#66: How To Build A Proactive Customer Success Team

Every CS team wants to be proactive. Only a few are.

What differentiates those who live up to this ambition and those that don't?

Their systems. 💻 

Truly proactive organisations combine the power of technology with the power of humans to connect with the right customer, at the right time, and about the right topic.

Everyone else wants to operate like that.

But instead of investing in the right systems and ensuring their data infrastructure is solid, they expect humans to fill the technology gaps.

Last week in the CS MasterClass we covered the importance of defining a Customer Journey that can serve as the backbone of your Customer Success program. It set a foundation for the processes you need to enable to be proactive independent of segmentation.

The burning question is: How can you monitor thousands of customers as they go through this journey and match their needs with the correct intervention?

This week's newsletter and Episode 3 of the CS MasterClass are here to help you learn the foundations to build these smart systems.

What does "proactive" mean in CS?

Being proactive is made up of two main components:

1. Anticipating customer needs (both the challenges and the opportunities)
2. Acting early to either mitigate the challenges or to seize the opportunity

In practice, this looks like being able to flag an adoption challenge early and work with the champion to drive change, or figuring out that a strategy the customer is using isn't yielding results and it's time to try something different, or that a customer is on an accelerated path of growth and could use further functionality like automation or better insights. 

Great CSMs are brilliant at this and weave these points into consulting conversations (this is one of the 8 CSM Skills in the CS Mastery Guide). That's one of the reasons why segments with a higher touch see significantly better results.

But as we scale we start to hit a few roadblocks:

• Gathering these insights is time-consuming
• A few data points add up to thousands as you add customers to the funnel
• Not every CSM has the deep domain expertise to spot these opportunities
• Prioritising engagements based on all of these data points becomes impossible 

The result is that unless a customer is at the highest-touch model of your engagement strategy, they end up not getting that proactive service.

How can my team become proactive?

It all starts with identifying the right signals to monitor.

Too many teams get overwhelmed by how much data needs to be cleaned to feed a machine-learning model that works. 

I recommend that instead of trying to clean everything, you focus on 3 main areas:

1. Product Usage: What features have the highest correlation to the customer's use case? If you can narrow the product usage to those alone, you will have a great first step into flagging potential usage risks and opportunities. For example: If you are a Marketing Automation tool, and your customer isn't using the automation features, that should be a flag for you to intervene. 
2. Customer Outcomes: We talked about how to define and measure customer outcomes in the first episode of the CS MasterClass. Leverage that data point benchmarked to customers like this (ie. small businesses in the UK) to flag a need to take action.
3. Engagement: Pick the top 3 engagements you want to see from your customers ( ie. an EBR a year, a call with a decision maker, completion of a course etc). Flag risks and opportunities based on the customer's engagement.

Once you have the few data points that you will monitor continuously, you can build interventions that can be CSM-led or digital.

For example:

• A low-touch customer flagged with low product usage: Trigger an email with a video on how to achieve their goal using X and Y features.
• A high-touch customer with poor outcome realisation: Trigger a CSM task with a playbook to review the current strategy and help improve results.
• A digital customer with poor engagement and low product usage: Trigger a phone call from a scale CSM to warm the relationship and offer help on getting started. 

While this seem like it requires a BDUF (big design upfront), you can start small with one signal and one action and monitor the impact. This will allow you to get off the ground and test your playbooks. 

Being 1% more proactive each day will make you 37.4% more proactive by the end of the year!

Ready to learn more and get started?

Lucky for you, I just released Episode 3 of the CS MasterClass where I walk you through how to make this a reality for your business.

I am joined by ⁠Easton Taylor, the SVP of Customer Success at Gainsight. In this conversation, Easton and I dive deep into the tools, the methods and the enablement to help you get to this level of proactivity with your CS team.

If you get this right, you'll maximise your chances of delivering value to customers.

As James Clear said in Atomic Habits, “You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”

But delivering value is only one half of the puzzle.

You need to be able to articulate the value you are delivering to the right stakeholders in the customer organisation for it to be recognised and valued (and if you don't yet know how to measure value, make sure to rewind to Episode 1 of the MasterClass).

Many companies fail this step and lose customers to the competition.

Want to explore how to communicate value to customers?

Don't miss next week's episode of the CS MasterClass where we will cover exactly that with a guest you won't want to miss.

See you next Friday!