How the “lifestyle engagement framework” helps build sustained customer engagement
Customer success is all about building a consultative partnership with your customers. Ensuring customers are successful with your product leads to the most meaningful business outcomes in the form of retaining recurring revenues and generating references and referrals for future business.
From the onset of the engagement, ongoing dialogue is key to healthy customer relationships. Now, the critical question to consider at this juncture is, how do CSMs identify which customers need attention and when?
If your CSMs were handling just one customer, it’s straightforward to identify when and where they need help. But that’s not scalable. Setting your CS team up for scale is a balance game requiring a framework to build the right engagement for success.
The most reliable companies have established repeatable procedures or processes that support employees to demonstrate trust and business reliability. This “framework” consists of establishing success measures, enhancing customer relationships, defining customer lifecycle, understanding their challenges/expectations, and identifying the processes, key deliverables, KPIs, and tools to support customer goals for each stage of the customer lifecycle.
Reimagine retention with a “lifecycle engagement framework.”
Only those customer success and account managers who have complete context know where and how to coordinate and focus their engagement efforts.
However, to achieve that, the organization needs first to overcome the most significant technical challenge of all — the complexity and time-consuming process of getting all the data they need in one place. The next step is to help your customers quantify how they can meet their business goals through your products and services.
The best approach to customer retention is one that allows you to take control of the lifecycle:
- Automate stimulus creation
- Bring context to the forefront
- Standardize and automate the response
- Measure
Proactive engagement needs context. The health score, a 360-degree customer overview, and segmentation all provide context intrinsically. Compounded further, with a bit of data crunching and elbow grease, you can paint a clear picture of the customer needs and what to reach out to them with. For instance, when you have context on renewal information, an automated goal can be set up to indicate CSMs to reach out to the customer since their renewal is coming up.
How do you drive success? At scale?
In customer-facing roles, everyone has a funnel. For instance, the marketing funnel (Awareness → Acquisition → Activation → Adoption → Retention/Transaction) where marketing works with leads and the sales funnel (deal progression) where they work with opportunities/deals with the outcome is acquiring customers.
But, what do CSMs close? What is their funnel? What does it look like? The CSM funnel is geared to drive success at scale:
It all starts with data. With data, you can strategize and prioritize, and create insights out of it, and generate opportunities for retention and expansion. The CS leaders then define playbooks to drive value. These in turn further drive the sales funnel. So, the CS team creates and enables rich funnels to work on and nurture customers for all teams including their own — it is more than updating a customer record. Its intelligence, collaboration, and contextual engagement — all driven by the CS function.
The key imperatives are to deliver value & showcase impact and ensure customers are successful by identifying outcomes. The way to achieve this is to focus on the entire lifecycle and build an engagement framework that encompasses the following aspects:
- Scoring (health + others) helps summarize and quantify for CSMs
- Take negative signals (alerts) into proactive reach out (email or touchpoints)
- Goal automation to help progress and map touchpoints
- Touchpoints are the rich engagement layer to extract customer goals
Engaging and interacting effectively
How much customer interaction is enough? How can you better keep in touch with your customers? You can interact with customers in many ways:
- Regular interactions or cadence meetings
- Self-help materials
- User communities
Why is this important?
You may notice that your inactive/disengaged customers may be less costly to serve, but they’re also more likely to churn. Keeping in touch with customers is essential to developing, retaining, and growing customer relationships.
That’s where Touchpoints come in. At its core, Touchpoints helps CSMs respond to risk or value stimuli and engage effectively with customers that need help. With Touchpoints, your CS teams can manage customer meetings, accelerate time-to-value, nurture long-term relationships, and drive recurring revenue.
Let’s look at what a prescriptive success plan looks like and where Touchpoints fits in:
- Identify which outcome and value driver will be the priority for a segment of customers through a consultative approach
- Map those value drivers to the capabilities that need to be implemented
- Build a success plan to implement and execute those work-streams
Once the goals and the blueprint of the plan are set in stone, Touchpoints will help drive value and achieve those goals by automating the following types of tasks for CSMs:
- Developing a communications plan based on onboarding programs, success plans, or journey maps to determine the type and frequency of contact.
- Introducing best practices and new ways for customers to use your products through workshops/webinars.
- Looking for opportunities to expand the quantity and quality of interactions through digital outreach.
- Conducting periodic executive or quarterly business reviews (EBR / QBR) with customers.
- Proactively contact inactive customers to determine the reason for inactivity and what actions, if any, can be taken to preserve the relationship.
How Touchpoints work
There are four major activities that Touchpoints allow users to do within Freshdesk Customer Success:
You can add Touchpoints as part of goal playbooks and in turn, CSMs will know the exact tasks and set of meetings they need to schedule to achieve goals with their customers.It doesn’t stop there — they are able to send the invite to get it scheduled entirely through Freshdesk Customer Success, with native integrations with Google calendar and Outlook365.
Another area of focus is around retaining context and making it easy to take notes/update tasks during/post meetings. With Goals and Tasks already created for cohorts of customers within the tool, CSMs simply need to add them into Touchpoints to build the agenda for a meeting with the customer.
Further, the meetings workspace is a full-page note-taking experience with all the Goals and Tasks visible on a single pane. This helps CSMs record updates directly on the Goals and Tasks, change due dates, or add notes all from one screen. The best part is, the changes made in the meeting workspace automatically update the respective Goals and Tasks – no more tool switching or losing context!
Finally, all of these updates/takeaways/action items are recorded into a recap email which can be sent again with one click.
Let us know if your success teams struggle with questions around building prescriptive success plans or effective response mechanisms around stimuli, and we’ll get you on the right track!