As a fast-growing business owner, you know managing operations at a large scale is not easy. More customers means more data to track, more leads to follow, more profiles to manage, and more things to be done.
You can only do so much with the time and resources you have. To meet these growing needs, you need to scale up and optimize your operations.
In this article, we’ll break down the basics of building an ideal Customer Success Team.
You’ll also see how to build or adapt a team to manage large-scale operations.
Key Roles in an Ideal Customer Success Team
Each position in a Customer Success Team plays an important part. Let’s break down the dynamics to see how and why each of these roles functions within a business.
Chief Customer Officer (CCO):
The CCO assumes the highest leadership role in the Customer Success Team. They’re responsible for presenting the vision and strategy the team will use.
What is this vision? Aligning the needs of the customer and the company.
For example, a company may have a vision of providing the best SaaS backup services on the market. The customers may be looking for a budget friendly option that’s secure and has most basic features covered.
How do we align these two needs? One possible solution is offered multiple packs of tiers of backup services. This lets users choose from something that’s budget friendly, all the way to the enterprise tier.
The strategy? It varies based on your business but usually includes improved after-sales support or a better onboarding process.
A CCO needs to have a keen understanding of customers' wants and expectations across the board. They know the demands and mindset of each demographic or customer group.
They might note that enterprise customers are more interested in uptime and security. Regular users may be more interested in budget packages and flexible options for subscriptions.
This knowledge lets them assess what kind of relationship the company has with their clients.
On top of that, they must also understand business goals. Examples include, increasing active users, reducing churn, and dealing with scaling issues.
By combining these two aspects, they can present a vision and strategy that caters to both customer needs and business growth.
For example, clients who deal with data analytics might desire more granular control. As such, the CCO knows they need to focus on providing more options in services they offer.
The CCO develops long-term plans instead of focusing on the day-to-day tasks. They also inspire and motivate their team to deliver exceptional results.
This is done by using regular training programs, performance metrics, and coaching sessions.
Skills:
- Adept leadership.
- Strategic thinking.
- Understanding customer needs.
- Tailoring strategies.
- Crafting long-term vision.
VP of Customer Success:
The Vice President of Customer Success acts as a key executor of the CCO's strategy. They translate the vision and strategy presented by the CCO into actionable plans and steps.
For example, a strategy might dictate the need for more detailed feedback from users about their pain points. The VP will put this into action like this:
- They will implement a feedback program with forms and emails for direct feedback.
- They will devise a training program that helps the customer service teams ask more specific questions from clients.
- They might develop a dedicated forum on the company website. This can act as a common ground where users can discuss their experiences.
They create plans and clearly document how the team should handle different cases. For example, how to handle a customer who’s having trouble with his subscription billing cycle.
When novel situations arise, they step up and present an example of how to handle these cases. These processes are documented and used as a guideline for similar situations in the future.
Skills:
- Strong leadership.
- Organizational finesse.
- Understanding customer needs.
- Drafting plans from abstract goals.
- Creative thinking for novel cases.
Customer Success Directors:
Customer Success Directors align team goals to satisfy customer needs and the plans set by the VP. For example, the plan might be to reduce churn and learn why customers are leaving the service.
In turn, they will develop goals and instruct the team to start paying more attention to customers canceling the service. This can include asking reasons why they’re leaving, to offering compensation or incentives for staying.
This is how they lead the team, by translating plans into distinct objectives.
Their job focuses on refining operational processes to achieve high optimization rates. This improves operational efficiency and frees up time for other tasks.
A key part of the job is collecting data and using analytics. This includes retained users, churn rate, user satisfaction rate, feedback from clients, etc.
This data is useful, not just for the customer support team but also the entire business as a whole. It lets a company stay in touch with how it’s doing and how connected it is with customers.
By understanding the customer journey, they can tailor the process to meet specific client expectations.
For example, analytics might show that a lot of customers are reaching out. A closer look reveals they need help with a specific software feature.
A fix in this case might involve redesigning the UI, the options present, or the functionality of the tool. It might also call for revising the user manual or creating a tutorial for this feature.
Skills:
- Analytical skills.
- Process optimization.
- Managing teams.
- Translating plans into objectives.
- Ability to train and guide a team.
