4 Recipes for Customer Success: Developed for Big Teams, Reworked for Us
We’re small but we think big. However, most of the CS advice out there doesn’t quite apply to us yet. Do you ever wonder how you can put some of those tips into practice? Here we’ve reworked tried and true CS tips for our early stage businesses.
Chances are you are both support and success. Your clients expect super fast and effective service that they’re used to getting from larger companies, and it’s up to you to bring your team together to ensure things get done amidst all the other priorities. “It’s essential to set up some common workflows so nothing gets lost in the shuffle during critical times,” — especially if cross-functional teamwork is required to best service your clients. You can get the proactive ball rolling by documenting everything to build your knowledge base, regularly meeting with key team members, and iterating on processes as you learn.
Betty: When I first started, our team was cranking on building the awesome software that our clients use today, while I was servicing clients on a legacy system. At first, it was a little chaotic inserting myself into the engineering workflow to get client issues resolved, and it was taking longer than it should. However, through regular daily catchups (sometimes 2x a day!), 2-way sharing of information on client goals and projects/tickets in progress, and verbal/written alignment on who was working on which tasks greatly improved the velocity of addressing client needs.
Failure may seem like the opposite of success, but it is a key part of a CS job! You don’t have the luxury of resources and time as you would in a larger company, and you’ll need to fail fast to get answers. Don’t be afraid to try something, even if it’s just a hunch, and be proactive about your clients’ success vs. a fire fighting mentality. Todd Eby of @SuccessHacker wrote, “Most companies …retrofitted [Success] into their operation after they had one too many “Oh sh*t!” moments.” This doesn’t have to be you or your company, even if you were hired for that purpose. If you see an opportunity, take the initiative to grab it. The insight and understanding you develop now will provide more data points to make better, more informed decisions for your clients.
Betty: I recently seized an opportunity that has since dramatically boosted the results for a client. Nothing was wrong with the current relationship, I just saw an area for improvement. I pitched my idea to the client, and we started small with a test batch of users. While it wasn’t a home run immediately, the learnings were huge. Since then, we’ve had multiple iterations on our initial test, and now the primary focus is on rapid expansion and growth. While one-off fire drills still happen, they get a lot less attention from the client.
3) Use Customer Success Management Software (sort of)
You won’t have enough clients or team members to warrant a Customer Success Software at first. But this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be thinking ahead. Don’t have a complex health score algorithm? You’re not off the hook! You should still be aware of (or in the process of uncovering) with which behaviors and triggers indicate whether a customer is doing well or ready to churn.
If you know how to use excel, you have a dashboard! Play around with different usage metrics. Get to know which KPIs are important to your CEO and customers. As leaders, this is an essential precursor to identifying “metrics that show [CS] teams are contributing to our companies’ revenue”.
Bernadette: In the beginning, I ran around and around trying to figure out which usage metrics indicated a healthy customer. CSM software wouldn’t have helped me at that point. It took quite a few iterations of a monthly report to our customers to land on usage metrics that resonated with our clients and were strong indicators of health. It was an intensive task, but now we know!
4) Understand who your bad fit customers are
In the beginning, you won’t know how to pick your best customers and deals will be made with less-than-perfect fits. Don’t worry, it’s actually a good thing. It takes in depth conversations with your customers in order to understand their “Desired Outcome”. Customers who don’t ‘fit’ easily require you to stretch yourself and work harder to make it work. This process of understanding the needs and profile of the right customer and use case and help your company define it’s good and bad fits.
Bernadette: Our onboarding process is so much different than it was when we started a year ago. We learned the most from accounts that struggled to get up and running. We thought we knew all the use cases and implementations for our product, but there was more out there. Now in onboarding we ask much more in depth questions, uncover issues that new users aren’t even thinking about, and position ourselves as trusted advisors as we solve our users’ problems. All thanks to our ‘bad fit’ customers.
