3 Steps to Get Started Now
Step 1: Segment your Portfolio
Segmenting your portfolio will streamline how you approach customers and make it easier to efficiently delegate time and resources. There are many ways to categorize your customers—just to get your gears rolling, here are some criteria you can use:
- The cost or type of their services package
- Their overall contract amount
- The level of involvement from a customer’s in-house departments (IT, Ops, etc. will take care of a certain amount of their onboarding needs)
By gaining a deeper understanding of the needs required by each of your categories, whatever those might be, you can work to deliver strong customer experiences with efficiency and consistency.
Step 2: Establish cross-functional relationships with Sales, Customer Success, and Support
As your customers get passed between Sales, Services, Customer Success, and Support it can become increasingly difficult to keep track of information relating to their involvement with each department.
The handoff is a critical moment—with every exchange the customer is vulnerable and could potentially lose trust in your company. On top of that, every new person that comes in contact with that account needs to know the state of the customer, their goals, health, milestones, etc., in order to drive outcomes without spending time getting caught up on customer activity. The last thing a customer wants to do is repeat the same information to every new team.
To deliver an exceptional, seamless customer experience between handoffs, you need to establish customer-driven, cross-functional processes within each of these teams. This will ensure that with each interaction, the current team can operate with utmost efficiency and the customer remains on track to achieve their predetermined goals.
Step 3: Establish your Processes
Now that you’ve segmented your portfolio and established cross-functional relationships with your fellow departments, it’s time to get to the nitty-gritty. It’s time to establish a set of frameworks that you can use as a springboard. In the next section, we’ll dive deeper into the following key processes:
- Handoff Management
- Turnkey Onboarding
- Project Experience Management
- Outcomes Planning
- Sell Across the Lifecycle
Diving into Processes
Process #1: Handoff Management
As we mentioned above, handoffs are a critical moment in the customer lifecycle. If mishandled, the customer will feel disconnected, anxious, and annoyed. On the other hand, a successful handoff will bring customers closer to their goals, leaving them satisfied and able to clearly see the value you’ve delivered. To ensure smooth exchanges between departments, you need a heightened focus on transparency, accurate customer data, and open communication across your company.
How do I achieve success in this area?
- Require your Sales team to capture customer goals and objectives at the start of every engagement and store the information in your central source of customer data. This way, when other teams come in contact with that customer, they can understand how their tasks contribute to the customer’s ‘big picture’ objectives.
- Define the roles each party should play in handoffs between Sales → Services and Services → Customer Success Manager.
- Deliver definitive proof of value to customers at the end of every engagement. To increase customer buy-in, suggest success criteria at the beginning of the project based on similar projects you’ve carried out with other customers.
Metrics for Measuring Success
- Improving the Handoff and properly capturing customer objectives should set the customer up for success across for the long-terms. To measure success of this process, you should look at:
- NPS or CSAT
- Adoption Health
- Professional Services Qualified Leads (PSQLs): Leads that are generated from engagement by the Professional Services team
Process #2: Scale Onboarding
Onboarding is the foundation of the customer lifecycle. How your customer feels after completing their onboarding plays a huge role in customer adoption and overall Customer Success. Customers want to get value from your product ASAP, but in order to get there, some require more attention than others. For those that want low-touch turnkey onboarding, you need to establish a solid strategy that will effectively get them to a go-live state with a sustainable resourcing model. If you’re used to the long-term engagements that legacy onboarding requires, you may have to take a bit of a “trust fall” to leverage technology to supplement or drive the onboarding process.
How do I achieve success in this area?
- Design a semi-automated onboarding approach that will lead low-touch customers to success.
- Vigilantly monitor customer health and proactively reach out if a red flag occurs.
- Implement a technological component to automate outreaches and drive engagement.
Metrics for Measuring Success
- Hours spent per Customer
- Onboardings completed per Quarter
- Onboarding CSAT
Process #3: Project Experience Management
When a client signs up for a project, they want to be blown away with the experience and the outcome. This is a great opportunity to significantly impact customer satisfaction, but if you don’t manage the project wisely, you risk the opposite. Focus on these three aspects to deliver exceptional project experiences: efficient project execution, streamlined risk management, and meticulous data collection. Measuring customer health throughout the process is vital. By keeping your finger on the pulse, you can act on any signs of declining health and take proactive measures to nurture a healthy relationship and great project experience.
How do I achieve success in this area?
- Create a unified understanding of the project goals and customer health
- Establish a central source of project and customer data, including health scores, plans, dashboards, etc, that can be accessed by all customer-facing teams
- Proactively manage risk
- Define and understand risks before you begin a project
- Build a playbook for each type of risk customized by segment
- Form a hierarchy for risk escalation
- Put a framework in place that requires project approaches to be reviewed and validated by management
- Execute a survey program
- Form a customer communication strategy that follows the customer’s journey (i.e. send surveys at certain project stages—at the beginning, upon completion, as a midpoint check-in, a few weeks post-project, etc.)
- Design specific communications targeting each role involved with the project
- Automate survey delivery and response collection
- Create dashboards so you can review survey data and drive improvements
Metrics for Measuring Success
- Number of Project Escalations/Risks
- Customer Implementation Team NPS or CSAT
- Overall Project Health Score
Process #4: Outcomes Planning
When a client enters a project, they want to be blown away with outcomes. This sounds easy enough—do your job well and the client will be happy, right? Unfortunately, this isn’t always the case. Your client can’t jump for joy if you don’t align with them on their goals and give them insight into the work you’ve been doing behind the screen to achieve them. This absence of alignment is usually to blame when a customer is dissatisfied with their outcomes. The good news is, you can combat that with a few simple tactics. It all comes back to that idea of having a clear definition of “success” through the customer’s eyes.
How do I achieve success in this area?
- Align projects with specific criteria for success from the client’s perspective
- Track project progress against the success criteria shared by your client
- Automate measurement of customer adoption and health
- Create a scorecard upon completion that ties project objectives to engagement metrics
Metrics for Measuring Success
- Number of Objectives Completed
- Overall Customer Health Score
- End User & Executive Sponsor NPS or CSAT
Process #5: Sell Across the Lifecycle
In the first chapter of this guide, we mentioned how a customer of a recurring-revenue business can positively impact revenue growth in three ways: they can renew, expand, or advocate your product—all without raising customer acquisition costs. This process is all about understanding the customer lifecycle so you can maximize on these opportunities and grow using your existing customer base.
How do I achieve success in this area?
- Expansion management
- Establish frameworks to help your team leverage healthy customers for additional service offerings
- Constantly monitor customer health and proactively approach customers whose activity reveals that they may be in need of your service offerings
- Reference management
- Utilize NPS and CSAT surveys to capture customer sentiment and leverage
- Keep track of customers who have opted into your reference program wherever you store your customer data
Metrics for Measuring Success
- Number of PSQLs
- Services Revenue
- End User & Executive Sponsor NPS or CSAT