Owning customer success at scale
Customer success is important to the long term growth and stability of companies, but it can be expensive to implement and difficult to get right.
For companies with subscription based revenue models, customer success has become essential, underpinning increased customer lifetime value, higher renewal rates and reduced churn. But even for companies with transactional revenue models, customer success should be a central component of your GTM plan.
How will you ensure long term customer satisfaction and loyalty? What steps can you take to ensure customers stay with you and don’t move to a competitor or otherwise churn?
Balance the role and cost of success
Some of the questions you will need to think about when implementing your customer success model:
- Ownership of customer success – who will own the relationships with customers post-sale? Can you afford dedicated Customer Success Managers (CSMs) or will this be managed by existing roles such as Account Executives?
- What technical support might customers need and how will this be delivered?
- Customer onboarding and training requirements?
- How will customer success team members be compensated to achieve the best outcomes?
- What customer success metrics will you monitor, for example customer lifetime value (CLTV), customer retention rate, and Net Promoter Score (NPS)?
- Would you benefit from real time account plans to ensure seamless cross-collaboration among everyone involved with customer success?
- How will upselling/cross selling happen and who is responsible?
- How can customer success benefit from data analysis and AI-powered tools?
- How will it all be funded?
Happy customers make the best advocates for your company and its products, so help keep them happy with our guidance. Get in touch and we’ll help you build the machine.