#51: How To Scale Customer Success And Improve Quality (at the same time)

How can you scale Customer Success without losing quality?

Balancing quality and quantity can seem like an impossible task.

Every time we add more customers, or more engagements, or more KPIs etc, the strongest piece of pushback is "when you increase the volume, you decrease the quality". 

But this is a platitude. And platitudes need to be challenged.  

When I hear these excuses from the CS folks I work with, my follow-up question is: 

What's the level of quality today and how has the level dropped since you increased X?

That's when the cricket sound usually kicks in.

If you want to scale Customer Success, you've got to stop taking this "either-or" approach and optimise for both quantity and quality.

This newsletter is here to help you understand the why and set the right tools in place to help you execute your scale strategy with excellence. 

CS Teams Need Quality and Quantity To Scale

Forget the clichés. It's not quality or quantity, it's both.

At Pulse 2023, I spoke about how CS tends to lose effectiveness as we scale (watch here). We see a drop of 5-10 points in GRR when we go from high-touch to low-touch.

To avoid this and move the NRR and GRR up as we scale, we need to:

1. Work proactively with every single customer, AND
2. Deliver high-value engagements that help customers achieve their outcomes.

The first is about coverage and quantity of engagements. 

In high-touch segments, a metric you might track is the % of your customers who have had a call in the last 90 days.

As you increase the number of customers in the CSM's book of business, you can monitor this metric to understand the impact of an increased funnel on proactive outreaches.

It's the same for the high-value engagements.

You can track the activities that have the highest impact on your customer's outcomes to make sure your team is focused on the stuff that matters.

This data will help you define the optimal customer-to-CSM ratio. In other words, the point where a CSM's book of business is too big for them to manage all the proactive engagements.

But delivering these activities is only one half of the equation.

Two CSMs that delivered 10 EBRs might get very different results. The result depends on how good the delivery was, how well the CSM understood the customer's goal, whether the CSM challenged the customers in areas where they could improve, who attended the session etc. 

Quality determines whether any high-value activity will actually drive value for the customer.

But it wouldn't be good enough to have 1 high-quality EBR in a book of business of 30 customers. To get results, we need every customer to have a high-quality EBR.

So... how can you ensure quality?

Measuring, Monitoring and Enabling Quality

The reason most leaders don't measure quality is that it's time-consuming.

How do you know a call was good?

You listen to it!

But of course, you can't listen to every single call (and you shouldn't).

The thing is, even if you could listen to every call, you would still lack an important component of what makes that interaction "high-quality", which is whether it actually worked.

• Did the call help the customer unlock better usage?
• Did the call help the customer achieve an important outcome?
• Did the call contribute to a successful renewal?

It's only when you connect the content of the intervention with the result that it drove that you can confidently say whether the quality was high or not. 

To do that, CS leaders need the right technology. They can't manually do this one by one.

So what tool should a CS leader consider to help solve this problem?

Conversation Intelligence.

Tools like HubSpot,  Gong, Outreach, Salesloft and a ton of other AI-powered products can help us gain 360° visibility across every customer interaction while connecting to the results data that can help understand the drivers of quality at scale  (not sponsored).

Unfortunately, from surveying 600+ CS Leaders, it doesn't seem like this is a high-priority tool. Conversation Intelligence ranked as the least prioritised tool for all CS Leaders surveyed in the '24 CS Trends Report. 

But I think CS Leaders that don't invest in this, are missing a huge opportunity.

I've used a few of the tools I mentioned and they were transformational at multiple levels:

• For the CSM: Helping spot skill gaps and strengths and helping managers coach the CSM to unlock a new level of performance.
• For the Team: Helping consolidate insights about where the team can use better enablement and also facilitating peer learning 
• For the Company: Helping the leadership team understand customer sentiment, refine playbooks and know with data what behaviours lead to the best outcomes.

Sales leaders have invested heavily in these tools in the last few years.

Why?

They know that keeping the quality of the activities high as they demand more volume from their reps is the key to maximising results.

And that's the same goal we have in CS.

We want to scale not only the cost of serving customers but also the impact that our teams deliver. So I will leave you with one question...

Is it time for you to take a leaf out of the Sales Leadership playbook and invest in these powerful tools for CS too?

See you next Friday!