Managing customer success teams isn’t easy. Their job is vital: Keeping your customers happy. That’s difficult enough on its own, but it gets even worse when you have a large and diverse user base. The more users you have, the more complicated their needs will be.
And naturally, you want to keep them all happy. Else, you’ll lose business. Luckily, all you need to do is learn how to manage your customer success team.
After you read his blog, you’ll know everything about building and scaling a customer success team.
Understanding the Challenges of Customer Success Teams in SaaS Environments
Your customer success team has one goal: To ensure your customers are happy and use your product. To achieve this, they provide various forms of support to your customers, such as:
- Helping your customers onboard their employees.
- Teaching customers how to Integrate your product with their existing workflow.
- Diagnosing potential future problems your customers may have.
- Reaching out to customers who decrease their use of your product.
- Requesting feedback on the product’s performance and features.
It is a complex set of responsibilities. So, managing their workload is a customer success team's biggest challenge. This is particularly difficult when your business expands.
An expanding user base doesn’t only increase the total work your customer success team does. A larger user base will likely be more diverse. So, your customer success team needs to do more complex work.
Here’s an example:
Say you’re an AI ghostwriting SaaS. Your first 10 customers might only want your product for writing emails. That makes them a customer segment with a simple use case for your product.
They'll use your product to create simple but catchy emails. They'll likely use these for outbound marketing.
But your next 10 customers use your product for writing long-form blog posts and articles. That’s a more complex use case. They need your product to produce content that’s also eye-catching but longer.
Your customer success team treats your first 10 customers differently from the next. The blog posts and articles customers have different needs. They’ll have different problems too.
The email customers won’t use your product to scrape the internet. But your blog post customers likely will.
Your SaaS likely has more than two customer segments. Your customer success team will have to provide personalized support for your customers.
Let’s say you have an accounting SaaS product. One of your customers needs support to export their company’s financial data to your product. Your customer success team will help them set everything up, making their lives easier. And they’ll retain your customers.
That way, your customer gets set up faster.
Did you know that increasing customer retention by 5% can increase your profits by up-to 75%? That’s because 65% of your business comes from repeat customers. So, your goal should always be to keep as many customers as possible.
This becomes difficult with larger and more diverse user bases.
Effective Strategies for Prioritizing Tasks in Customer Success
Workload management is a major challenge for customer success teams. The best way to combat this challenge is through effective task prioritization.
Your team will have more tasks than they can perform at any moment. And not all tasks provide the same value. So the only solution is to rank certain tasks over others.
Identify and s and prioritize tasks that provide the most return.
You can use the Eisenhower matrix to rank tasks for your customer success team.
The Eisenhower Matrix is a 2x2 matrix. It has importance on its vertical axis and urgency on its horizontal one.
| Urgent | Not Urgent | |
|---|---|---|
| Important | Do | Decide |
| Not Important | Delegate | Delete |
Categorize your tasks in the matrix's quadrants according to its urgency and importance.
The most important tasks go in the first quadrant, followed by the second and third.
Quadrant 1: Do
These tasks are urgent and important, so you need to do them first. These are the tasks that provide the most impact, and your team should do them first.
An example is providing onboarding information for a new customer.
Quadrant 2: Decide
These tasks are important but not urgent, so they’re the second most important. These tasks impact your business, but they don’t need to be immediately completed.
An example would be creating new content for customer education.
Quadrant 3: Delegate
These tasks are not important but urgent. That means they need to resolved immediately, but they don’t have a high impact on your business.
An example is editing your latest customer education blog post.
Quadrant 4: Delete
These tasks are neither important nor urgent. These tasks are likely not worth completing.
An example could be changing the font of a customer education blog post you’ll publish next month.
The Eisenhower matrix is good for small user bases. And it demonstrates the principle of task prioritization. But you will need a more complex solution if you have a large and complex user base.
That’s where SimplePlaybook comes in. Your customer service team can use it to decide which tasks to perform and when. You can use SimplePlaybooks to maintain personalized interactions with large user bases.
Scaling Customer Success Teams Without Compromising Quality
You want to provide personalized interactions to all customers to maximize their satisfaction. The more satisfied they are, the longer they’ll subscribe to your product. And they'll be more likely to recommend you.
Providing personalized support is hard if you have a growing user-base. Your team gets stretched thin when they have more users to serve. Yet, you need to provide high-quality support. Else you won't maximize the benefit of your growing user base.
The solution is scaling customer success teams without compromising quality.To do that, follow these 5 strategies:
Standardized training
Provide the same training to all new members of your customer success team. This includes:
- Providing the same training content
- Using the same metrics to judge trainee’s performances
- Ensuring there are no significant differences among trainees’ experiences.
Standardize operating procedures
All customer success team members must perform the same actions for the same tasks.
