way to a sizable credit or at worst, complete churn. Helping your customers realise early value in your relationship is critical to your mutual long-term benefit. To succeed you need to have a clear strategy on how you are going to engage with customers during the critical “Launch” phase otherwise pretty much everything else you planned for (including the recurring revenue) will go out of the window. To compound the misery further, any unhappy customer will most likely take every opportunity to steer others well clear of your business using both on and off-line channels. The typical “Launch” period is traditionally defined from the point at which your customer signs their contract until they have reached a specifically defined milestone in using your solution. However, I would argue that “Launch” starts with the first contact in pre-sales and ends with a successful renewal at the end of their (typically annual) subscription. Even though as vendors we typically see the world through the “pre-sale” and “post-sale” lens, our customers do not. They look at their relationship with their vendors holistically and will rightly expect that everything described and promised to them in pre-sales will be carried out in full by Customer Success teams. In my experience, there are typically three critically important factors that decide whether a client continues to renew and grow or whether they diminish and leave. The first two are financially-based; either customers can’t or won’t pay their bills. On that basis, it is vital that you have effective credit control systems to help identify those that fall into these two categories. The third factor is the one I want to focus on – those customers who do not see the value in what you are providing. This is especially true in the Launch phase – there is no track record or history of success, the customer has made a significant investment and got nothing back in return yet and their minds are rushing to judgement – “have I made a great decision or shall I cut my losses and run?”. With that harsh reality, here are my top hints to ensure that your customers not only succeed but thrive during the critical Launch phase:
There is an undeniable link between providing a great Launch experience and the probability of long-term customer success. By focussing your resources appropriately on the critical Launch phase will help ensure a great relationship from the start, pay enormous dividends in the future and help avoid the seven-year (or even month) itch!  Author Bio: Adam Joseph
Founder of CSM Insight who had previously spent 15 years managing Customer Success organisations for leading businesses. Passionate about all things Customer Success and a recent keynote speak at the Gainsight Pulse EMEA conference.  How Customer Success Managers are critical in the new engagement model Customer Success Manager is one of those job titles which can be met with scepticism. It can be perceived as insincere or fashionable marketing jargon. When I sense that reaction I quip that I'm simply a victim of my own job title. Do customers really believe that their supplier really cares about their success? Lots of businesses today selling services and products to other businesses, particularly those selling SaaS solutions with subscription based commercial models, actively market and promote Customer Success. They often talk about customer centricity or putting customers at the heart of everything they do, front and centre or putting the customer first. They talk about being externally focused rather than internally focused. They talk about being a business partner and being a trusted advisor to their customer not just a supplier. But what does this really mean and how does that become a reality? The single most important step is to provide your customer with an effective, passionate and committed Customer Success Manager to manage the relationship with the customer at the point of consumption of your product and service. The traditional role here is one of Account Manager but often traditionally this role is working to ensure the success of the supplier. It is often a commercially focused role, carrying a commercial sales target and perceived by the customer as looking to sell more within the business, not working directly with the customer to ensure their success. Ultimately if your service or product provides commercial value and makes your customer more commercially successful, they will probably renew their subscription and continue to buy your product or service providing that success translates into ROI beyond the cost of your product or service. If you truly help them to be successful and make their success a reality they will promote and recommend your product or service to others both inside and outside their organisation. It will result in an increase in customer satisfaction, net promoter scores, referrals, retention, new opportunity all of which contribute directly to shareholder value. A challenge here for a lot of businesses is how to directly measure that success. You have to divert from the tradition - hire account managers and put them on a quota and simply measure their target quota against their salary. Customer Success can be just as easily measured by retention rate and upsell (portfolio growth), referrals and opportunities, usage and adoption growth, Net Promoter Scores and tangible locked in ROI against customer objectives and success measurables. An initial sale will always be conceptual or theoretical in terms of value. A customer does not realise success and return at the point of sale. A Customer Success manager works with the customer to make this a reality, translating features and capabilities into tangible business benefits and value. A Customer Success Manager is a consultant, not a trainer. A Customer Success Manager asks questions and builds relationships with key stakeholders and users to understand the customer's business, objectives, goals and challenges. A Customer Success manager demonstrates that the company he/she works for values their customer's business and then works with them to ensure that they add value to the customer's business. In many respects a Customer Success Manager is an employee of the customer not their employer. Customer Success Managers can work very well alongside commercial account managers who drive strategy and work with senior stakeholders and network to find more stakeholders and opportunities, whilst the Customer Success Manager can focus on helping end users to cement the business value and benefits. The Customer Success manager becomes a trusted advisor and a consultant and in that sense is never perceived as a salesperson simply looking for new opportunities and upsell. Of course this is still implicit in the role, but new opportunities and upsell will be the natural result of the success of this role through referrals and demonstrated value, not simply conceptual value. Another vital ingredient in the recipe for success is the Customer Success Manager acting as the voice of the customer within their own organisation. A Customer Success Manager will be uniquely positioned to relay feedback and ideas for product and service enhancements linked to clear use cases generating value and benefits. This can help to drive a meaningful and relevant product roadmap based on real rather than perceived customer needs. They act as a liaison with first level support functions to ensure issues and service tickets are appropriately addressed and escalated. The Customer Success Manager understands the customer and reported issues in operational context so helps to build a contextual support relationship rather than a transactional support relationship. So this is how and why the role of a Customer Success Manager is critical in the new customer engagement model in the new technology and B2B service space. A successful Customer Success Manager will ensure your business succeeds by ensuring the success of your customers. Make sure you have a successful Customer Success Team.  Author Bio: Steve Willmott
