How to scale a customer success team
Scaling customer success is unique to every business because it requires a mix of different teams, processes, and tools. But before you scale your customer success initiative, you should understand two things: a) it should be a worthwhile investment for your company in terms of improving customer loyalty, and b) it should be financially justifiable for your bottom line goals.
So how do you scale customer success? Here are some great tips to help you do just that.
1. Hire the right people
Customer success management lies at the crossroads of sales, support, and technical product know-how. At a glance, it is easy to look at customer success as the next-step destination for the customer service department, but in reality, it’s more complex than that. In order to grow your customer success team as a core part of your business operations, you have to hire the right mix of people with the sales, support, and product knowledge. Your customer success team should have people who have lower inhibitions to initiate an interaction with customers (just like marketers or sales professionals). They should also possess high empathy to understand customer apprehensions and pain points. Essentially, you are gathering a group of ‘farmers’ to take care of your existing customer base and cultivate them for your future sustenance. Scaling the human capital of your customer success team becomes easy when you set a customer-centric culture with the first few hires in the team.
2. Segment your customers
Not all customers are alike; nor do the success metrics for one customer apply to all others. Therefore, it helps to identify the different customer personas your business has and categorize them into organized groups so that your customer success management scales up well. For example, most small and medium businesses (SMBs) make up for the 40–50% of the customer base for most SaaS startups. You can’t handhold them and set them up for success the same way you do for your enterprise clients. Your biggest clients in the enterprise sector might need a more high-touch, technical, and repetitive support whereas the SMB clients might need a few low-touch interactions in order to meet their business goals. Therefore, building a buyer persona and segmenting your customers is a good foundation for scaling your customer success team.
3. Use the right tools
Giving the right set of tools and technology compliments your customer success team to overcome their challenges and improve their success rate in the long-run. Equipping your customer success team is half the battle when you have the right people in the group. To scale your customer success team, you have to equip them with the right kind of tools, techniques, training, and confidence. For example, you can automate the standard touchpoints with customers by using automated emails, push notifications, event-based in-app messages, and so on. A live chat software is extremely valuable for your customer success team in order to engage and succeed with customers because it offers the perfect balance between automation and human touch. You can optimize your self-service content within your live chat widget for making the customer journey smoother or deploy chatbots to engage with customers for specific use cases. Similarly, you can also use it as a collaboration tool within your customer success team to keep everyone on the same page. A modern live chat tool also integrates perfectly in your software stack so that your team productivity goes up and customer churn comes down.
4. Set up processes
Your customer success initiative can bomb if it doesn’t mature into a systematic process in due course. Because customer success is not a one-off, project-based endeavor, you need to operationalize into a process culture that becomes easy for the decision-makers in your organization to understand, follow, and monitor. It can be somewhat challenging to set processes and stick by the protocols when you are starting out new in your customer success initiative. However, once your customer success team is confident about taking up roles and responsibilities, you can start thinking about building workflows in the team to make execution easier. The customer success workflows can stem from the support team for repeatable customer handoffs, for example, or they can be in harmony with the sales team when the success team is able to create new revenue opportunities.