How Should Your Customer Success Team Service the Long Tail?
Traditionally, tier 3 is the Long Tail of a B2B vendor’s customer base. Long Tail customers are valuable because they comprise a large percentage of revenue and represent a large pool of customers who can grow into much, much bigger ones in time. It is absolutely worth the cost and the effort to set up a service delivery model for this customer tier. So what are the strategies that lead to customer success and customer satisfaction in this tier?
Most companies must take a low touch or a no-touch approach for this customer segment because they are usually spending less in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) than accounts in higher tiers. It most likely will not be appropriate to service accounts falling into this category with people-based resources. This results in this tier being largely self-serve, depending solely on the Technical Support team, or Customer Success Teams with a high account to Customer Success manager ratio (in some cases 1,000:1).
Tier 3 requires robust online resources to service themselves. An example of service delivery might involve:
| Self-Service Support Via Community |
| FAQ |
| Knowledge Base |
| Self-guided Training Modules |
| Video Tutorials |
| In-product Tool Tips |
| Automated End User engagement |
| Automated Best Practice Advice |
In my next blog, I’ll describe the process you can use to segment your customer base and implement rules to keep your CRM up-to-date.