Steve Willmott is a Customer Success Manager at Dun & Bradstreet. Steve has over 30 years experience in customer service delivery and management roles, working in customer support and training with Lexis Nexis before moving into service management and leadership roles at Butterworths, OneSource Information Services and Thomson Reuters.  ....It might be the best thing that ever happened to you I am writing this blog at around 35,000 feet on-board an ageing British Airways 747 on-route to Chicago. The scene around me is calm and sedate (I just finished watching LaLa Land for the record – it gets better as the film goes on) the drinks are being served and that horrible waft of reheated airline food is starting to fill my nostrils. Nothing could be more different to the shambolic scene exactly two hours ago as we entered our third hour of delays sitting on the tarmac in London. Chaos was everywhere; screaming babies, worried passengers with connecting flights trying to get the attention of cabin crew, cabin crew doing their best to ignore them, little (to no) information from the flight deck, people looking at their phones for any type of update. At one point, someone read an update on the BA website saying that the flight would be leaving in thirty minutes which brought a cheer from those around. Those cheers faded to further misery when the 30 minutes came and went and still we had no idea what was going on. The lack of information about what the problem was, how long it would take to fix and when we would finally get going was causing the mood to become dark and almost mutinous. People were on their phones, calling, emailing, “facebooking” and tweeting (me amongst them) their general displeasure about British Airways. The captain occasionally gave an apologetic update but I got the feeling that he was about in the dark as everyone else. As I reflect in my uncomfortable economy seat (not made for my 6 foot 3-inch frame but I blame that more on my genetics than the airline) on these recent events, what strikes me the most was that this was the moment for British Airways to shine. I wanted them to show me and my fellow passengers that they cared about us, they had our backs, they were going to make up for their lack of a functioning aircraft with superb service. Alas, this did not happen and if anything, the cabin crew made the situation worse by looking and acting more fed-up than the paying public. As I referenced in an earlier blog posting, “mistakes happen” and this seems like the ideal time to expand on that point. In my experience, it’s not the actual issue that will cause the most harm, it is how you deal with it that is even more important. Of course, it goes without saying that you want to do everything in your power to stop the problem from happening in the first place. However, deal with a problem the right way and you will win “fans” for life - get it wrong and your name and reputation will take a nose-dive (not sure I should be writing that on a plane but it seems apt). One of the most important aspects about working in Customer Success means that you are going to have to deal with issues that cause unhappiness and distress. Some will be of your own making and some will be completely unexpected and caused by others. Whether they are due to software bugs, mis-set expectations, lack of customer understanding, poor user interface or that you simply screwed up (as I have many times), customers will generally forgive most problems and judge you on how well you deal with the issue after it happens. Here are my top 10 tips about how you can turn a negative situation into your advantage:
As I started this blog talking about a movie, I thought I would end it with one. One of my favourite scenes from Apollo 13 – the true story of the failed Moon landing mission - was when a NASA Director said “This could be the worst disaster NASA’s ever faced”. Mission Controller Gene Kranz replied “With all due respect, sir, I believe that this is going to be our finest hour”. It was not the failure that the movie was about - it was about the recovery. Finally – anybody know how I am going to get my connecting flight to Nashville? Wish me luck!  Author Bio: Adam Joseph
Founder of CSM Insight who had previously spent 15 years managing Customer Success organisations for leading businesses. Passionate about all things Customer Success and a recent keynote speak at the Gainsight Pulse EMEA conference.  Customer Success is one of the most talked about topics in business today and provided me with a rich and rewarding professional journey; here are some of the key insights I have uncovered so far:
 Author Bio: Adam Joseph
Founder of CSM Insight who had previously spent 15 years managing Customer Success organisations for leading businesses. Passionate about all things Customer Success and a recent keynote speak at the Gainsight Pulse EMEA conference.  In November 1789, Benjamin Franklin wrote the famous words: “In this world, nothing can be said to be certain except death and taxes” but I would also extend this to include another certainty in life - “learning”. For as long as humanity has existed, we have continued to evolve as a species by learning from our experiences, environment and elders. Learning is a key part of our development and whether it takes place informally at home or more formally in the classroom, workplace or even watching a safety presentation on board an airliner, we are continually being trained to learn and develop new skills. From a corporate perspective, I have been part of hundreds of training sessions as both as a participant and as the trainer. The skill of the trainer plays an absolutely pivotal role in ensuring that the key learning messages are expressed in a way that leaves the audience enthused and engaged. When I look back at the common traits of the best training sessions that I have attended or led, there are five key components that stand out:
And Finally…. Like any art, you need to keep honing your skills to develop as a trainer to ensure that you continually improve. No matter how experienced you are, keep learning from those around you and continually ask for constructive feedback from your customers and colleagues. The areas that I outline in this blog are not designed to be an exhaustive list and there are many other aspects that go into preparing and delivering great training. I certainly welcome your comments and feedback on your experiences that you have found on your journey delivering training so that I can continue to learn and develop my skills.  Author Bio: Adam Joseph
Founder of CSM Insight who had previously spent 15 years managing Customer Success organisations for leading businesses. Passionate about all things Customer Success and a recent keynote speak at the Gainsight Pulse EMEA conference.  How can you ensure that you are not just another Customer Success Manager, but stand head and shoulders above all others? From my experience, the following are the top ten traits in the best Customer Success Managers that I have ever hired, worked with and learnt from:
 Author Bio: Adam Joseph
Founder of CSM Insight who had previously spent 15 years managing Customer Success organisations for leading businesses. Passionate about all things Customer Success and a recent keynote speak at the Gainsight Pulse EMEA conference. |
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