Best Practices for Customer Success in 2021

The rise of SaaS brings with it new benefits and new challenges. Recurring revenue has enabled both the birth of explosive companies and the responsibility of maintaining revenue over time and growing it to keep up with ambitious targets. Enter customer success.

For SaaS and enterprise software companies alike, the objective is maximizing the value of a customer over time. The decline of the traditional pre-sales process places increasing importance on what was traditionally known as post-sales. Customer success may be a new buzzword but the concept isn’t new, only growing in importance.

The customer success function in organizations exists to make good on your sales promises. A customer success team strives to reduce the time between signing a contract and realizing the benefits of your product. Building a successful, scalable customer success strategy in 2021 and beyond, especially at early stage startups, requires company-wide participation, actionable data, and healthy iteration.

Whether you have an established CS team or are just planning for the future, here are our top recommendations for 10x’ing your Customer Success organization.

Customize to your Customer

Your customer success organization should be organized around, you guessed it, your customer. Structure your customer success team and processes around the customer journey you’ve defined for your company — and it should be different for every company. For example, if your company employs a freemium model, you might choose to focus on building onboarding and accessible training materials to help users employ the product to its fullest potential.

To define your customer journey, your CS team should do things that don’t scale.

1. Act as a hands-on advisor for your first few customers/implementations.
2. Seek to understand each customers’ business goals and share ownership in driving them forward.
3. Demonstrate value by documenting your customers’ workflow, including the inputs and outputs for your product in particular.

Not only will that level of commitment and concierge support turn those initial customers into champions, it will provide your CS team with the necessary foundation to segment customers as your company grows.

Next, identify the right segments for your unique customer journey and build your CS strategy, team, and processes around the identified customer groups. You may choose to segment customers based on a hard metric like ARR (e.g. <$10k accounts, >$50k accounts, etc.) or something more qualitative like industry or buying criteria (e.g., reporting, workflow, etc.). Define and document a unique customer success approach for each customer segment you define.

Invest in community

Customer success is centered around relationships: starting new ones (cross-selling an account) and deepening existing ones (increasing lifetime value). A CS strategy that focuses on building a community of champions rather than ‘customer retention’ shifts the focus from the customer’s company to the actual users of your product. Think ‘champion-based marketing’ in place of ‘account-based marketing.’

First, the ‘champion’ who learned how to use and fell in love with your product is more likely to advocate for your product in their next role if they’re still connected with you (either emotionally or logistically, like through a slack channel or a newsletter).

Let your sales team focus on closing warm leads rather than identifying them by using a product like Warmly, that automatically informs you when a champion starts a new role in a new department or a new company altogether. Warmly recommends that CS teams create a new important metric — LTVC (Lifetime Value of a Customer). Everyone tracks the LTV of an account, but the lifetime value of a customer is only beginning to be realized.

A secondary benefit of building a community around your product or service is that champions often work in tandem with your team, answering user questions or sharing templates, feedback, use cases, etc. The creativity that has emerged from the #Roamcult and Notion super users are examples of how community can drive product growth.

Maximize existing value

Orienting your CS team around customer outcomes will be more challenging without the right supporting tools, data, and processes. Support your CS team, and by extension your customers, with the right infrastructure to maximize product value.

Invest in product analytics tools like Google Analytics or Mixpanel to understand how customers are using the product today and what areas they aren’t leveraging to their fullest potential. User interviews, paired with your product analytics, can guide your CS team’s focus for training and refining onboarding materials/strategy. Over time, the data you collect from analytics and user interviews will help shift your CS team from being reactive to proactive.

Additionally, increase the value of your product by building what your customers want. Customer Success should have a 1:1 with the product team every 2 weeks. Be empowered to share your learnings from customers and ensure that your customers’ voices are heard in your product development cycle. Create a system for intentionally sharing and regularly updating customer feedback.

Product analytics tools can also be used to automate notifications when, for example, a customer’s logins drop or the amount of time spent using your tool decreases (or alternatively, clicks to the help page increase!). Predictive analytics help identify ‘churn factors’ and support your CS team by letting them proactively bring up any concerns with your customer.

To get ahead of people-related risk factors, equip your CS team with the knowledge of customer health indicators like job changes. Products like Warmly, notify you when a key account may be at risk due to the departure of a ‘champion’ from your customer’s company.

Stick your transitions

Your customer success team will not be effective if they operate in a silo. Involve your CS team in the traditional sales process when possible so that no information or continuity is lost in the transition.

Another strategy for nailing the sales to CS handoff is developing standard processes and documentation that the sales team can populate to make sure the CS team has the information they need to be successful from Day 1.

If using a bottom-up or freemium model, provide your CS team with visibility into any and all touchpoints, decisions, and questions the customer has asked. Don’t ignore reverse transitions either! Have the CS team initiate conversations with champions that have switched jobs before handing them off to the sales team.

Be a revenue generating team — and get compensated for it!

Customer Success, when done correctly, should be a vital part of your organization’s growth. Demonstrate the importance of CS to your company by ensuring CS has a voice at the leadership table.

Reward your CS team for the revenue they retain and create. In parallel to the decline of pre-sales engineering, the traditional compensation model for sales has evolved. Customer success teams increasingly are assigned a quota for revenue retention. Confident CS teams that deliver outcomes for their customers should be incentivized and rewarded when their investments turn into renewals. Provide your CS team with the tools and support they need to drive upsells and cross-sells and compensate them for it! Additionally, many companies are starting to compensate CS teams for net new revenue when champions move to new organizations and re-buy your software thanks to a re-intro by your team.

For enterprise or B2B SaaS products, investing in your customer success team is increasingly important. To differentiate your product experience from the competition, implement customer success strategies beyond the minimum expectations of your customer. “Success” is a proactive term, while “Support” is a reactive one. Be proactive in making your CS team exceptional in 2021.