6 Sections You Should Have in Your Customer Success Playbook
Creating a playbook for your customer success team allows you to have a single source of truth for the most common questions that both new and experienced team members ask. A playbook saves managers time and helps clarify processes and goals. After publishing my previous article on this topic, I received many practical questions on writing a playbook and tailoring it to the team’s needs. In this article, I’ll share my list of recommendations on what you should include in your CS playbook and why.
1. Identify the whys
Before describing your team’s processes, goals, metrics, KPIs, and more, spend some time reflecting on your team’s purpose and how they make your clients’ lives easier. Although it may be obvious to you as the manager, it may not be the case for your new hires. Understanding your team’s purpose and their impact on clients helps keep them motivated. In addition, understanding why the processes are built this way and not the other can help your team accept and follow them. Lastly, having clarity on why these KPIs are used to measure performance enables your team to stay focused on their goals.
A positive, external effect of formulating the whys is that the manager will have the opportunity to reassess team processes on a general and granular level. It can sometimes lead to an insight that, with the team’s growth and development, your current processes are no longer accurate and need to be updated.
2. Provide process descriptions
Provide a detailed description of all the processes that are critical to your team’s success. It’s important to be as specific as possible to leave minimum room for any misinterpretations. I recommend preparing clear checklists for each important activity.
Let’s take a customer call as an example. Certain steps are usually performed before the call, such as reviewing the client’s history, analyzing usage metrics, etc. Then comes the call itself. What needs to be done? List action items such as asking discovery questions, checking the client’s progress toward the goals they set for your product, showcasing new releases, discussing adoption, scheduling a follow-up call in the end, and more. Finally, describe what needs to happen after the call. Does a CSM need to log the summary of the call somewhere in your CRM? Send a follow-up email to the customer? Check whether additional seats have been allocated?
Every step of the process that you, as a manager, consider important needs to be described properly. Don’t be afraid that your description will contain too much detail — it’s better than forgetting to add critical points that could lead to problems later on. And never assume that the team should already know something and skip over it. Describe it!
3. Explain the metrics and KPIs
Explain the main metrics based on which the results of the team and each individual are evaluated. Describe how these metrics are connected to the company’s global ones. For example, at Wrike we use objectives and key results (OKRs). All OKRs set for each team contribute to higher-level, departmental OKRs, which in turn contribute to company-wide global OKRs. So every CSM has a clear understanding of how their personal goals connect to the global goals.
It’s also important to share how each metric or KPI is calculated. Doing so creates an atmosphere of fairness and transparency, which is especially important when these KPIs have a direct impact on the team members’ salaries and bonuses.
4. Include examples of cross-collaboration
Another important topic that’s worth covering in the playbook is how and when the customer success team needs to collaborate with other teams. A good starting point would be listing all the teams CS needs to work with on a regular basis. Common examples include sales, support, and product teams. Then explain where the field of responsibility of one team ends and another one begins. For example, at Wrike: Clients are redirected to our Support team for technical questions, while CSMs cover value-related questions. When writing about this division in the playbook, I provided a relatively large set of examples on which questions can be considered technical and which are value-related.
This section would also be a good place to highlight who to escalate questions/issues to and whose approval would be required in different situations. The purpose is to provide clear boundaries on which team is responsible for what, which issues the teams should be working together on, and how that collaboration should look.
5. Incorporate guides on the necessary tools
Prepare descriptions of the tools/solutions the customer success team use. This section shouldn’t be a compilation of 100+ page instructions on CRMs, reporting solutions, and more. Instead, provide a brief description of potential use cases, what CSMs should be paying attention to (and what they shouldn’t), and your teams’ best practices.
Again, wherever possible, provide detailed instructions — ideally in a checklist format. For example, how to open a client’s profile in the CRM before the CSM’s scheduled call with them, what data points to look at, and how to log the call summary. If there are certain reports that CSMs should be reviewing on a regular basis (e.g., their progress towards their retention targets), add the links to such reports in this section.
6. Add an FAQ section
One of the most important sections to have in the playbook is the FAQs. As a manager, you’re used to getting multiple questions from your team members on a daily, even weekly basis. It’s likely that many of these questions are repetitive and you already have them documented — in emails, communication platforms, and other sources. So your job here is to gather all of these questions, exclude the ones that are too specific (or keep them, if you’d like), and add them to the playbook. You may also want to rewrite the answers to be more concise and universal. Having this section k allows you to save a lot of time that you’d otherwise spend answering the same questions over and over again.
Whatever else you choose to add to the playbook depends on your team’s needs and what you consider important. For example, I added a collection of productivity tips for CSMs that proved to be incredibly efficient when I was a CSM. In any case, make sure that the playbook is fun to read. Add jokes, interesting examples, and personal experience. Make the playbook a document that your team members would want to read!