Customer Success Managers:
Customer Success Managers operate on the frontline. That is, they will directly manage client accounts or relationships.
Often, this means having a more personal relationship with the client. Depending on their expertise, they might be relegated to specific aspects of the operation.
For example, managers with expertise in finance will deal with accounts in the same domain. Their closer relationships let them understand the niche requirements of clients.
As such, they focus on client satisfaction by resolving issues promptly. They aim to nurture accounts over the long term to generate loyalty through customer satisfaction.
Their position also lets them better understand the needs and wants of different client profiles. This provides valuable information for decision-making.
Skills:
- Strong interpersonal skills.
- Problem-solving abilities.
- Juggling different client accounts.
- Understanding client requirements.
- Customer-centric mindset.
Customer Success Associates:
Customer Success Associates form the operational backbone. They handle day-to-day tasks as set out by the managers and directors.
They operate to achieve the mission set by the higher-ups but in a more direct fashion. They use objective markers, performance metrics, and daily goals to measure success.
Instead of focusing on individual client accounts, they provide support to all customers. In some cases, they may be split by departments.
They handle queries, answer common questions, and provide updates on pending tickets. When necessary, they’ll coordinate with managers to handle special requests.
Much like a multi-tool, they generally do not specialize in one field. As such, they’re the first point of contact.
Skills:
- Excellent communication.
- Adaptability to new tools.
- Tech savvy.
- Managing multiple queries at once.
- Time management.
Creating an Effective Onboarding Process for Customer Success
An effective onboarding process acts as the first impression of a company for both the customer and your customer success team members.
First impressions are last impressions. You want to show both your clients and your team members that you’re a professional business that knows how to get things done.
For the customer success team, the onboarding process shows them a glimpse of what it’s like working for you. If the process is smooth, professional, engaging, and educational, they’ll expect the same in their day-to-day operations.
What are some elements of a good onboarding process for team members?
- A well designed orientation stage and process.
- Clearly defined responsibilities in the job description.
- Well-documented processes for each task.
- Friendly and open communication to encourage discussion and problem solving.
- An onboarding training phase and process to help members get familiar with their jobs.
- Coaching and training programs to help fill skill gaps and meet other needs.
Now, imagine the opposite scenario. Where a team member hits the ground running without any guidance of orientation.
Whenever they try to get something done, they’ll need to go through trial and error because there’s no documentation. They can’t ask for help because they don’t know who’s on their team or what channels to use.
Without proper training to fill in the skills gaps, they won't be able to perform their duties properly. They might cause setbacks in the work.
Teach your team members and focus on effective communication. Do not make assumptions and always try to clear up any confusions.
For customers, it lets them start using a product or service without having to go through an extensive sign up process. If the process is too long, confusing, or off-putting, it gives clients the impression the user experience will be the same.
Examples of this can include:
- Poorly designed UI/UX elements.
- Delayed confirmation emails.
- Lack of guidance and support.
- Unclear value offerings.
- Bugs and glitches.
- Overwhelming amount of information.
- Poor communication.
A seamless onboarding process for the clients also benefits the customer success team. It gives them valuable information and crucial insights for further client engagement.
For example, suppose most clients are choosing a certain package or subscription. This might highlight that the least chosen package does not offer enough value or is irrelevant to the majority of the user base.
This gives teams the data and proof they need to decide what to do next. They might remove the least chosen package entirely, or come redesign the offering to make it more relevant for users.
When simplifying and streamlining the onboarding process, companies should pay attention to include the following elements:
- Personalized welcome and orientation videos.
- Guided setup of service.
- Interactive tutorials and demos for different features.
- Progressive learning levels that build on previous lessons.
- Chat support and assistance for clients.
- Regular progress updates to show clients how far they’ve come.
- Feedback tools so users can make suggestions.
- A wiki-like knowledge base with troubleshooting guides.
- A forum for open discussions.
- Gamification elements where appropriate for better user engagement.
Integrating Customer Success with Overall Business Strategy
Integrating customer success with business strategy is at the heart of customer-centric businesses. The process involves tying customer success to the company’s success metrics.
Without this, companies cannot achieve long-term success. When these two aspects diverge, it creates nonoptimal situations where each aspect can compete with one another.
