What’s Next for Customer Success? Scale!

I just love the New Year.  We survived the holidays, and now we’re off to the races with a fresh start at the year.  It’s also the time that we all make predictions on what the year will bring.  I’d be remiss if I didn’t try my hand at it as well.  

So, what does 2017 bring for Customer Success?  

Scale!  It’s the year that we’ll see Customer Success focus on efficiencies in order to scale.  

If you look at where we’ve been, it’s the next logical step in the evolution of the Customer Success role:

• 2007-2009: CSM role emerges
• 2010-2012: CSM role is evangelized and adopted
• 2013-2016: Teams of CSM’s are built
• 2017-???: Teams are optimized for efficiency

From Investment to Efficiency

Now that executives have adopted and invested in Customer Success, they’re asking how the programs and team(s) can be made more efficient.

Senior staff is looking for efficiency for good reason. As your customer base grows, expanding the Customer Success team team via headcount doesn’t always make sense once the team is established.  

For example, 20% growth in your customer base shouldn’t result in 20% growth of the Customer Success team’s headcount.  As a result, this means getting more out of your people.

Start by Analyzing CSM Time

The best way to spot improvement opportunities is to focus on where your CSMs are spending the bulk of their time.

80% of a CSM’s day is focused on communication.  They’re engaged in

• Email
• Chat
• Follow Up Calls
• Quarterly Business Reviews
• Escalation Conversations (internal and external)
• Best Practice Sessions
• Technical Conversations
• Deployment/Onboarding Conversations
• Training
• Adoption Strategies

…and the list continues.  CSMs are fantastic communication engines.  The amount of follow up and outbound that they are engaged in is astounding (and likely inefficient).

If you’re going to improve CSM efficiency, you have to start with communication as the thing to improve and maybe automate. 

Productivity Improvements

To truly scale and keep up with the growing ratio of customers to CSMs, improving communication efficiency is a major source of gain.

Automate the repetitive communications

Consider leveraging technology to automate communications that CSM’s will otherwise do manually and repeatedly.  Consider scenarios such as:

• Adoption campaigns
• Onboarding
• Training
• Long tail customer nurture tracks
• New feature deployment

An ideal solution is to use technology that sends triggered email campaigns to ensure that your CSM team is fully supported to help each and every end user to successfully adopt your product.  

Who gets serviced?

Another place to look for gains is to point your CSM’s at the right customers.  Presumably, higher-value customers merit more service from the CSM team.  This can lead to other strategies for servicing smaller customers, such as:

• Email automation
• Rich documentation content
• Self-service training
• Customer communities

Start with tiering and segmentation of your customer base.  Coupled with a clear service delivery strategy for each tier, your CSM team can maximize the value of their time.