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TIG #71 Unlock Success: Structuring and Scaling CS Programs 🔓

by Daphne Lopes on
Scaling and measuring the impact of CS programs is hard.

Modern organizations run multiple programs to drive value for customers. From Deal Desks and Success Plans to Onboarding, Webinars, Executive Sponsorship, and Customer Advisory Boards, each initiative plays a crucial role in the customer journey, encouraging actions that enhance the likelihood of customer success.

Without these programs, delivering a world-class customer experience that creates value at scale would be virtually impossible.

However, the challenge of scaling and measuring the impact of these programs is ever-present.

As CS leaders, we need to make sure these programs:

  • deliver a great customer experience
  • drive towards our customer's goals
  • delivers results for our business
In this edition of the newsletter, I took the insights from this incredible free course that my friends at EverAfter created to help you create CS programs that work.


This week you'll learn:

  1. The importance of having structured customer programs to deliver a great experience and measurable results;
  2. Why it’s vital to resource Customer Programs well and how to build a business case for your leadership team;
  3. How to continuously assess the effectiveness of your Customer Programs.
Let's dive in!

The Importance of Having Structured Customer Programs

A few months ago, I shared this 7-Step Customer Journey. It's a high-level post-sale structure to help you design processes and systems to drive value. 

The building blocks of this journey should exist no matter what segmentation strategy you use:

  1. Sales Handover
  2. Success Planning
  3. Onboarding
  4. Early Adoption
  5. Value Review
  6. Mature Adoption
  7. Renewal
What changes for different segments is not the stage, but the delivery method (ie. you want every customer to have an onboarding experience, but smaller and less complex customers are more likely to self-serve than large and complex customers). 

Each stage of the Customer Journey is made up of different programs.

Some of them are very small and straightforward. For example, the 'Sales handover'. You probably only need to create and maintain a form or a product interface and deliver enablement to sales reps and CSMs to ensure a strong Sales Handover.  (EverAfter has this incredible Sales Handover template you can use)

Other programs are much more complex, like for example Adoption Programs.

A great Adoption Program will require outcome, product, firmographic and engagement data to feed automation and personalisation and trigger content or CSM action. You'll have multiple paths with specific content, different systems to enable the program, and several KPIs to track. 

Trying to scale these bigger programs is a full-time job (probably more than one...).

Why?

They are not evergreen. We must continuously evolve these programs as the product and the customers grow. Otherwise, they become obsolete and stop yielding results.
They need to be understood. There's a need for regular assessment of the impact of the programs so they can be tweaked to maximise customer value and business value. 
 

Resourcing Customer Programs


Let's face it... The lack of resourcing for these initiatives is real.

I talk to dozens of CS leaders who are overwhelmed by the number of programs they need to build from scratch, often with little to no resourcing and relying on spreadsheets.

Don't get me wrong, I love scrappiness and experimentation!

I think it's 100% the right way to start. 

The real problem arises when CS teams never move past this phase.

To truly succeed, we must formalize these essential programs and invest in the necessary resources and technology.

And how do you get resources?

  • Start with a hypothesis that is backed up by qualitative and quantitative data. 
  • Run a Pilot. Structured experimentation, with robust measures of success that the business cares about and is willing to invest in (Retention, Expansion, Churn etc.) 
  • Make a strong business case for the program. Once you have the results from the pilot, you'll have a solid base to make a business case for the program to be resourced correctly. The business case should include the projected value of the program (ie. how much money can the program make or save) and the investment required (people and systems, quantified in $$s). 
  • Don't be afraid to disqualify a program if a pilot fails to give you the green shoots you'd like to see. Failure is part of experimentation.

In fact, if you are experimenting a lot, you should fail more often than you succeed!


Assessing Program Effectiveness


For the pilots that succeed, that's not the end of the line.

Whether you get the required resources to run these programs effectively or you are still in the scrappy phase even after roll-out, assessing the program's effectiveness regularly is really important.

You don't want to keep investing time and resources if something is no longer working. Conversely, you want to double down on the stuff that yields outsized value. 

How can you assess the program?

I advise you to use a framework that can help you objectively evaluate the program. That means defining metrics but also a frequency in which you look at these results.


EverAfter has this great Program Effectiveness Model Template to help you get started.

I recommend CS leaders evaluate their programs at least quarterly. 
 

Key metrics to look into are:

  • Leading Indicators: What specific actions do you want your customers to take? What immediate results do you want to see from those actions?
  • Lagging Indicators:
    • Customer Outcomes: How will these actions benefit your customers? (If you need help defining your customer outcomes I recommend you read this guide on Defining Customer Outcomes or this one on Leading KPIs that work)
    • Business Objectives: What business objectives will these outcomes help achieve? 
At the end of the day, you want to be able to regularly report to your leadership team on how these programs are helping drive value, and hopefully, use these leading indicators to see around corners when it comes to risks and opportunities.

TL'DR


Customer Programs are the foundation of a great customer journey. 

Use your customer journey as the starting point to define which programs you need to invest in, and don't be afraid to start scrappy. Trust me... we are all doing it on a shoestring budget.

But scrappy doesn't mean unstructured.

  • Define a hypothesis
  • Build a pilot
  • Assess the pilot's success
  • Make a business case for the investments you need
  • When you roll out the program, create a cadence and structure for evaluation


Want to run better customer programs that help drive value for customers and in turn creates value for your business?

Then you need to take the free 'Productizing Customer Programs: Modern Fundamentals Certification Course' that EverAfter offers.

Run to register while there are still spots.

The new cohort starts on the 18th of September! 

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