#53: Simplifying Customer Success

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post titled 'Make Customer Success Simple Again'

It gathered 500+ Likes and dozens of comments of people agreeing with the feeling that Customer Success had gotten overengineered.

But de-complicating things is not easy.

So where do you start? 

This newsletter is here to help you find a path to a simple and effective Customer Success solution for your business.

Connect Back to Why Customer Success Exists

Gone are the times when Customer Success was about "making customers happy".

CS teams exist because we understand that customers that achieve their goals using our products, continue to buy from us.

The problem is that most CS teams don't know how to measure "customer value".

Instead of using metrics of success that reflect our customer's objectives, CS Teams borrow from old-school sales playbooks and measure input and activity, instead of value.

I am not saying all activity metrics are bad.

When well designed, they are useful to actively manage performance. But, in the midst of solving for internal metrics and navigating politics, people forget CS's main job...

💡 Helping customers achieve key outcomes.

If you want to de-complicate your CS program, you have to eliminate the noise for your team.

That means stripping everything back to:

1. What problems/opportunities customers are trying to solve/seize with your product 
2. How do these translate into measurable KPIs

Here's a guide on how to define Success KPIs that work.

Every step in the customer journey and every intervention should be getting the customer closer to their goal, or helping unlocking a new value for them.

Invest In the Right Technology

A big problem CSMs face is the volume of customers and inputs that they are working with.

What's signal, what's noise?

What needs immediate attention?

A key part of Customer Success is proactively engaging to drive an outcome.

But we can't expect CSMs to do all the prioritisation work. Otherwise, they spend all of their time data crunching and little of their time having high-value conversations.

That's why Machine Learning Models are so exciting for CS.

If you want your team to have a larger book of business, and be able to engage proactively, then you need to develop smart solutions like this guided engagement assistant tool that I shared on Linkedin or this smart alert system I shared last year. 

Make sure your technology takes away the overwhelm, instead of adding to it!

Implement The Right Team Structure

Old team structures are not likely to unlock new results.

I recently wrote a deep-dive into how to re-think your CS team structure to help us solve two big problems that most Customer Success Teams face today:

1. We are short on the expertise that helps us scale value delivery.
2. We are working siloes, and it's hurting our customers.

One thing is for certain: We can't scale the results we deliver simply by adding more CSMs.

We need to rethink the functions needed in the Customer Success team.

For example:

1. Customer Marketing Manager: To help create valuable content and scale distribution.
2. Customer Experience Function: An overlay role acting as the PM of the experience.
3. Program Teams: To deliver and measure the critical programs that support value delivery.
4. Centre of Excellence Function: Helping improve the service we deliver to customers

I talked about 3 of these high-value roles in detail here.

The right team structure will help your CS team focus on what matters and achieve better results for customers.

Avoid The Temptation Of Throwing The Sink At The Symptom

A lot of problems arise from knee-jerk reactions to a bad month or a bad quarter.

Suddenly there are 10 new 'save' processes, new renewal activities, more playbooks, risky accounts meetings with senior stakeholders and more. 

But retention is a lagging metric. 

You're reaping today, what you planted 6-12 months ago.  

There's very little you can do in a month to change the faith of customers that spent the last 12 months not seeing value. 

That energy is better spent on the customers who you have a higher chance of helping.

Pay close attention to customers who are in the 1/3 of their way into their contract:

• Have they onboarded successfully into their use case? 
• Are their users using the high-value features?
• How are they doing against their peers?
• What's the value they started to get from the product?

When you operate earlier in the customer lifecyle and implement the right strategies for driving value to customers, your team will feel the panic and the noise subsiding. 

TL'DR

If you want to simplify your CS team, make sure:

• You know what value you deliver to customers (and can measure it)
• Invest in technology that can help take data-crunching away from CSMs hands
• Implement the right team structure to help you scale
• Avoid the temptation of throwing the sink at the symptoms of a large problem 

See you next Friday!