Navigating Digital Customer Success, 6 steps

I recently had the opportunity to speak at the Salesforce World tour in NY to talk about how we do Digital Customer Success (DCS). In today's rapidly evolving digital landscape, achieving customer success isn't just about delivering a product or service—it's about crafting meaningful experiences that resonate with your audience. Here are the steps I shared that might help you on your journey.

1. Create the Vision and Strategy

Navigating success requires a clear vision and strategy. How can you expect to get there without knowing where you're headed? At Salesforce, we've dedicated significant time to crafting our Success Operating model, anchoring all our efforts to it.

If you read the words in the third row across the columns as a sentence.

We accelerate Customer Outcomes through productized Success Plans & Investments, providing Customers an Easy and Expert Experience that forges Trailblazers for life!

I love that sentence and return to it regularly when prioritizing our work. Are we empowering our customers to achieve their business objectives? Everything we do circles back to this.

My team operates within the third column, providing proactive and reactive self-service, with the customer journeys at the center of everything we do. We do this by harnessing the best of our Salesforce technologies.

An "Easy" customer experience focuses on convenience, accessibility, and efficiency to reduce friction and ensure seamless, effortless customer interactions. As an example, making it easy for customers to submit a case by reducing unnecessary clicks (we have all been there!).?

An “Expert” Customer experience in self-service brings the right solution to the customer in the first interaction. For instance, providing the customer with an article containing instructions tailored to their level of understanding, enabling them to resolve their issue promptly and efficiently.

We ensure an Easy and Expert experience across four dimensions, with the Customer Success Journeys at the core. Extensive customer research led us to identify two primary journeys:

• Education: Customers seek to learn about a Salesforce product /feature.
• Resolution: Customers encounter an issue and seek its resolution.

We design for the journeys across four dimensions;

1. Reactive - Customer initiates engagement with Salesforce.
2. Proactive - Salesforce drives engagement with the customer. ?
3. Self-Service - Customer independently manages tasks or accesses information.
4. Assisted - Customer receives assistance from a Salesforce Engineer or a Success Manager, e.g., a Human touch.

Much of our work focuses on moving customers from the bottom right quadrant, "Assisted Reactive," to the left-hand side of the model, e.g., how we enable more customers to self-serve.

Ultimately, this means you are improving the experience for your customers (nobody wakes up in the morning and says I want to contact support), and it enables you to show one element of ROI on DCS through cost avoidance (see number 4).

2. Understand Your Customer's Journey

Empathy is the cornerstone of Customer Success. Take the time to map out your customer's journey—from initial awareness to post-purchase support. Identify pain points, moments of delight, and opportunities for improvement. Walking in your customer's shoes gives you invaluable insights that inform your strategy and enhance their experience.

My team spends a lot of time on this through our Experience design team; below is an example of a recent journey mapping exercise we went through to help identify customer pain points.

3. Define Your Channels

In the digital realm, customers engage with brands through various channels—from social media platforms to email newsletters. Determine which channels are most relevant to your audience and tailor your approach accordingly.?

For example, one of the channels we enabled is YouTube . I often get asked why we do that when we have video content on our Help portal, Trailhead, etc. YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world, so we deliberately chose to enable a channel where our customers are.

Fun fact: It's Salesforce's second-fastest-growing YouTube channel. We're on course for 10 million lifetime views this month!

4. Define Your KPIs

If you can't measure it, how do you show the impact? We spend a lot of time as a team making sure we are clear on how we measure the impact of our work. We think about our metrics in three categories: at the highest layer are our strategic KPIs; below that, we look at channel-level KPIs, and finally, our content KPIs. Below is an example of what some of these look like.

For our Strategic KPIs, Self Help Success (SHS) is measured simply by looking at customers who engaged with one of our digital channels but did not create a case. It's not a perfect metric (is any metric perfect?), but it's a good indicator of the performance of your digital channels. We also have a time-on-page qualifier for SHS; if someone is on the page for less than 45 seconds, we don't count that as success.

Some companies like to use the word "deflection" here; I hate it because it drives the wrong behavior in your organization. Bring a customer into a room and tell them you deflected them!! Flip it; you drive customer success through self-service, e.g., SHS.

We also look at digital CSAT, which measures the customer's experience with our digital channels. Note that this is not a CSAT survey after the assisted interaction; we also measure CSAT at moments in your digital journey. It's easy to drive SHS up by making customers jump through unnecessary hoops that go against our design principles of Easy. Thus, we monitor digital CSAT very closely.

Returning to something I said above, measuring these KPIs allows us to show a cost saving of DCS, which helps show ROI and hopefully enables you to invest in the right resources (see 5).

5. Invest in the Right Roles

I often get asked about my team at Salesforce, including its size, roles, etc. When I started three years ago, my team was very small, and even my role was not common in the industry (that is changing).

To succeed in this space, you must invest in the roles needed to do it. You need people who wake up in the morning and are 100% focused on self-service. Start with 1-2 people, prove the ROI, and grow from there. Below is an example of our current roles in our DCS Organization.

6. Experiment with New Technologies

I've been in this industry for over 20 years, and it's hard not to get excited about the advances in AI and what they will do in the industry. Everyone wants to jump in, use things like Chat GPT, and put it in front of their customers. Companies that do that are quickly learning about hallucinations, etc.

At Salesforce, Trust is our number one value, so the key for me is experimentation. Start small, expose to different cohorts of customers, learn from that, and then go big.

As an example, we recently launched Einstein Search Answers on our Help portal, but we restricted to specific cohorts of customers that were logged in; this has allowed us to test with smaller groups and get the confidence we needed in the answers it was giving before we go big and expose to all customers later this month. Its pretty cool, you can check it out here .

Summary

Thanks for taking the time to read this and making it this far. I would love to hear from you in the comments. What resonated with you? What would you like to know more about? How is your company thinking about Digital Customer Success?