Startup Playbook for Customer Success
A Net Promoter Score (NPS) that beats Apple’s. An award-winning app that “customers can’t live without” — despite being in the very unexciting category of financial reporting software. Customer success managers that get gifts of chocolates, DVDs and makeup from the company’s grateful marquee customers (Godiva, Disney and L’Oreal). A company that tops customer satisfaction charts for enterprise software.
It’s not Salesforce.
It’s Workiva (NYSE: WK), the one company I cite whenever I’m asked who sets the bar on customer service.
They understand a fundamental truth: good customer retention is to SaaS business as water is to fish. You simply can’t survive without it.
But how do you create a vibrant, customer-centric culture from Day 1 — and reap the benefit? Mitz Banarjee is Workiva’s Executive Vice President and Chief Customer Officer and the longtime architect of its winning customer success formula. As Workiva now approaches $300M in revenue, and as someone who’s built great customer success organizations from startup phase to ‘exit’ twice, I asked Mitz to share his customer success playbook.
Step 1: Set the tone at the top and from the start.
When Mitz joined Workiva (then called WebFilings) in its infancy, he immediately asked the executive management team, “Will you let me do what it takes to make the customer experience great no matter what happens with the product or pricing? It won’t be cheap, and I want to charge for it.”
They agreed, knowing their initial model might not scale but preferring to err on the side of making early customers evangelistically happy. These raving customers were a huge part of why their annual compound growth rate was 139.3% their first three years. They had a great sales team but their existing customers’ evangelism was the single most powerful marketing lever they had.
Step 2: Think through your service and hiring strategies.
Deciding to do a high-touch customer support model and charging anywhere from 10% to 40% of contract value for services means the customer is going to hold you to a higher standard that you can afford to deliver on because it’s paid for. Workiva made sure they consistently provided great service, and it meant customers never pushed back on the services costs.
Charging for service meant the team earned their own keep — so there was no pressure that came with being a cost center. It also has the added benefit of helping set compensation higher, which in turn let them hire better talent.
Here too, Mitz was unconventional. “I didn’t go by customer success being on their resumes. I hired bartenders and servers. If you’ve served really cranky customers, you’re better at getting into someone’s head,” he observed. “I look for the Chatty Cathy and Chatty Chad. They have a way of opening people up and that made for a really diverse team that could tap into customer’s real needs.”
Step 3: Understand your customer’s life and make it better.
At a startup, money is always tight, so the tendency is to think “Is this good for us?” and not “Is this best for the customer?” The only way to know is to really understand the customer.
Mitz once asked a customer, “Tell me about your busy season.”
The customer said, “My day starts at about 8 a.m. and ends around 10 p.m. It’s just the way it is, and my family is just used to it.” Mitz asked, “Well, are there some things we can do differently using our product?”
Mitz then reconnected with that customer and asked how things were going 100 days after using the product. The customer said, “For the first time in 25 years, I went home for dinner.”
That’s how you want to define customer success: changing someone’s life for the better. That way, even if they churn or leave that company, they will never forget that positive experience. These days, the C-suite listens to the people on the frontlines having to use products. You want those users to love what you do.
Step 4: Change is always hard! Make onboarding a gradual process.
The first 30 to 90 days is really important in onboarding customers, but most companies try to do too much. Remember that change is hard for everyone. Workiva does an initial training but then watches product utilization metrics and does check-ins every other week, offering features or functions the customer might now find useful given the customer’s usage patterns.
Deepening adoption becomes the focus of the post-‘onboarded’ part of the relationship. Customer success reps did proactive customer check-ins at a minimum on a quarterly basis, sometimes monthly, and then weekly during key cycles like onboarding or busy times. It all depended on the nature of the relationship and complexity of the deployment. If it was more complex, the check-ins were more frequent.
Step 5: Focus on adoption of the product versus upselling.
It’s really important to separate customer success (ie, you calling customers) from support (ie, them calling you). This also means you don’t want to switch customer success to revenue numbers too early. You want them focused on protecting the revenue you have and growing it safely by making sure customers are retained.
Workiva decided rather than trying to upsell customers (which is a sales cycle mindset), they would focus on adoption. Instead of upselling into new features, they focused on price increases for the incremental new value for product upgrades, which shifts the framing of the conversation. Since the customer has been shown the value all along the way, they didn’t have pushback on price increases and customers were easy to retain.
Remember that, once a Customer Success Manager (CSM) starts feeling like a rep to your customer, you’ve breached the trust you’ve worked so hard to earn. You’re getting paid by customers to keep all accountable for a good experience. It’s crucial to maintain the mindset that this is a relationship and act accordingly.
Step 6: Don’t worry about scale or process too early.
When things were just getting started and contracts were $15K — 25K a year, Workiva was able to support 30–40 accounts per CSM because they were proactive, not reactive in their outreach. CSMs just built in regular check-ins and a cycle that made the load manageable. As contracts got bigger and rollouts more complex, enterprise CSMs had four to five accounts, ranging from $10M to $50M in revenue. So loads were adjusted as the business evolved.
But love for people can only go so far. The best way to scale is to deliver a product that does what customers want. Here, customer success can help guide the little things that make a big difference. One recent example was dual and triple monitor support. The Workiva customer success team showed the product team the data on why customers would love it. Although it was a small feature, it was the thing customers spoke about most in the recent upgrade. “It’s the little things that rock their world,” Mitz notes.
Mitz does believe in using tools to hack scaling, but these “should start and end with the strength of a relationship you have. It doesn’t all have to be people doing the job. Tools that can take conversations that were done in a human way and help one human juggle 50 accounts without changing the level of support are great.” But be transparent: no one likes to feel played. Scaling through AI is totally fine but it should still feel human and personal.
In the end, retaining customers is about staying focused on building a customer-centric culture that positions retention as an outcome of everyone doing their job proactively. That’s a stark contrast to teeing it up as a reactive metric to chase.
What can you do differently to shift your organization’s mindset and rock your customers’ worlds?