There shouldn’t be different ways of doing things when you can identify the most choice.
Use technology to automate tasks
You can use software like SimplePlaybook to automate tasks like task prioritization.
Doing so will save your customer success team time and energy to focus on more important tasks.
Review employee performance
You should review your team’s performance, especially for new team members.
Regular reviews ensure your customer success team provides high-quality service.
Have a scaling plan
Decide in advance at what point of expansion you want to add new customer success team members.
For example, you may decide you need one new team member for every 100 new users.
This approach prevents your team from over-working or over-hiring.
Measuring and Maintaining Success in Customer Interactions
Achieve successful customer interactions by measuring key performance metrics (KPIs). These metrics prove whether your customer interactions were successful.
Here are 3 KPIs you can use:
1. Churn rate
This is the percentage of your customers that stop using your products over time. A high churn rate indicates high levels of customer dissatisfaction.
2. Customer lifetime value (CLV)
This is the total revenue you earn per customer while your customers work with you.
A high CLV indicates your business benefits from customer retention.
3. Customer engagement score
A customer engagement score assigns weights to customer actions and adds them up.
The goal is to identify which customers perform the most desired actions for you.
Use these stats to improve your customer interactions over time. For example, if you have a high churn rate, you should ask your customers why they stop using your product.
You can use this information to improve your product. Say your customers say they dropped your product because it lacks features they want.
You use this feedback to improve your product by integrating the features they want. As a result, you’ll improve your product.
This way you’ll establish a feedback loop with your customers to improve your product over time.
Developing a Customer-Centric Culture in Scaling SaaS Companies
Customer-centricity involves focusing everything around maximizing value to your customers. This contrasts with a product-centric approach, which maximizes value for your business first.
A SaaS business should adopt a customer-centric approach instead of a product-centric one. That way you’ll decrease customer acquisition and maintenance costs by up to 33%.
To achieve this, build a customer-centric culture throughout your organization. Start with your customer success team since they’re your most customer-facing department.
Your customer success team should orient their actions around maximizing customer value. For example, consider which questions customers about your product when creating tutorial videos.
That way, they’ll produce tutorial videos that provide the most value to customers. You want to extend this line of thinking to your entire organization.
Your salespeople should think about how to maximize value for leads when contacting them.
Your HR department should recruit talent to improve your customers' lives.
Your product managers should also focus on convenience for customers during product development.
Your customer success team managers should focus on scaling customer success without compromising quality.
Your entire organization should think like this. Then provide the best possible customer experiences, leading to excellent business returns.
Achieve this using the following 3 customer success strategies:
1. Identify your customers’ needs: Deploy surveys to receive customer feedback. You should have evidence-backed proof of what your customers want.
2. Train your team: Train your team to think in a customer-centric way. For example, teach your marketing team to think about how to improve your content for readers.
3. Share customer data across departments: You want your entire organization to adopt customer centricity. For that everyone in your organization needs integrated access to customer information.
Case Studies: Successful Scaling of Customer Success Teams
These 4 companies scaled their customer teams. Learn from them for your own business.
1. Hubspot
Hubspot scaled their customer success team by employing customer-centric strategies. Hubspot focuses on hiring experienced talent for their customer service teams. They also encourage their customer success team managers to coach team members.
They also encourage cross-departmental collaboration and information sharing. Through these policies they’ve built a customer-centric organization. They used it to scale their customer success teams and improve revenue retention from 80% to 100%.
2. SalesForce
SalesForce's team provides a range of services. These include providing onboarding training and ongoing support for new customers. Their priority is to maximize value for new and existing customers.
As a result, they’ve built a reputed SaaS customer success team. They also scaled their customer success team by maintaining a customer-centric culture.
Their diverse services also means that SalesForce fulfill their customers’ diverse requirements.
3. Zendesk
Zendesk scaled their customer success team to 250 people across 8 locations in 10 years. Their main strategy was to organize their customer success team into three tiers.
Each tier provides different services, ranging from general questions to technical support. This segmented approach allowed Zendesk to provide relevant customer support.
This approach also built a stable and scalable customer success system for them.
Zendesk built a scalable system they use across locations by focusing on structure. This solid foundation means they scale their team without compromising on quality.
4. Intercom
Intercom’s customer success strategy involves providing detailed support to customers. This strategy includes team training, ongoing optimization, and tailored information. They’ve invested in providing personalized experiences to customers.
Their approach is to assign a dedicated customer success expert to each customer. So they provide support for their customers while they’re using their product.
As a result, Intercom’s customers have dedicated personalized support.
Summary
Every SaaS business needs a customer success team to keep your customers satisfied. Without one, you won’t keep customers and your customer acquisition costs will rise.
You'll face many challenges in scaling your customer success team. The most important is. Manage this by building a customer-centric culture through measuring KPIs and employee training.