#43: Scale CS Without Losing GRR and NRR

Digital CS often performs significantly below High-Touch CS.

 What I've seen in most organisations is:

• Digital CS - 70-80% GRR
• Pooled CS - 75-85% GRR
• High Touch CS  - 85-95% GRR

But, does it need to be this way? 

Absolutely not.

Companies like Atlassian have proved that you can have scale CS and high GRR at the same time (they reported 98% GRR in their 2021 financial report). 

In this week's newsletter, I will share how to start building a modern CS program that delivers results for your customers and your business. 

🤖  Back To Basics

Building a highly efficient and effective CS program starts with first-principles thinking. 

In my talk at Pulse, I shared an analogy that HubSpot's CEO Yamini used a few years ago...

You can't build the Burj Khalifa using the same tools and methods of building a two-storey house. Everything you know about construction and engineering needs to evolve, to make a building that is half a half-a-mile in height possible. 

It's the same for Customer Success.

You cannot build your digital-first, AI-enabled CS organisation by using the same processes and systems that you use today for your human-first programme. 

Why is that? 

The main problem with today's processes and playbooks is that in most cases companies don't actually know if they work.

Today, customers are targeted with dozens of CS programs.

Calls with their CSM, webinars, social posts, community forums, EBRs, courses etc, but we don't have the rigour that helps us understand which of these touchpoints are effective at driving engagement, usage and outcomes for our customers.

If you automate what you have today, you might just end up doing more of what doesn't work.

⚡️ Reverse Engineer Success

If you want to design an effective and efficient CS model, you have to forget most of what you think you know about delivering Customer Success. 

Allow yourself to re-imagine what delivering CS looks like by reverse engineering from the desired end-state.

What's the desired end-state?

Delivering valuable and tangible outcomes for customers, quickly. 

To do that, I recommend you follow these 5 steps:

1. Define and standardise your Customer Outcomes. I've written extensively about how to get this done (check out this previous edition of the newsletter). If you don't understand what your customers are trying to do with your product at scale, you'll never be able to scale CS. 
2. Map your Customer Outcomes to Personas. Knowing who is responsible for key Jobs to Be Done is critical to scaling CS. If you don't understand what tasks each user is interested in, your content and outreach will never be relevant enough to drive meaningful engagement at scale (Check this guide on how map JTBD to Personas).
3. Design Your Customer Journey. You don't need different journeys for different segments. What you need is one journey with steps that make sense for your customers based on where they are at. You should be able to leverage data insights (ie. behaviour, subscription etc) to decide the best intervention and tools to use (watch out for next week's edition of the newsletter where I will cover my latest customer journey).
4. Implement Smart Systems. You cannot deliver a tailored and dynamic customer journey, if you don't have the right systems in place to assess and prioritise risks and opportunities, and then trigger actions based on customer behaviour. (Check this newsletter where I talk about smart systems to identify risks and opportunities)
5. Design CS Programs to support the Customer Journey. These should be outcome-based interventions designed to be deployed based on behavioural insights you gather. You should experiment, AB test, measure correlation and continuously improve the programs based on what the intervention is looking to achieve. 

TL’DR

If you are hoping to scale your CS organisation but are finding that the more "scaled" you go, the worse your GRR is trending, you might want to re-think your strategy.

My advice is:

1. Go back to first principles.
2. Reverse engineer your org from what your customers want to achieve.

Avoid the temptation of automating what you already have. There are too many gaps and old assumptions in there to make it a good ground for the new model.

By designing your CS programme from a blank page, you might end up with very different processes, systems, team structure and roles, than normal CS organisations.

And that's ok.

In the words of architect Mies Van Der Rohe... Form follows function.

You wouldn't want the Burj Khalifa to look like 163 houses stacked on top of each other.

So don't make that mistake with your CS team.

See you next Friday!