29: Mastering Customer Success - The 5 Laws to Drive Exceptional Results! 🚀

Imagine witnessing a grand symphony, where every note and instrument harmoniously converges to create an unforgettable masterpiece.

That's what great Customer Success looks like. 

But creating such a piece of art is hard.

More often than not, transitions between lifecycle stages feel cumbersome, collaboration amongst teams is messy, success plans barely exist and tracking customer results is a nightmare.

Before you know it, your CS team sounds more like a primary school band than an orchestra.

But just like there is a formula to creating the perfect pop tune, there is a set of guiding principles to building a great Customer Success practice. 

And if you can implement them, you will accelerate growth exponentially. 

The 5 Laws Of Customer Success

There are 5 core elements that make up any robust Customer Success practice. In fact, they are so important and pervasive that I call them "laws".

They are interconnected and each of them is a key driver of the other.

Today, I want to dive into each of these and explain their relationship, so you can diagnose where your team's strengths and weaknesses are, and take action.

#1 Law of Engagement

Engaged customers adopt at a higher rate. 

Customers that engage with the resources available — whether they are digital or analogue, high touch or low touch — have better adoption.  

Why? 

Because unless users are willing to get educated on how to use a new tool, they are not going to be able to get their work done on your platform. 

Customers that lack engagement at the start never get enough initial traction and often go back to doing things the way they used to and churn as soon as they can get out of the contract. 

That's why defining what great engagement looks like is important.

A few examples:

1. Regularly talking to a CSM
2. Completing a Certification
3. Watching in-product tutorials  
4. Activity in the community 

You can measure early signs of positive or negative behaviour and address them quickly before they become an issue. 

#2 Law of Adoption

Usage is the path to outcomes.

Your product is the tool your customers chose to help them achieve their outcomes.

If they are not actively using it, then they cannot get results.

A customer can be very engaged with your resources and have a successful implementation, but fail to bring users into the platform and drive usage. This is a change management challenge.

And if they are active but are not using the right tools, they too cannot get results.

Not following best practices or a lack of overarching strategy that drives process improvement means that customers are busy with the wrong things.

That's why a strong behavioural-based adoption motion is key to helping customers drive usage.

It all starts with:

1. Measuring adoption that positively correlates to customer's goals
2. Monitoring the adoption of key features that relate to the customer's use-case 
3. Setting up an alert infrastructure to notify CSMs of adoption drops 
4. Rolling out programmatic and high-touch adoption plays to drive usage

#3 Law of Outcomes

Value is the only path to durable retention.

No matter what you do to drive engagement and adoption, if your customers have no tangible outcomes and poor ROI will always and inevitably leave. 

In fact, research shows that even measuring outcomes has a positive effect on retention. That's because customers are more likely to stay with a vendor that helps them understand their gaps than one that cannot communicate how they are tracking towards important goals.

There is no shortcut for this. You'll have to invest on:

1. Defining what outcomes your customers expect from your product
2. Start measuring these outcomes
3. Benchmark against other customers
4. Share this information with customers

I wrote a guide on how to start with customer outcomes here.

#4 Law of Experience

CX transforms customers into raving fans.

Customers become loyal when, on top of tangible results, they have a great experience with your business. Only then will they become advocates.

But what's a great experience? 

According to Gartner's research, great experiences are less about satisfaction and more about effort. In other words, the easier it is to do business with your company the better the experience.

If you want to master this law, focus on:

1. Creating an effortless experience by building a best-in-class self-service motion
2. Reducing the effort to engage when human-led experiences are necessary

An interesting metric of experience to adopt might be the Customer Effort Score (CES). I broke down how to use CES in this recent issue of the newsletter.

#5 Law of Time to Value (TTV)

The fastest you can get a customer to their desired outcomes, the better. 

I like to say that TTV is more of a dimension than a law.

The goal of any company should be to get customers all the way from sign-up to getting results in as little time as possible.

But it's become common practice in Customer Success to have 60-90 days on-boarding and annual contracts.

Unfortunately, these timeline truisms often prevent CS professionals from improving TTV. That's because everyone just accepts that "it takes that long" to drive value for customers.

This thinking hinders your ability to grow customers faster. 

The tip here is to never settle. Always try to get customers to value faster. 

Some ideas on how to build shortcuts to success for your customer:

• Create use-case templates to reduce onboarding significantly
• Work with partners to help customers set-up faster
• Offer system migrations to speed up the process of moving systems

TL'DR:

These 5 key principles will help you create a symphony of success in your Customer Success practice:

• Engaged customers adopt at a higher rate, so defining and nurturing engagement is crucial.
• Adoption is the path to outcomes, and driving usage of your product is essential for customers to achieve their desired results.
• Value is the only path to durable retention, so understanding and delivering tangible outcomes is vital for customer satisfaction and retention.
• A great customer experience, focused on reducing effort, transforms customers into loyal advocates.
• The faster customers can achieve their desired outcomes, the better. Always strive to minimize the time to value.

See you next Friday :D