10 Actions to Improve Your Customer Success Function Today

As we're in the game of continual improvement, here are ten actions worth considering to improve your customer success operation...

1. How is your team perceived within your company? Ask them...

You have surveys with your customers so why not ask colleagues from other departments what they think your team is doing well and also areas to improve. Making it anonymous should take the emotion out of the exercise and help you get more honest feedback. Customer Success Managers rely on Support/Product/Finance/Onboarding/etc. to help them manage their customers so finding ways of improving how they interact is bound to improve outcomes for clients.

2. Review your customer segments.

You'll have your own way of segmenting your customers. The most basic being the highest revenue earning customers in your 'High Touch' segment, lowest in 'Low Touch' etc. It's important to review your customers to see if they still fall in the correct segments - has their latest upsell purchase pushed them into the higher category or visa versa? Your segment boundaries are probably arbitrary (e.g. < £30Kpa = Low Touch): does this boundary still make sense after recent price changes?

Do you have any customers of strategic importance rather than high ARR? What about low spending companies that happen to be personal contacts of your CEO or even current or potential investors? If these businesses are not in your High Touch segment I suggest they should be.

Getting your segments correct means the right customers get the right amount of attention and also means you're not asking too much, or too little, of your CSMs. The accuracy of your customer segments erodes over time so review them today and mark a regular date to repeat this exercise.

3. Review your CSM Effort Model

This is especially relevant now during the Covid crisis and will need regular review as we emerge. If your CSMs are used to personally visiting customers then your Effort Model will take into consideration travel time. That isn't the case while we're all working remote so in theory your CSMs have lots of spare capacity. All the CSMs I've ever worked with always wish they had more hours in the day so now they have, agree what they should be working on and keep your Effort Model up to date.

4. Spot-check CSM entries in your knowledge-base and reward the best one.

A great internal and external knowledge-base is a key way to scale your operation. Everyone should be contributing so take a look, find and showcase the best entries from your CSM Team.

5. Consider organising a CSM off-site (when social distancing rules allow!)

Do you find that weekly CSM Team meetings need to be strictly time managed so they fit into their slot? CSMs are generally great talkers - especially on ways their company could/should help them help their customers be more successful. Off-sites are a great way to dedicate half or a whole day to cover all those extra topics you never seem to get around to discussing. To be productive they need to be carefully planned but if done well, off-sites can be a great moral boost to the team.

6. Share a customer success story with the rest of your company

For colleagues who don't interact directly, customers can sometimes be quite abstract. This is especially true if the market you're in doesn't contain household names. If this is the case, try to bring your customers to life by writing a case study that succinctly explains who they are, what they do, and how they're getting value from your product/service. Include some photos/visuals if you can. This doesn't have to be a slick, marketing style case study, an entry in a Slack/Teams channel is a good start.

7. Visit a recently churned customer and try and find the real reason why they left

You're probably already following a playbook for when a customer churns. That playbook will have internal retrospectives and may already reach out to customers for their comments. The problem is, immediately after a decision to leave, customers will often be cagey about letting you know the full answer. Pick a customer that churned three months ago and try to meet for a coffee (or a virtual coffee while we're still social distancing!), by now the dust will have settled and they may give you far more insights and lessons to learn.

8. Consider using Customer Personas

As part of your Customer Journey Planning, you may want to consider defining certain personas that describe the types of people they are. This is often the preserve of Marketing who do this so they can use the right channels to reach new prospects. It has relevance to your Customer Success function as well. For example, you may have a customer persona group that are more casual and tech savvy, or one that is maybe based in the City and is more formal. Given your customer personas you might choose to conduct your next User Group meeting in different ways, e.g. over webinar and in person?

9. Invite yourself to a customer Sales meeting

Either in person (or via video conference) ask to sit in on a sales meeting with a prospect. The purpose of this is to better understand how the CS Team can help in both winning the contract and also how, should the deal be won, the handover to CS can be made slicker. Could the ongoing CS relationship with the customer form a potential value proposition to justify the sale? Could/should the CSMs be involved in the pre-sale so that formal handovers are not needed? Would the CSM building a relationship with the Executive Sponsor as part of pre-sales be beneficial to the ongoing customer relationship?

10. Say "Thank you"

Not a "Well done on hitting your KPIs" but an unconditional and heartfelt thank-you for nothing in particular. Customer Success Managers have a tough job. They have to be 'jack-of-all-trades' - empathetic relationship builders, data analysts, technical advisors, internal champions, master time managers, etc. etc. They are arguably the most important team in your recurring revenue business. They won't always get it right but if you have a team that has the core ability and are prepared to work hard; every now and then just say thanks.