Getting Back to the Basics of Customer Success
Get back to the basics of customer success with four foundational tenets: make CS a company-wide value, master the journey, scale up, and track the right KPIs.
TL;DR
- The four foundational tenets of customer success are: establish CS as a company-wide value, understand how each stage of the customer journey impacts the customer, scale your strategy as customers scale, and track the right KPIs.
- Customer health is the responsibility of the entire organization, not just the CS department — it should be a top-down value starting with the board and executive team.
- New tools and solutions should enhance strong customer-centric processes, not replace the fundamentals.
Over the past several years, customer success has gone from a department only forward-thinking organizations had to an integral part of every single SaaS company in the world. From onboarding new customers to managing implementations and renewals to spearheading expansion conversations, customer relationship managers (CSMs) are the true multi-faceted superheroes of SaaS.
While the importance of customer success has exploded over the last decade, so too have the tools, solutions, and content that is out there for CSMs and customer success teams. With every new customer issue or new solution on the market, the overarching message and focus of customer success becomes that much more convoluted.
The foundational tenets to customer success
As we look ahead to a new year, now is the perfect time to take a step back and get back to the basics of customer success. Remembering what the foundational tenets of the industry really mean – and learning new ways to meet these goals – can help your team connect on a deeper level with customers in 2021 and beyond.
Here are four basic tenets of customer success to remember this year:
1. Establish customer success as a foundational value of your organization
While CSMs and a customer success department may have ownership over the growth and sentiment of customer accounts, the health of customers is the true responsibility of an entire organization. One of the basic principles of customer success is that it should be a top-down value, starting with a board and executive team and then trickling down to every department.
Customer success leaders can work hand-in-hand with executives to educate on how customer success directly impacts every single person in an organization, from finance to sales to marketing.
2. Understand how each stage of the customer journey impacts the customer
Every customer is different, and this can make it difficult for customer success teams to seamlessly scale their operations across different industries and account sizes. This is why the second foundational principle of customer success is understanding the customer journey.
From the very first introduction to a customer, understanding how the onboarding, adoption, renewal, and growth phases of their journey will impact both their internal team and how they leverage your platform can ensure you deliver the highest value at every stage.
3. Grow and scale your customer success strategy as your customers scale
When a customer success team is just starting out, every customer is high touch with a ‘critical’ alert. As your customers scale, however, and start to become more varied in size, needs, and preferences, your team must be able to scale alongside their unique needs. This is where the connection between human interaction and technology can really make a difference.
By organizing your customer’s unique needs, your team can treat every single customer the way they prefer.
4. Track and measure the right KPIs to influence decision making
Just as collecting data and metrics is a part of the foundational principles of a SaaS organization, so too are KPIs foundational to the world of client success.
Whether your team is looking to expand your operations, provide better service to customers, or improve on specific processes, tracking KPIs, data, and metrics allows your team to make better, more strategic decisions that can influence your department’s success down the road.
Get back to basics with ClientSuccess
Getting back to the foundational building blocks of customer success doesn’t mean eschewing new solutions and resources that can help you better manage your customers. It means understanding that these solutions are meant to enhance and add to your already strong customer-centric processes.
Helping customer success teams excel at the foundational tenets of customer success is why we built the ClientSuccess platform.
From delivering amazing customer experiences to staying on top of multiple KPIs to tracking customer success across an entire organization, ClientSuccess can help your team get back to basics – and then perfect these areas of expertise to delight your customers.
Ready to learn more? Check out these additional resources from ClientSuccess:
- Webinar: Lessons Learned from Building 3 Customer Success Teams from Scratch
- Webinar: The Cardinal Sin of Client Success
- eBook: How to Build and Scale a Customer Success Team
Frequently Asked Questions
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