Customer Success framework
By creating a consistent experience for your customers, you can confidently predict revenue
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Reasons for implementing a customer success framework
You should be implementing a customer success framework if you want to increase:
- Customer retention
- Customer satisfaction
- Renewal rates and revenue
- Upsell and cross-sell opportunities
- Loyalty
- Lifetime value (LTV)
- Referrals and word of mouth marketing (WOMM)
If you’re a SaaS company, implementing a customer success framework is the only way to ensure long-term profitability.
By creating a consistent experience for your customers, you can confidently predict revenue.
Components of a customer success framework
There are two major components to a Customer Success Framework: how you communicate with your customers and the organizational structure surrounding it.
Communication
Communication is essential for customer success.
Customers need to be aware of what’s going on with their product. They also need to know about new features, important updates, and changes in pricing as soon as they happen (if not before).
Without constant communication, customers will feel like they’ve been abandoned or forgotten by your company.
Organization
You must align all of your company’s departments around your customer success framework if you want to see tangible results in terms of customer retention and growth.
Sales, marketing, support, and product development should have the same goals, strategies, metrics, and initiatives as the Customer Success team.
How does customer success differ from other departments?
Customer Success is about delivering value to customers. When customer success is measured purely by retention or revenue, the focus can shift away from what the customer needs.
Customer Success is a long-term relationship with a customer. It requires effort and investment on both sides.
Customer Success reduces churn. This comes from engaging customers to ensure they are getting value from your product and working with them to identify issues that might cause them to cancel their subscription in the future.
5 principles for implementing a customer success framework
Here are 5 principles you can use to develop your own customer success framework.
- Resource allocation — Every company has limited resources, so how do you allocate those resources across different customers and make sure that the ones that need more help get it? It’s all about making sure people have access to the right information.
- Communication in context — This means knowing what type of communication is best at any given time and how much to send a customer. For example, imagine that a customer is getting close to canceling their service; that would be a good time to reach out via email or phone, but if they’re not doing anything, sending them an email could actually annoy them.
- Automation — Knowing when automation is appropriate for a particular task—and when it isn’t—can make or break your business model. When done well, automation can create efficiency and save money by freeing up your employees’ time, but if used incorrectly it can hurt your business because customers will feel like they aren’t being treated as individuals.
- Reporting on usage metrics — Usage data represents real-time feedback from users about how they’re using your product or service in order to ensure that they continue using it successfully over time (i.e., retention). It also helps identify potential new opportunities for growth through upsell/cross-sell opportunities based on what types of things other customers might want to buy (new features etc.) based on similar user behaviors.
- Feedback loops with engineering teams about bugs/feature requests so we can fix them quickly before any negative impact occurs
1) Allocate resources to your customer success team
In order to have a successful customer success team, you need to allocate the following resources:
- Human resources. Your team should include people with necessary skills and knowledge, such as personnel, training, tools, and support. These are essential for delivering high-quality customer service.
- Time resources. All your employees need time to focus on their main tasks and not be overburdened with responsibilities that don’t pertain directly to them. Your customer success managers should handle most of the work related to customer care and expectations, while sales reps’ focus should remain on selling your product or service.
- Financial resources. You will want to spend money on good tools (CRM software) that will help you organize and manage your team’s workflow efficiently, as well as improve overall productivity and results.
- Accessible information. To set up a successful framework for your organization’s teams, define how departments can share information about customers in an efficient way so everyone has access to it when they need it.
2) Let your new customers know about your customer success plans
This is the second point of focus in your customer success framework. Let your new customers know about your customer success plans.
Customers often do not know what to expect when they start working with you, so it’s up to you to tell them their options and set expectations. You can do this through a few different channels:
- Sending an email or newsletter filled with customer stories and use cases, along with links to help articles, videos, and other resources.
- Putting together an onboarding plan that involves live demos, follow-up emails, and meetings with CSMs.
- Providing links to each CSM’s profile in the product itself so customers can start self-serving by reaching out to the right person if they have questions.
It would be useful to develop a Customer Journey so you make sure the experience is aligned, independently of who is responsible for managing the customer.
It also helps you know what to communicate to your customers, aligning expectations since the beginning.
3) Set up client communication channels and reporting tools
Set up internal communication channels.
You’ll need to set up ways to get your entire team—both customer-facing and not—on the same page about the status of accounts. This can be done through your existing project management tool or CRMs.
Set up a customer portal with self-service options.
You don’t want customers filling your inbox with status requests and bug tickets when they could do it themselves. Set up a customer portal on your website (there are several tools like Freshservice or Servicenow that are relatively easy to use) where customers can submit those requests directly, without taking time away from you or your team.
Set up reporting tools to track progress on goals and current issues.
This one is specific for managers who are setting goals for their teams (though we all need reporting tools if we want to demonstrate success!). These might include dashboards in Salesforce or Gainsight, but there are plenty of other great options out there as well!
4) Create automated processes for common repetitive tasks
Automation allows you to cut down on the time spent on repetitive tasks and focus more time on personal interactions with customers. It can also ensure consistent and high-quality results. By finding ways to automate tasks that are not unique to any one customer, you can save the time of your reps for the things that do require their attention. As an added benefit, automating certain processes can help you collect data about how your customers interact with those automated systems so that you can improve them in the future.
5) Use the data you collect to improve your customer success plan
At this point, you’ll want to revisit your customer success metrics and see if they are aligned with your business goals. If they aren’t, start by identifying what metrics would be relevant to your business goals and how they can be aligned with the customer journey to ensure success.
Using the data you collect over time, you may need to tweak your plan based on key findings from the data. For example, maybe the product adoption rate is not where you thought it should be after reviewing usage data or exit survey feedback.
You might find that there is still a gap between a product’s features and customers’ needs or that marketing materials are misleading about what challenges the product solves for customers.
If you don’t have any metrics around product adoption, think about setting up regular user testing sessions so that you can get a better understanding of how people use your software as well as create more opportunities for users to ask questions and express concerns they might have while using the software (and whether these issues impact their ability to get value out of the product).
A customer success framework helps you build long-term relationships with customers and provide them with value after the initial sale
Customer success is the practice of helping customers get value out of products by ensuring they’re properly configured and used and providing guidance to help them achieve their goals.
It is about building long-term relationships with customers while providing them with value after the initial sale.
This helps customers achieve a return on their investment (ROI) and makes it less likely that they’ll churn—meaning they’ll be more likely to continue buying from you and refer others to your company.
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