The objective of a Customer Success strategy is to retain and grow customers.
When done successfully, an organization will inevitably face the challenge of scaling Customer Success operations.
Operations are scrutinized for operational effectiveness with process, best practices and automation being the typical targets for optimization.
Rightfully so.
Automation is Critical for Scaling
Tech-touch and automated self-help are effective strategies used to scale value-driven communications which improve customer experience, adoption and retention.
They allow repeated, adoption related training and education to be codified and delivered automatically making more time available for Customer Success to have strategic customer interactions that drive customer loyalty and expansion.
Tech-touch and automated self-help are therefore key to a company’s growth strategy.
But an organization needs to know what it is codifying and how that drives customer success in order for automation to be successful.
Codifying inefficient or non-value-add activities only scales poor customer experience.
A holistic, customer engagement methodology that drives repeatable customer success is key to scaling.
Stop focusing so much on renewals! Drive adoption and everything else will fall into place.
A vendor can deploy a self-help platform that anticipates what customers need to adopt product, and guides them forward by making the right material available to them at the right time.
Using usage data and the customer journey – knowing where in the adoption lifecycle the customer is – a vendor can develop a platform that nurtures customers along automatically.
Depending on where a customer is in their journey and what they are trying to accomplish with the product, the vendor can point the user to the specific and relevant self-help material.
By virtue of using usage data and knowing where the customer is in their adoption journey, the platform can predict what type of information the user will need to continue along in their journey.
As such, a lot of questions that would typically be raised with the Customer Success Manager (CSM) or support are deflected allowing the customer to continue making progress with the technology while saving the CSM’s time.
Rather than spending time answering repeatable questions easily answered with readily available material, the CSM can focus their effort on strategic, value add interactions with the customer.
Tech-touch Benefits All Customer Segments
Promoting user adoption in a predictive, just-in-time content delivery manner is not just for a company’s tech-touch customer segment.
Strategic and enterprise customers also realize improved adoption when the high-touch service they receive from Customer Success is augmented with the tech-touch model.
Bottom Line:
Efficient and effective adoption is key to retaining and growing customers sustainably.
If adoption is solid, everything starts to fall in place thereafter.
Understand the customer’s journey and the various user personas to determine what content users will need at various points of the adoption journey.
Once those needs are known (i.e. anticipated), use existing content and applications such as automated nurture campaigns to deliver the right content at the right time in order to pre-emptively answer customer questions and facilitate automated self-help.
In doing so, customers help themselves to successful product adoption and CSM’s spend more time with customers on strategic activities that drive additional value-add.