Customer Success: Your Business Life Raft in 2023

In today's SaaS environment, customers are looking at their tech stack more critically than ever before. Tools like SasStrify or Vendr are gaining in popularity, and are helping your customers get a consolidated view of their tech stack.

What is the impact of this? More attrition in the SaaS industry. To mitigate this, Customer Success is the answer. A renewal is the cheaper, easier and more sustainable way of maintaining growth. By focussing on Customer Success, businesses can make sure their customers stay happy, feel heard and continue to buy your subscription or product.

That is why we predict that Customer Success teams will be every business’ unsung heroes in 2023; they will drive an increase in retention and help clients create value.

Buyers want to realize value with the service they purchase. In the best case, buyers can create this value without any handholding of the service provider. Awesome. Sign us up!

More often we find ourselves interacting with the onboarding and support team to realize the value that the sales rep has promised during the sale. What happens if I am unable to realize this value? We leave. We go to the next vendor that help us realize the value we seek.

There is a huge opportunity for SaaS companies to get ahead of their competition, by aligning their sales to customer success, with some Revenue Operations magic. Enabling Customer Success teams to do their best work in a systematic way.

Revenue Wizards created this guide to help you assess the health of your Customer Success Organization. We asked Mick Weijers, Founder at Customer Success Snack, for his expert opinion. 

The Goal of Customer Success 

The ultimate goal of a Customer Success team is to enable the customers to realize the value that was promised during the sale. Clients will renew as long as they see this promised value in the product.

Creating value for client can be accomplished by building strong, long-lasting relationships with customers. Thereby ensuring customer satisfaction, retention and driving growth and revenue for your organization. The trick is to keep aligning with the customer on their goals and strategy, as these will change. 

Skills and traits required in Customer Success

#Communication skills #Stakeholder Mangement #Commercial thinking #Long-term planning #Detail oriented #Process thinking #Caring #Balancing customer needs and business needs #Organizational skills  

Phases of Customer Success

There are four phases in the customer’s journey:

1. The Sales/CS Hand-off
2. Onboarding
3. Adaptation
4. Renewal (incl. Upsell/Cross-sell)

Let’s take a closer look on how to assess each of these phases and create value for your clients that will keep them coming back for more.  

1. Hand-off 

The hand-off stage is crucial as it sets the course for the whole customer success journey. The customer success journey starts with the sales process. No matter how good your customer success team is, they will be set for failure from the get-go if the product was oversold, or if the sales person overpromised on adoption or implementation timelines.

Probing questions to asses your hand-off phase:

• What was promised to the client?
• What value do clients want to achieve?
• When is customer success introduced?
• What data can customer success access?
• What does the handover process look like?
• How is the handover process documented?

A successful handover would be that the client has a clear understanding of what to expect during the onboarding, and the CS team has all information on how to proceed and what has been promised. 

Without a SMART-formulated 'desired outcome' the CSM department needs to do a re-discovery. This is among the biggest frustrations of CS departments worldwide. 

Mick Weijers, Founder Customer Success Snack

2. Onboarding

The goal of the onboarding is to equip the client with the skills to create value from the solution. This is also the time when the Customer Success rep has the opportunity to position themselves as a commercial partner to the client, and a subject-matter expert.

Probing questions to asses your onboarding phase:

• What format is the onboarding (self-service, group, personal, mix)? 
• ...

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About Revenue Wizards

Revenue Wizards is a Full-cycle Revenue Agency with a holistic approach to Revenue Strategy, Operations, and Insights. Sustainable Business Growth is the only way to be successful in an uncertain world. We partner with you to build an in-house revenue organization with a holistic view on revenue. This includes your Revenue Strategy, Revenue Operations, and Revenue Insights. 

www.revenuewizards.com

About Customer Success Snack

Customer Success Snack is an initiative to Unite CS professionals in Europe. With a full service community with events, mentor matching and active job board we grow together. Since it is a relatively young philosophy and department it is important to connect and share best practices to increase the importance of CS for Investors and board rooms. We partner with industry leaders to build playbooks, learnings and insights.