How can you build a customer success team that grows with your business?

To ensure the success of your Customer Success (CS) team, it is essential to create a framework for Customer Success and Stakeholder Management before scaling your team. This framework will assist you in mapping out a strategy to align your product, services, and support to help your clients realise the value of their investment and grow their business with your solutions. To begin, determine the "Why" factor and develop Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) for each customer. This will help you understand what success means to your clients and how your products and services can help them achieve it.

?? Elevate your CS team in a VUCA world with Dynamic Teaming! ???? Tech's unpredictability demands a shift from traditional strategies to dynamic teaming. Here's how: Diversity: Go beyond tech backgrounds. Diverse experiences enrich your team. Psychological Safety: Encourage experimentation and learning without fear. Inclusive Leadership: Ensure every voice matters, promoting varied problem-solving approaches. Deliberate Processes: Define clear roles within CS to enhance collaboration ???? In tech's volatile landscape, success hinges on diversity, psychological safety, inclusive leadership, and clear processes. How do you implement Dynamic Teaming in your CS operations? Share your insights!

Building a customer success team that scales alongside your business requires a strategic approach. Define clear goals and metrics: Align your team's objectives with your overall business strategy. Track relevant metrics like customer retention and Net Promoter Score (NPS) to measure progress. Hire the right talent: Seek individuals who are passionate about customer success, possess excellent communication skills, and have a track record of building relationships. Implement a scalable customer success process: Establish a structured approach to onboarding, managing, and growing customer accounts. Continuously learn and adapt: Regularly gather customer feedback and use it to refine your strategies and processes.

In summary, Building a customer success team that grows with a business requires careful planning, hiring the right people, implementing effective processes, and fostering a culture of continuous improvement.

A key area in ensuring customer success is to define clarity for your team which will translate into customer success, one of the best ways to measure your success is to look at your customers success. An opinion without data is merely an opinion so leverage data available to you.

And last but not least search for candidates within your existing circle...is there where the most motivated people stand! Sometimes taken for granted

I had one manager earlier in my career in Customer Success who really modeled what it looks like to be an incredibly successful Customer Success Manager. They believed that it was equally important to possess passion for a positive customer experience, and also bringing value through data. I was always given feedback on how I can be a stronger storyteller, and was given exposure to other areas of Customer Success for my development. It's empowered me and shaped my way of thinking and working with customers.

Customer success managers is the front line person for customers and company. They will be responsible for handling customers deescalating the situation.

I would like to Add to what everyone said, that taking care of your team is a must to ensure the delivery of all the mentioned above. A good structure starts from the base up with strong columns to be able to cary the standards way up. So take care of your columns and be their base.

A candidate's attitude should carry more weight than their knowledge; anyone with a learn it all attitude can learn anything and anyone with a know-it-all attitude will learn nothing.

One thing I found incredibly valuable through customer segmentation, was the time that I gained back to be able to reinvest into new customers. I interacted with a high volume of customers, and scaling the SMB (Small-Medium sized Businesses) segment meant developing a digital customer success process with automation so that I could have more capacity to support more accounts.

Whilst customer segmentation is important, agile candidates/employees prove to be better in the long term. Businesses transform a lot quicker than they did in the past.

Part of creating clarity is ensuring that your processes are well defined. Your processes need to be agile enough to change based on customer needs.

While every customer has different needs, it becomes critical to identify what key milestones are in the life of a customer. One thing I found helpful was defining the customer journey map by segmentation. Each segment might have different touch points, but defining expectations help provide a more consistent experience for each customer. It also internally provides clarity for adjacent Go-to-Market teams (ie: Account Executives, Account Managers) and eliminates any confusion on who owns the customer touch points at any stage of the customer journey. It's helped me know clearly when and where I can step in to provide value.

Beyond the examples of CRM usage, I have found it valuable to use technology to curate content (e.g. use cases, case studies) by industry, pain points, and company size. This allows my CS Team to have a wealth of targeted (value-add) content to drive customer conversations on ways to use our tools that have helped other businesses.

Emphasizing the critical role of technology and automation in enhancing customer success, this section highlights how tools like CRM systems and feedback platforms streamline operations and personalize customer engagement. Such integrations enable teams to focus on strategic, value-add interactions, driving satisfaction and growth. At SalesBytes, we advocate for leveraging technology to exceed customer success goals, underscoring its importance in scaling businesses effectively.

We live in a data driven world with AI being developed at an accelerated pace. Use it to work smarter and get more done quicker.

In working for a small company providing hardware and software solutions to businesses ranging from mom & pop to enterprise, our Customer Success function has remained nimble out of necessity. As our business grows and our processes, procedures, and even priorities change, we are constantly evaluating what's been working and what needs to evolve. Remaining adaptive is intentional work that has proven to consistently be worth the effort!

CS is often the catch all for process and items that impact customers and have not yet found a place in your organisation to be resolved. so always plan for support and back up for CS departments so there is consistency for your customer base -don't add more work, admin or Clients to the list - if possible have an operational and admin support to take some of the noise off the team -be clear day 1 what is owned by your CS department CS is always the customer face for a company so there is no hiding, nor downtime. Plan for this, ensure cover for holidays, absences and Peak busy times Finally ensure you have a growth management plan for your CS team to retain staff and their valuable experience and allow for their growth