For example, if you want to increase net profit, you might introduce a new package or service tier. In this case, let’s suppose you’re a SaaS backup company.
Your high tier package is double the cost of the previous tier but offers twice the value and applies a 10% discount. Initially, this might seem like a good idea.
After all, you’re offering more perks at a 10% discount to attract users who make more use of the service. However, you notice that there’s not a lot of users buying your new package.
So you go back to the drawing board and look at customer data. What is it that users want and how can we give it to them?
According to the surveys and feedback, you see plenty of features that clients want. You check the market and do a competitor analysis.
There’s virtually no companies offering these features. Or at least, they’re not doing it well enough for them to stand out.
So, you come up with a new plan. Instead of merely introducing a new package, you apply upgrades to all your packages.
For the starter tier you introduce a personal installation and remote support guide perk. When users know they will get help, they are not as intimidated by technical processes.
For the intermediate tier you give them limited versions of the expert tier perks. They get to try out features and get a taste, which will entice them to fully jump ship to the next tier.
To entice expert tier users into your premium package, you offer dedicated hosting hardware. You also give them 24/7 live support, multiple backup locations, and blockchain support.
Now, instead of just offering more of the same, you’re offering customers something that they want and need. You’ve turned your offerings from something stale into something unique that stands out from the market.
Customer success is directly tied to business success. Satisfied clients can turn into brand advocates.
This means increased return business, organic growth, and consistent revenue streams.
This can be achieved with proactively engaging with the customers, offering tailored solutions, and nurturing long-term relationships.
When these requirements are met, company goals like churn reduction, long-term growth, and increased profits become a reality.
Adapting to Different Industries:
The requirements of each industry can vary greatly. For example, users of a software suite like Creative Cloud will have different expectations to the project management crowd.
It’s important that company processes are tailored to meet the specific needs of their users. After all, the company exists to provide a solution or product for the client's needs.
Some general tips apply across the board, such as effective communication, but the rest is a case of “it depends.”
Tech savvy users won’t need, and might even get annoyed with basic solutions they’re already capable of solving. Instead, they will focus on things like API access, uptime, optimization, etc.
In contrast, e-commerce users might need more detailed documentation, widgets, and tools. They need the extra help to set up shop and care more about presentation and image.
A good starting point is to put yourself in the shoes of the customer.
Start by asking:
- What would draw me to a business?
- What value am I looking for?
- How can I differentiate between the offers on the market?
- What is something that companies lack?
- Is there a way to clearly compare the prices and features of what’s available?
Collaboration with Other Departments:
Customer success can also be integrated into other departments. The data and insight gained here can provide valuable information to tweak other aspects of the business.
For example, if customers are not satisfied with the onboarding process, the support team will know why. They can present the data and their suggestions to the sales department.
The sales department, in turn, can edit and revise the process to be more in line with customer expectations. As a result, a major issue is resolved and the business retains and attracts more users.
Apply this approach to the other departments, and the benefits become obvious.
Another example is the core programming team including or revising features based on feedback from the customer team.
Apart from fixing issues, this can also boost revenue generation. For example, Amazon uses personalized recommendations based on a user’s purchase history.
The benefit is twofold. The company gets more sales, and the users easily find items relevant to their interests.
How can you apply this to your own business? Same approach but different application.
Study your customers. What type of customers do you have and what do they want?
Start looking and categorizing the data long enough and you’ll start to see patterns. From these, you can create user profiles.
For example, customer type A is an average retail user. They use your backup solutions to store family pictures and documents, and some personal data.
Customer type B is a business. They use SaaS tools to backup their valuable data from multiple sites and create multiple copies of said data.
Customer type C is a government organization that uses SaaS backups as part of digitizing their old physical documents.
Based on each client type’s need, you can create custom offers or packages that will meet the demand of most groups.
For illustrative purposes, let’s consider the above mentioned cases.
Customer type A would prefer a budget solution and probably doesn’t value real time updates.
Customer type B would prefer real time updates, multiple backups, and a large storage option.
Customer type C would prefer timed backups, long-term storage, and probably a custom offer.
Know your customers and use the data you gather. Combine the two to give your clients what they want.
Scaling and Evolving the Customer Success Team
As your company experiences growth, it will inevitably run into inefficient tasks and operations.
