How to start a customer success practice?

Customer Success, at its core, helps customers achieve their goals by maximizing the value from a product. Thus, increasing the retention rate, and creating potential opportunity for up sells / cross-sells too.

How should you start a customer success practice in your company? (4 Steps)

1. Segment the customers

When you segment customers, you can treat each segment of customers as one set. Managing them then becomes easier because their problems and expectations are similar.You need to first decide on what factors are you going to segment the customers.

Is it going to be on the basis of use cases or the plan that they are on or some other factor? The factors on the basis of which you will segment the customers will help you plan your resources.

2. Decide on the amount of resources to spend on each customer segment

Since all customers are NOT equal, you cannot and should not spend equal resources on them. Depending on how you have segmented your customers you have to decide how many resources you have to spend on each of them.

For example, say, you have segmented your customers on how much they pay you. Then you need to have more touch points and provide more hand holding to the high valued customers. You need to make sure that their issues are solved on priority. Try to provide the best customer experience possible as they are responsible for bulk of the revenue. Whereas, for customers with low TCV, you may want to automate the process.

3. Decide what to focus on

Customer success managers have a lot of responsibilities like increasing retention, decreasing time to value, building key relationships, create up sell opportunities, etc.

But when you start, one of the best customer success practices is to focus on one thing and making sure you get early results.

Hence, it is advised to focus on product adoption in the beginning. Once a customer starts using the product and is able to achieve early value, the chances of retention increase.

4. Focus on the customer

A customer success practice will not be fruitful if you are not customer focused. You need to understand the needs and requirements of the customers. Sometimes you may even have to go out of your way to help the customer. When you focus on your customers, you gain valuable insights that can help improve the product. At the end of the day, the customer is not only buying a product but also an experience.

Every day products are getting easier to build - it’s the customer experience that differentiates your product from competitors.