Customer Success : The Personality & Process

The health of a SaaS business is directly tied to its ability to retain its customers and prevent churn. To have success with customers, in my experience I believe there two core elements, both equally important;

1. Personality

2. Process

1. Personality

Over and above all the personality characteristics needed for any customer facing roles such as patience, empathy, friendliness, etc. a CSM must also possess the following

• Be a trusted & knowledgeable consultant to the client. – This requires having a deep understanding of both the product, best practices, workarounds, competition, etc. on one hand and on the other hand a deep understanding of the customers need, business goals, customer industry/domain. This helps to interact with the customer in a language/terminology they understand and present the solution simplistically. Be proactive in offering solutions or workarounds (if the product cannot completely solve customer problems in the current state) to make things easy for the customer.
• Ownership – Be the single point of accountability for all things regarding the product. Proactively go above and beyond when fulfilling customer needs, be a step ahead.

2. Process

To have the right outcome it is important to have processes in place along with the right personality. Listed here is the process in brief once a customer is in the pre-sales cycle.

• Pre-launch preparation – Gather every information about the client, their industry, etc. before having the first interaction, this would involve understanding who the clients end customers are, revenue models, etc. how their competition is doing it, etc. Be sure to check if any competitors are already using your product already and how they benefitting. Understand the need and the problems customers are trying to solve using the product. Identify the success criteria before hand.
• Sales handover  – Kickoff call with the customer, led by the sales person, with the customer success manager & customer. The call should start off by the sales person describing business of the customer and business challenges or initiatives that led them to sign the contract. Customer Success manager should follow-in with the first implementation goals and plans. This ensures that the customer feels they are in safe hands and not thrown over the fence.
• Help transition from existing platform – This would involve moving all required existing data that is applicable, transitioning existing data helps end users feel at home and makes adoption easier and faster.
• Integration – This is another key element to ensure end users are connected with all tool they are already using in their day to day work, will help in making adoption easier and faster.
• On-boarding – Help the customer manage, execute the change with end-users within their company. Provide all support or hand holding needed in getting the users comfortable using the platform by regular coaching, training and support. This phases usually helps create a strong relationship with the customer.
• Be an on-going advisor – Engage regularly by sharing best practices, demonstrating any new features released. Proactively offer solutions that could make the end users life easier.
• Monitor adoption – Perform frequent health check-ups to monitor usage, a 20% drop in regular usage could be considered as an initial alarm to reach out to the customer to understand the reasons and address issue if any.
• Campaigns – Run frequent creative campaigns that motivate end users to adopt the platform, e.g. share a monthly industry benchmark report vs how customers are performing. Have yearly awards with different categories for different industries recognizing your customers.

This may not be 100% applicable to every business, but hopefully gets you thinking in the right direction. Would love to hear your thoughts and suggestions.