33. How good are you at Customer Success?

CLO (knocking his CEO’s cabin) : May I come in?

CEO : Of course, Thanks for the brainstorming technique SCAMPER last time, it will surely help everyone to come up with new ideas to improve anything. What's the Gyaan for the day?

CLO : Yes, Today let's think of our Customers. Of course, we do it day in day out. But today we will think of Customer Success.

Customer Success is all about making your customer successful. It is extremely critical for all businesses. Today, we will focus on what customer success consists of, give an assessment test to find out how good we are at customer success and from those inputs, find out how we can make it better.

So let's start.

A good Customer Success process consists of following important elements :

1. Targeting Right Customer (Capture) :

You as an organization should be targeting Right Customer. This should be the customer who has more pain related to the problem you are targeting and is ready to pay premium to solve that problem.

2. Right Engagement (Nurture) :

You as an organization should be clear with the kind of NURTURING ENGAGEMENT you want to have with your target customer. Once the customer is captured, this Nurturing keeps your customer engaged well with your brand.

3. Communication between responsible functions :

Functions in your organization which are responsible for all customer facing content should be communicating with each other seamlessly. You should have a SPOC (Single point of contact) or Power of Two or a Cross Functional Team (CFT) of experts to ensure proper collaboration for all customer facing content, be it used for lead capturing, lead nurturing, customer onboarding or training.

4. Visually appealing, easily seen and easily accessible content :

Each and every content created by your organization for your customers, be it for lead capturing, lead nurturing, customer onboarding or customer training should be visually appealing, easily seen and easily accessible.

5. Product Training :

As an organization, you should have a well set process to onboard/ train your customers about your product/service.

6. Tips/Use cases clarity :

As an organization, your customer facing content should clearly talk about the use cases/tips to resolve the customer problems. Customer language should be used to create all the content to have maximum impact.

7. Social / Peer Learning :

Customer facing content created by your organization should promote use of peer learning and your organization should provide technology for the same. The peer learning for B2B target customers can be kept in private to subject client only. This ensures that customer employees are encouraged to use your product/service with social/peer learning among them.

8. Repeatable, Scalable, follows industry BEST practices with Feedback loop :

The process with which you create your customer facing content should be repeatable, scalable, follows the industry BEST practices and has a feedback loop to continuously make it better.

9. Customer Support Staff training :

As an organization, you should always properly train your Customer Support Staff.

10. Org Structure : Independent Customer Success team :

Customer Success Team which takes feedback from customers should be different and does not report to your delivery/operations and customer support function heads. Independent feedback should be received from customers. Always.

11. KPIs : Quality focused and not Quantity focused :

Your organization should have set right Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) w.r.t. to QUALITY of the target leads rather than the QUANTITY to ensure that you attract only RIGHT CUSTOMERS.

12. Support process (ticketing system) :

Your organization should have a well set ticketing system to measure the performance of your Customer Support Team.

13. Measurement of Usage - Adoption, Usage/Engagement, Stickiness/Retention, Virality/Referrals :

Your organization should have set right Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) w.r.t. to ADOPTION, USAGE/ENGAGEMENT, STICKINESS/RETENTION, VIRALITY/REFERRALS by the customers.

14. KPIs : Output focused and not input focused :

Your organization should be tracking your employees responsible for any customer related content (lead capturing, lead nurturing, onboarding and training) using a measure related to output and not the input e.g. Sales per month or Demos per month or Usage per month instead of Content generated per month

15. Leadership Alignment :

Your organization leadership should be absolutely clear about the need for attracting right customer, nurturing them with right content and onboarding and training them to increase customer satisfaction. Your Leadership should have all customer satisfaction related Target KPIs (Key Performance Indicators).

16. Land & Expand :

You as an organization should be helping your B2B customers for effective rollout (adoption and usage) of your product or service. You should have a clear cut strategy defined for the same in agreement with the customer.

e.g. Land & Expand Strategy : Creating Customer Champions at the start of the roll out, let them first accept your product/service and then they can make it viral inside your customer organization.

17. Motivation to consume as well as share your content :

Your organization has a mechanism in place to motivate customers to consume as well as share your content (e.g. You use certification to encourage course completion, you provide technology so that customer users can share their certificates on their internal social networks, You use gamification/leader boards to encourage healthy competition).

18. Continuous Engagement (Tribe) leading to much needed focus groups :

Your organization should have a mechanism set so that you use technology to create customer tribe, which includes raving fans inside customer's organization who are discussing/debating/promoting usage of your product/service.

19. Motivation to create content :

Your organization should have a mechanism in place to create an encouraging culture where new ideas/solution/content related to customer success are celebrated.

20. Automation :

Your organization should have a mechanism in place to find and automate/semi automate each and every step in customer journey. (From lead capturing, lead nurturing to Onboarding and Training).

Do you want to know how good is your Customer Success process?

Let's now start this quick and yet comprehensive Customer Success process assessment for your organization!

It will be helpful for you to understand where you are as an organization currently. This is a baseline assessment of how good are you at Customer Success as an organization.

Simply answer these 20 carefully crafted questions (Go to the link below and Click on 'Start To Do' at the end of the page) and check out the same. You will get your score along with our assessment of where you are. Not only check out that, but identify areas where you need to improve!

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