11 things to keep in mind while scaling Customer Success
“Scaling Customer Success” is the latest buzzword in #customersucces. In the last few months, I have had well over a dozen conversations with CSM #1 in a startup to CSM’s in a startup that has grown rapidly and is struggling to structure their Customer Success (CS) team. Everyone seems to be heavily zoned in on this topic. A driver for this push to scale Customer Success perhaps comes from the increasing acceptance of NRR as the metric to focus on and align different teams. Not to mention, when you hear the NRR rate for some of the recent SaaS companies that IPO’ed. Mostly all north of 120%. Everyone wants to get in the action.
Here I will outline 11 things to keep in mind while scaling CS.
1. Focus on the Golden Triangle
Processes | Technology | People
Working on each of these pillars simultaneously, in an incremental fashion is the right way to make huge overall improvements. Don’t overthink which pillar to pick first. Pick one to start with, and go from there. Luckily, all of these are interrelated and will converge upon each other at some point.
2. Define what scaling means.
For sure, it does not only mean increasing the headcount of a team. Or, increasing ARR/number of accounts per CSM. Adding to headcount that drives a drive fragile processes(backed by back tech stack) and not knowing how this translates to the customer, is a recipe for disaster.
Instead, look at this from a customer perspective. Brian Chesky, one of the co-founders of Airbnb once explained that scaling consists of two stages.
Stage 1. Designing the ultimate customer experience, with just one single user in mind. Figure out what that experience would look like. What is that wow moment for the user?
Stage 2. Take that experience, and think of how you can do exactly that a million times.
“Handcraft the customer experience before you start scaling” — Søren Moesgaard, Regional Manager, Customer Success Nordics & DACH at Pleo
Summary here is, think to think about scaling customer experience first.
3. Customer relevancy
Scaling is also about being mindful of where a CSM is spending their productive work hours. Your customer portfolio will need to be segmented one way or another. Something appropriate for your business. This ensures you are able to drive value for your organisation AND the customer. For example, are you forcing your CSM’s to hold a QBR with a customer that does not need one/benefits from it? Or having a low communication cadence with customers where your biggest growth opportunities are? CSM’s cannot be spending all their time on all the accounts. No focus = no results.
“Scaling is about where you spend your time and about being agile” — Anouk van Tuinen, Sr. Manager, Customer Success EMEA at Miro
Within your commercial team, work to align on what an important customer looks like. What their needs are and what experience they should get from you (outcomes they want to achieve with your service/product and how you deliver these to them). When you become incredibly good at scaling these customer experiences, the natural outcome is that for your startup you drive higher NRR, perhaps with a nominally higher headcount. While your customers are wildly happy with the value they get from you (and your product).
4. What does success look like to your customer?
Often, CSM’s:
- Have little insights into what customers expect from the product(value/outcome) and from the CSM’s themselves.
- Shy away from hard/tough conversations that are crucial for driving said value/outcomes for the customers.
The starting point of delivering an amazing experience is knowing what your customers want, and going about orchestrating that in an efficient and effective manner. And if you have not done this, at least with your (key customers, based on the above segmentation), it’s ok. The next best time to have this conversation is NOW. With all new customers, start it as early as possible.
Looking at this from a dating analogy, you are going to get into a potentially long term relationship (with this organisation and its people). Get to know what makes them tick and what is expected of you. This will help you charm and deliver your way into renewals, expansion and upsells. — Saahil Karkera, Head of Customer Success, Oaky.
5. (Articulating)Reemphasisng value
Right, so you know what your customers are looking for (value/outcome). Now it’s time to articulate and emphasise the value your product brings to the user and the customer throughout your engagement cadence with them.
💡Tip: Never overpromise and set yourself up for failure. If anything, under-promise and then massively overdeliver.
Let's take a hypothetical example. Your product helps customer support teams resolve tickets.
Value for the:
- First-line support agent: Picking up the tickets quickly = (KPI)Mean time to respond |Cadence: Weekly | Promise a reduction of 10%, strive to deliver 30%
- Team Manager: Resolving tickets fast and efficiently = (KPI) Mean time to Fix and first time right | Cadence: Monthly | Promise a reduction of 5%, strive to deliver 10%
- Director: Improving NPS. Cadence: Quarterly | Promise a improvement of 5%, strive to deliver 10%
You will need to articulate and showcase these values/outcomes consistently to these different stakeholders in the appropriate cadence (within the product and outside).
6. CS Techstack
When your startup is small, without specialised roles. Often CSM’s are wearing multiple hats. It feels like being an aeroplane pilot in a cockpit. You have to monitor hundreds of things. Unfortunately, in most of our cases, these things are not nicely laid out, in a systematic manner and so well integrated into each other.
If your startup (is pre-scale and) can afford to hire a new FTE. Invest that money in a decent CS focused platform instead. The platform can exponentially scale, an FTE cannot. If this is not possible. The key is to have different tech solutions in place that integrate well with each other and can deliver the CSM’s an (as close as possible) single source of truth.
Technology should act as the accelerator of doing something great with a small segment of customers, and expanding that great thing across your entire book of business.
However, most matured CS teams would have and are not limited to. A CS platform, a customer communication platform, product analytics, subscription management for your product plans and pricing, and a BI tool to work with. Remember, the next best time to invest in CS tech is now.
7. Tech touch
Ok, you have defined what scaling means, you understand customer relevancy, you know what success looks like to your customer, you are good at (articulating)re-emphasising value, are(articulating)re-emphasising value fairly well and have a tech stack that can power this shift. This would be a good base to start moving smaller touchpoints and support to a tech-touch approach.
