Hello my name is Léa Hennequart (Leah in English ), and I am the team lead of the customer success at Modjo. I was invited to write a blog to brush an overview of the life of Customer Success teams.
Let's maybe start by the definition of a customer success team. A CS (or AM) teams aims to support various area of your business, from client satisfaction to retention: it is a key team to convert POC and successfully upsell. Nowadays, the customer success teams are one of the most efficient ways to maximize the collective sales efforts of a company.
Indeed, studies show that 80% of users churn because after a negative post-sales experience; meanwhile 91% of clients say they would renew their order if the postsale experience is good. ((source Salesforce 2020 State of the Connected Customer - Salesforce.com).
Ready to join the companies with 91% of client renewals? Here are 7 tips to build a great customer success team.
1. Start with a customer-centric culture
Eric Yuan, the CEO of Zoom, established customer centricity as his first strategic priority. This means that the company needs to spend 70% of its time working with and for clients.
M. Yuan claimed that allocating dedicated time to address client satisfaction was one of the reason Zomm got so successful.
Following actions can be taken to implement a customer-centric culture:
- Ensure that the customer experience is owned by each and everyone.
- Recruit and train people with a strong biais for customer centricity.
- Constantly ask clients their opinions.
- Get bold ambition for your customer experience, you want to stand out from the competition.
🍍 Advice made in Modjo: At Modjo, we are lucky enough to use our own tool, which is by essence customer-centric. Indeed, all our decisions are made on recorded testimonies from clients that we store and replay when in doubt.
Our product team prioritizes the roadmap on viewing and quantifying feedback from customers.
2. Define your success criteria.
Before starting to build your customer success team. Ensure that what you are going to deliver is what your client needs and not what you need to cell.
This is the most important tips. That I ever received. And for sure, the one that has the most impact on internal teams and external's.
Indeed, Usually the definition of a successful adoption. Is based. On what marketing on product decided? However, it is critical to ensure that success, Even even though it was well defined internally. He's really the one that clients are expected.
It is even more important. To define and to repeat the process of definition of success. As your client base and your future will eventually evolve with time.
In order to do this exercise. You need to ensure. That you sit with your clients. And define tangible elements.
And that you can also measurable to make sure that he will be able. To measure his success.
🍍Advice made in Modjo: At Mojo, we always start our relationship with the client by the sentence.
What would be the element that will make more due as success for you? Depending on the answer of the client.
We deep dive into his criteria and we will define the KPI that we will check monthly with him.
3. Segment your customer base.
Segmenting your database is not only important but critical if you want to optimize your marketing strategy. Our address in a differentiated way your clients or have a better knowledge of what they're expected.
And therefore maximize the value of each of your clients for your company.
Standard segmentation will breakdown your client base by industry, company size, audience. But of course, nothing inhibits you to be creative.
The clearer your segmentation of your database in your CRM, the more you'll be able to deliver a personalized service at scale, without modifying your product. It will also enable you to maximize your revenue, by identifying and packaging new offers per segment.
🍍Advice made in Modjo: At Modjo, we have a dedicated segment for digital natives. They differenciate themselves from the others by having no legacy infrastructure, and being quicker to adopt SaaS product.
We address them differently by bringing a bit less technical deployement support & more innovation.
4. Formalize your customer journey.
Once you have a customer-centric culture, and a functionning segmentation, it's time for you to formalize your customer journey.
A customer journey starts from the first contact point of the client with your company, until their off-boarding.
A customer journey is typically broken down in different milestones; each one will be an achievable objective for your clients.
To support your team in getting your client to each milestone, you will define a playbook: it is a collection of all content, processes, best practices, assets that will be used a swiss knife, depending on the situation.
Through out this customer journey, you need to keep the experience focused on your clients priorities, as opposed as your company targets - they should eventually meet if they are well designed.
It is a fastidious job to formalize your customer journey and playbook. You can find many templates on the internet to help you start, such as the ones of Lincoln Murphy. A well defined customer journey should offer to your clients a unique experience, and reinforce your brand value and attributes.
🍍Tip made in Modjo: If you have different segments in your client database, don't build a customer journey generic.
Rather focus on a specific approach for a test segment, then iterate to test and learn, and and only after build the other playbooks.
5. Track & Measure
They say “if you can't track it, it doesn't exist”.
Measuring the impact of your teams is as critical as the actions you will put in place. Beyond the traditional metrics of adoption, such as churn or monthly active users, follow metrics on the features that will bring the most value to your clients.
For example, if your platform of collaboration is mainly used to train new employees, you might want to follow an additional metric around velocity of usage for new licenses.
🍍Advice made in Modjo: At Modjo, beyond our weekly usage metrics, we do once a month what we call cohort analyses: we're looking at the evolution of the metrics in comparison to the start date of the contract, and we make sure we can bring extra support to our clients having slower adoption than the average of their cohort.
6. Make it easy for your customers to find answers to their questions.
There is nothing more frustrating than not getting an answer to a somple question from your solution provider.
The first steps you can take to provide more satisfaction is to set up a FAQ or help center - this way, it empowers your client, fasten the time to answer, and it reduces your workload, to focus on higher-value tasks.
You can also implement a chatbot on your product interface to solve issues in a more interactive way, and automate a part of generic questions.
Finally, depending on your product and the maturity of your team, you might want to get a dedicated technical support team to internalize specific expertise.
We deployed the 3 of them at Modjo in that order, and it impacted positively our NPS as well as our customer success value.
While you set up automatic channels of communication, make sure that you also track the time that your client have to wait to get their anwswer. Issues & bugs will be inevitable, and your clients will value your ability to solve issues even more than your capacity to avoid them.
7. Play as a team
Last advice, 76% of the client are expecting a seamless experience before and after the sales. (source Salesforce 2020 State of the Connected Customer - Salesforce.com).
It is therefore essential to collaborate as much as possible without friction.
The handover process between sales & CS is the ownership of everyone.
Sales teams have to rapidly connect the CS teams, even before signing the contract, so your clients know they’re in good hands, and the CS has the maximum of information before starting.
Cross teams, such as product, marketing or finance will also want to get more information at some point of time from your clients.
🍍Consulting made in Modjo: Build a process customer-centric, so all transversal teams have access to the same information, and your clients don’t feel they’re the one onboarding a new person at each interaction.
That's it for me for today. 🙂
Liked this article that change a bit from what we usually print, please do not hesitate to shoot me a message on LinkedIn with your feedback.
And don't forget to share it with all the AMs, CSMs or KAMs in your company.
Have a good week,
Best,