When the client base expands, you have to deal with more of everything. The key point is, more data takes more time to process.
If you’re dealing with 50 customer inquiries a day, this may turn into 300 or more. That’s a big step-up in workload.
As a result, weak points in the system become obvious. Any unoptimized process will stick out like a sore thumb.
Trying to brute force a solution is infeasible. You can only scale up so quickly and so far before running into more problems.
If you try to handle the increased load without doing anything, you’ll have a drop in service quality. You cannot manage a greater load in the same setting without a compromise somewhere in the chain.
The most important factor here is maintaining personalized customer interactions at a large scale.
Doing this manually may have been possible when you had 50-100 users. However, 1,000 users is another story entirely.
You need to strike a balance between interacting with users and maintaining your service quality.
This is where flexibility, role evolution, training, and automation come into play.
Flexibility:
As the company grows, several roles in the team may need to shift. For example, tech-focused members may be relegated to deal with tech-savvy users.
To address the growing needs, everyone has to play to their strengths. This means shuffling members across teams.
For example, a team with different members, each with a diverse communication style can improve overall customer experience. Some team members will get along better with some types of clients.
For example, a client with a technical background will prefer someone on your team who’s also into tech? Similarly, an average user will prefer someone who’s more casual and easy going as opposed to someone talking in code.
This is because each client has a different mindset and perspective. Talking with clients is not just about reading a script.
You have to understand their needs and see things from their point of view. Then you need to come in with your expertise and help solve their needs or meet their needs.
When necessary, new roles may need to be created and old ones discarded. For example, a new role that provides technical support to users via remote access or video calls.
Training:
As technology and methods continue to evolve, customers' expectations also change. A customer success team needs the knowledge, tools, and experience to meet these requirements.
As such, continued training and education is very important. A customer agent is only as effective as what they know and the tools they possess.
Companies need to know how trends are growing and adapt to respond to these challenges.
Sometimes, it’s as simple as asking the customers what they want. Other times, you need to study the industry and new developments to prepare for the future.
If you can’t meet these growing needs, someone else will.
Automation:
As the operational scale increases, you’ll find that some tasks are just tedious busy work. Examples can include sending out boilerplate emails, importing data, or any number of tasks.
These mundane tasks take time, energy, and effort that could be better spent on more productive activities. This is where automation comes in to save the day.
Automation is a great way to carry out repetitive tasks that don’t require a lot of custom input or changes between actions. It’s a great way to increase client engagement without reducing service quality.
You can also use it as an analytical tool for highlighting trends. When combined with regular operations, it can optimize your productivity.
For example, customer service chat often answers the same questions over and over. A tool with boilerplate answers that can address clients by name can let one agent handle more queries at once.
SimplePlaybook can help you scale your operations and deal with the challenges that come with growing your business.
Cultivating a Customer-Centric Culture in Your Team
Building a customer-centric culture is not just a strategy. It’s a fundamental shift with long-term benefits.
As shown earlier, customer success is directly tied to business success. Carrying this philosophy across all departments only further enhances the effect.
Every interaction, from onboarding to resolving issues should focus on customer well-being. You know you’re doing a good job when your customers are your number one advocates.
It’s something every company covets, but not every company will achieve. Not unless they employ a customer-centric culture.
Every department in the company should think about the value they can offer to the customer.
For the support team, this is asking, what paint points do our customers have? How can we solve their issues?
For the product development team, it means asking, what use do customers get out of our product? What features can we include to help them achieve their goals with greater ease?
Another example is looking at new developments in technology and industry trends. Then, you ask, how can I use these to improve the product or service I’m offering?
When this philosophy is championed across all departments, a customer centric approach arises naturally.
When the customers get what they want, they feel valued and supported.
Summary
As businesses scale, employing the same approaches becomes unfeasible. That’s where solutions like SimplePlaybooks come into play.
To ensure success when you grow big, you need to think big. This means putting the customer first, and using adaptive scaling.
With technology evolving so fast the market is also changing. Companies have to stay updated and regularly train their staff if they hope to compete and succeed.
Above all, customer centric approach is key. All departments should incorporate this philosophy into their operations.
When the customer wins, the company wins.