Simply put, taking all of the above and exponentially scaling that to the current customer base and new (long-tail) customer base, would be a way where you are able to scale your startup without massively adding to the headcount.
Scaling your CS organisation could result in a shift in your ideal customer profile. Which can be great for your business. E.g you find from data that for long-tail customers, your sales velocity is high, they don't demand much support, are happy with the current roadmap, and are organically signing up for the product. Your sales team can then exclusively focus on those long-cycle/complex deals which are equally important for growth.
💡Tips:
- If there will be a noticeable effect on your customer in service levels as a move to tech touch. Clearly communicate to your customer how the changes will impact them. E.g Moving to tech touch could lead to a more affordable price plan, rather than having one dedicated Customer Success Manager. This could actually result in faster service as they might have a team of support reps that will help with any query they have.
- Do not be scared of running tech touch to your enterprise accounts. An automated email that reads ‘Your renewal is coming up’ email is relevant to all customers. This saved time can be utilised for value-adding tasks.
- If they have to jump through hoops to get support, this is not the idea of moving customers to tech touch.
- Make your self-serve setup easy to use/understand. Remember the grandmom test.
- Consider the timing of such a shift in service. By packaging this message with the launch of an academy offering you can enable the customer to be more self-sufficient.
- Drive/reemphasise the outcome they realise with your product.
- Consider the complexity of your product and use tools to make your users life easier.
8. People
As you scale, your customer set will also evolve. This will require you to reconsider your staffing decisions. What people do you already have and what level of diversity do you want to have, from experience level(depth and breadth) to ethnicity, to gender etc. With companies waking to the importance of Customer Success, there’s a big demand for CSMs these days. When hiring, focus on mindset first and skill as secondary.
Your product may require you to hire someone with deep industry knowledge or technical knowledge. If these individuals are hard to find, you will have to make a choice, hire someone with CS experience and little to no industry knowledge or no CS experience but vast industry knowledge. In either case, you will have to have a robust onboarding process to ramp up the CSM. And, set an appropriate learning path for them to stay and grow in your organisation. Work closely with your HR team to make both of these happen.
💡Tips:
- If you are keen to grow in your CSM career. Proactively seek where there is an opportunity for you to take things off someone else's plate within your organisation. In the short term, this may mean additional work. But in the long term, you can create your own opportunities and help scale the team.
- Work on employee branding to attract the best talent.
- Work on developing a growth mindset. This goes across all levels of the organisation.
- You do not have to be a manager to be a leader. Find something you are passionate about, and become an expert in that area. Lead within your area of expertise.
- If you are a team lead, expand your vision and ideas to the team as clearly as possible and then make ways for them to reach the said vision.
9. CS operations
As your customer success team “matures” (there is no clear definition for this), say you have a few dozen CSM’s, a small support team, a few customer onboarding folks. Now, would really be a good time to look at investing in someone to take care of CS Operations and administer all the applications you use in your CS tech stack.
To draw parallels, the Sales Operation role has been a crucial role/department scaling many organisations. There has been a slow and steady trend with more and more roles opening up for CS ops. There is a lot of knowledge and great ideas within your CS teams and likely not the time to execute on all of these. Bringing in an expert in processes and data would give a large boost to scaling strategies and CS objectives.
10. Focus on execution
Scaling is not an end destination. It is a continuum, a journey. One of the key factors to rapid growth is operational excellence. A well thought through plan, not executed well is worthless.
Periodically, you will have to evaluate where you are on that continuum, where your startup wants to go and how you in the CS team can act as a catalyst for that growth. Think what are the things you can
- Start doing
- Stop doing
- Continue doing
- Automate!
Once you have answers to these questions it is crucial to start slow with rolling out these changes.
Start small — test — optimise — repeat.
💡Tips:
- Try setting OKR’s around this.
- Focus on one process at a time and document it!
11. Other things to consider when scaling
- Can you work along with your leadership team/founders to make NRR a company-wide KPI? This creates an environment where it is clear to everyone, what they are working towards and creates collaboration opportunities within teams.
- Complexity and technicality of product. Is this going to get easier or more complex as your product grows? How can you support this complexity at scale?
- Consider other roles besides CS roles that can play a pivotal role in scaling. CS advocacy manager, product marketing specialists, CS technical specialist, data/business analysts, renewal specialists, community managers, content creators etc. You cant have a team full of only forward, mid-field, defenders or goalkeepers. Your team has to be well rounded.
- You will make hiring errors, even if you have a robust hiring process. It is best to acknowledge this as early as possible. Address it with the person, give them a fair chance to address the concerns. If there is a lack of progress, don't waste any time parting ways. Don’t let a bad apple bring the team down.
Summary:
There are 11 things you need to keep in mind before “scaling” your CS efforts are focusing on the Golden Triangle, defining what scaling means, customer relevancy, knowing what success looks like for your customers, reemphasising value, CS tech stack, tech touch, people, CS operations, focus on execution and some other considerations. You will have to work on these elements parallelly and incrementally in order to truly scale what you are doing.
In this article, I have expanded and built on the ideas that were discussed in the winter edition of the Customer Success Netherlands meetup. CS leaders from startups that are currently going through this scaling phase or have already been through it recently. Søren (Pleo), Sam & Conor (Foleon), Anouk & Bárbara (Miro) shared their two cents on this topic.
If you are interested in watching the full meetup: https://youtu.be/OyaQSbik2O4 or feel like joining the meetup group head over here.
