Three Strategies to Scale CS That Are More Effective Than “Do More With Less”

As the economy enters a downturn, organizations are being forced to become as efficient as possible. This is especially true in the SaaS market, where the “growth at all costs” mindset is no longer an option to scale a business.

As CEOs and investors look to focus their budgets on areas that will drive the most efficient revenue growth, customer success—and its north star metric, Net Revenue Retention—is becoming increasingly important. In our recent study, the 2022 SaaS Market Report, SaaS CEOs indicated that Customer Success is the department where they’re least likely to cut spending. We think that’s a win. Unfortunately, there’s a catch: In the name of scaling efficiently, CS is being asked to do more with less. 

Why “Do More With Less” Doesn’t Scale  

For customer success leaders, and SaaS leaders in general, the ability to scale efficiently and effectively is becoming a make-or-break differentiator in the current market. But, as Nick Mehta, CEO of Gainsight, recently reflected on LinkedIn, “Scale is sometimes code for ‘do more with less.’” This sentiment can become an easy pitfall for growing organizations. After all, who doesn’t want more work and less time and resources to do it? 

Mehta continues, “As leaders, it’s incumbent on us to not just ask our teams to do more but instead to focus on things that really matter.” He asked the Customer Success community what priorities they’ve identified for focusing and scaling CS teams. Here are the top three strategies that emerged from the conversation. 

1. Create a Charter to Define the Scope of Customer Success 

The work of customer success touches every corner of the organization—and it needs to in order to deliver and demonstrate value to customers throughout their lifecycle. However, CS has historically been treated as a catch-all, filling in where needed, juggling tasks that no other function really wants to own.

While CS teams are most effective when they build cross-functional alliances with Product, Marketing, and Sales teams, it is critical that SaaS leaders remember one thing: If you want to scale, CS can’t be the department of everything. 

This pain point was echoed by the CS community. Brian O’Keeffe, Digital Engagement Manager at Egnyte, who sits on the CS Ops team, noted, “The catch-all positioning is unsustainable and hurts CS … It was very difficult to reposition CS as a strategic and consultative partner when everyone in the org saw us as a dumping ground, which we were.”

So, what’s the professional way of telling other departments you need to step back from certain tasks? We recommend establishing a Customer Success charter that defines the scope and role of the CS team clearly to the entire company. 

According to Adam Joseph, Regional VP of CS for Gainsight, “unless you define what Customer Success is and conversely what it isn’t, tasks that no other function really wants to own can be given to Customer Success. So I think having that manifesto, having that strong leadership there to define what it is and what it includes and what the strategy is, is super important.”

2. Use Product Data to Focus CSM Priorities on Customer Needs

The discipline of customer success has evolved from simply preventing churn to engineering value for customers and growing their businesses. For SaaS organizations, a huge part of the CS function is guiding users through software adoption, so their time to value is lightning fast. 

CSMs now play a critical role in how customers adopt and ultimately expand and grow their use of the product. Sayanta Ghosh, Co-Founder of Peersome and former Principle Product Manager of Mindtickle, noted, “For CS teams to scale and yet be effective at their core, CS executives have to be aided by a deep understanding of how customers are using their platform, which features they are deriving value from, and what kind of behaviors can nudge the customers to derive more value from different platform functionalities. Most importantly, these data insights need to be tailored to the use cases of each customer and the specific goals of using the platform.”

We couldn’t agree more. Focusing the efforts of CSMs will be most effective when CS locks arms with Product to form an action plan for driving customer outcomes and creating meaningful customer experiences at scale. Tactics like in-app engagements can go a long way toward unburdening your CSMs while still capitalizing on every opportunity to guide the customer to value. 

This brings us to our next strategy, and it’s a show-stopper. Enter digital customer success. 

3. Operationalize Digital Customer Success Tactics 

The world of SaaS has heard a lot about digital customer success over the last year. But what is it? Is it only for low-value customer segments? How can you even get started, given the variety of tactics that it encompasses? 

From self-service offerings to product usage analytics and multi-stage customer journeys … digital customer success can be daunting. But, it’s absolutely necessary to invest time and energy into creating efficient processes that operationalize digital CS tactics. That way, your CSMs’ efforts will have more reach, without burning out the team. 

A clear example of this is VMWare. With 500,000 customers, VMware could hire every CSM in the world and they still wouldn’t be able to serve them. According to Meenu Agarwal, SVP of CS at VMWare, “it’s pretty clear that the only way to scale is with a digital-led CS approach. A digital-led CS strategy is what makes VMware’s CS work—and to have it scale for even more customers in the future.” 

Digital CS is truly the lynchpin to scaling CS without asking more of your CSMs, who already perform human heroics on the daily. As Kellie Capote, CCO of Gainsight, points out, by automating drudgerous tasks, you can save your CSMs’ energy for the high-value touchpoints where their personal involvement matters most. 

As Julie Fox, Senior Manager of Customer Success at FloQast, put it, “I like to think of scaling as less about ‘do more with less’ and more about ‘doing better.’”

Learn More 

To learn more about how to scale customer success and position your company for durable growth, check out the Big Book of Digital Customer Success.