An experienced customer success manager knows how to make each of their customers feel like they’re their only customer. But as a company's customer base grows, and its CS teams and processes scale, maintaining that kind of high-touch, personal approach gets tricky — even for the most seasoned CS professional.
“Customer success at scale requires a deep understanding of our customer personas,” Ben Valdez, customer success director at mobile identity solutions company Telesign said.
As companies scale, managers are turning to technologies such as ChurnZero and Salesforce to track user engagement, create customer personas, gather actionable insights and even receive coaching to improve communication skills. These tools help them interact with customers in ways designed to be both productive and meaningful.
And while these tools are helpful, it’s still important for CSMs to touch base with clients in more personal ways. An automated email won’t make a customer feel special but a handwritten birthday card will. For CSMs, striking the right balance between these two types of communication is key.
Human interaction is at the core of every customer relationship at HR software company Criteria Corp, VP of Customer Success Patrick Blanton said. As the customer success team adds new tools like ChurnZero, which measures user engagement data, to their toolkit, they know it will always supplement customer-facing interactions, rather than replace them.
When it comes to scaling your customer success team, what are the most important considerations and why?
For us, there are four major considerations. First is onboarding. As an HR tech company, we take hiring and onboarding very seriously. Once a new CSM joins our team, the onboarding process involves, at minimum, a month of training, call coaching and certification before they speak to a customer. Also, every new CSM is assigned a mentor. We set the expectation early that we are responsive, transparent and empathic.
Second is consistency. Each CSM brings their own perspective and experience to the team, but we also want to make sure we’re sharing a consistent message with our customers. Everyone in the company, not just those that are customer-facing, go through an intensive training program so they understand the history, values and vision of the company.
Third is objectivity. We rely on data to experiment and track results against our historical performance, helping us optimize as a team over time. We’ve also built an environment where the CSMs are comfortable presenting their own ideas on how we can improve our processes.
And finally, empathy. We demonstrate empathy toward each other, and that is instilled into the way our CSMs connect with our customers. We’ve tried to maintain a “flat” organization to preserve our unique culture, even as we scale.
What tools or technologies do you use to make customer success more scalable?
First and foremost, we drink our own champagne by using our assessment platform, HireSelect, to find the best candidates. We look for problem-solvers and those with the right balance of patience, consciousness and empathy.
Second, we use Gong, which is a call recording, transcribing and coaching software. We use Zoom to meet with our customers, and more recently, we use ChurnZero for user engagement to see how customers are using our product and to optimize our points of engagement with them.
We’ve always been customer-focused, leaning more toward human touch than automation.”
How are you striking the right balance of automation and human touch?
We’ve always been customer-focused, leaning more toward human touch than automation. With ChurnZero, we’re starting to explore how to apply user engagement data to understand our customers’ needs, and to start sending automated, targeted messages to customers within our software platform. But we ultimately want our customers to know that their CSM is always there if they do need that human touch.
At Telesign, Valdez said product complexity and customer volume are taken into consideration when evaluating a CSM’s projected annual revenue. His team also maps out customer personas to better understand how they will interact with their tech-assisted model.
When it comes to scaling your customer success team, what are the most important considerations and why?
We look at annual revenue targets per CSM and product complexity (simple to complex). As a rule of thumb, the more complex, the lower volume of accounts per CSM. Because of the complexity of our products, we generally spend more effort ensuring the product is deployed, configured and adopted across a customer's organization.
We also look at the volume of customers per CSM. For some enterprise-level CSMs, that range of expertise may be greater as they manage a fewer number of accounts that carry a bigger strategic dollar amount. Having these factors defined, we are able to know when to scale our CSM team and planning ahead is clearer and more strategic.
What tools or technologies do you use to make customer success more scalable?
We use Salesforce, Tableau, Confluence, Jira, Slack, Grafana, Microsoft Office and reporting housed in SharePoint. We also use custom-built email alerts from our data science team related to customer activity and trends and our internal customer portal.
Customer success at scale requires a deep understanding of our customer personas.”
How are you striking the right balance of automation and human touch?
Some customers are great fits for low-touch service, while others do not fare so well. Because of this, we have segmented our customers by attributes to determine their appropriate experience: SMB, mid-market, strategic and enterprise. By mapping out personas, we have been able to determine who can thrive and survive in a tech-assisted model.
Customer success at scale requires a deep understanding of our customer personas. In developing customer success personas at TeleSign, we are able to differentiate between customer personas versus buyer personas. Customer personas represent the actual users who use our product each day. Their success depends on their role, profile, level of experience plus a whole host of other factors.
Vice President of Customer Success Jessica Garbutt said her team uses automation tools to give clients quick replies when inquires arise at real estate company CREXi. However, she said clients should always have the option of talking to a human over chatbots if they wish. Automation is a quick answer for clients who want quick answers but sometimes clients want a conversation.
When it comes to scaling your customer success team, what are the most important considerations and why?
It’s important to acknowledge the ratio of active clients to success team employees and the workload split between how much reactive and proactive support you want to provide to your clients. Ineffectively scaling your team could lead to an entirely reactive approach to customer success if your team doesn’t have time to reach out to their clients.
In scaling a success team, ensure that you are growing at a rate that provides quick and effective reactive support while leaving room to be proactive with clients about life cycle milestones, quarterly performance check-ins, overviews of product enhancements and account recommendations. A proactive approach to client communication helps you get ahead of any conversations or issues that may have otherwise led to client churn if not proactively addressed.
What tools or technologies do you use to make customer success more scalable?
The most essential tool for a success team is to have insight into the clients' real-time performance. We use Salesforce dashboards for each of our success managers to define success metrics and target clients who need proactive support, marketing or consultations based on their performance data. From these dashboards, reps can be held accountable for client performance and retention metrics, which are used to ensure that we're scaling our CS team appropriately to meet these goals.
Additionally, we use Tableau as a data visualization tool, which helps us to make recommendations to our clients by telling a story about their month-over-month performance.
Lastly, I have to give a shout-out to Slack, as it's a significant component of our everyday success as a team, especially in today's work-from-home culture. We've created specific Slack channels where the success team can post about client wins, difficult termination conversations and client feedback. Slack allows us all to “overhear” these conversations just like we usually would in an office environment.
All clients have one thing in common: they want quick and helpful responses to their inquiries.”
How are you striking the right balance of automation and human touch?
All clients have one thing in common: they want quick and helpful responses to their inquiries. Automation is a useful tool to see if a client’s question can be answered quickly without requiring human intervention. It can even be a client’s preference to avoid a lengthier phone or email conversation. Chatbots are a great tool to implement automated responses. Still, they should always pair with a human component or a way to reach a human agent if the client wants to speak with someone directly. Automation should be seen as helpful instead of a barrier preventing human contact.
Automation can also be used when outbounding to a client to get them to take a specific action (such as payment collection, webinar invitations or prompting to schedule a meeting). Still, this communication strategy must include a more customized or human element when a client replies. If a client gives specific feedback or asks a specific question, you would never want to send them automated communication that ignores their response. It’s necessary to set up all of your automated tools to map out rules and filters that prompt human interaction as needed.
