Simple-CX.com

Your brand made a promise to your customer.

Your Customer Success team makes sure you deliver on that promise.

Your Customer Success team builds confidence and momentum, ensures the client moves beyond mere adoption of your offering and, instead, rolls your products, services, and world view into the very DNA of their business.

This ensures renewals and expansions become natural part of your conversation with the client rather than another sales call.

To deliver value, your Customer Success team …

• kickstarts the customer journey

• walks alongside the customer every step of the way

• guides and challenges, helps and encourages

• advocates for the client inside your organization

• represents the best of your company to the client

Once your company delivers value to the customer, you have earned the right to do it again.

At least, you have earned the right to ask to do it again.

Your Customer Success team members think big. They are excited to forge a deep relationship with their customers. To solve more and harder problems. To introduce new products and services. To share new perspectives that make the world a better place. Soon, your client is asking you about renewals and expansions because they trust your company to do the best for them.

To build this partnership your Customers Success team starts small and …

• focuses on one step at a time

• focuses on the most-important step next

• treats every customer as unique

• leverages data to solve problems for people

• holds themselves, their colleagues, and the client responsible

PEOPLE

Your Customer Success team is the cornerstone of your business' success.  They know your customers and their (real) needs.  They know your systems and politics.  Their creativity and passion drive your brand's innovation and excellence.

The secret is to create an environment where this most-precious of all your resources can thrive:

• be intentional and relentless about the culture you create

• make sure the right person is in the right job

• make sure every team member has internalized your long-term vision

• hold your team members responsible to act, learn, and succeed

ALIGNMENT

Your Customer Success team owns the relationship with the customer but your entire organization is responsible for the customer’s ultimate success. It is important to have clear alignment between teams and departments about responsibility and authority.

Not all of your customer success roles will necessarily live within a single department, just so long as the entire company knows who is responsible for what:

• Educate and Guide: Traditional CSM, teaches the customer to leverage your offerings to their best benefit from novice to expert and beyond.

• Nurture and Grow: Traditional Account Manager, cultivates the commercial relationship between you and the customer

• Break-fix: Traditional Support, answers in-the-moment questions and resolves unexpected problems

• Operations: Responsible for the technology, KPI and analytics, quality, and artifacts the Customer Success organization needs to be efficient and effective

• Leadership: Coordinates and cooperates with other teams and departments to ensure the whole company is in-step, provides direction and clarity to the Customer Success organization and where they are going, why, and next steps

For a short overview of the basics of Customer Success, check out this tutorial.

DATA

Two truths: You have to fight for every customer and It's better to fight smart than to fight hard. 

The good news is that you already have most everything you need to win: All the data your company collects and stores about your customers and their experiences with your company. Using this data, you can answer three, key questions:

• future opportunity: What should I focus on?

• today’s focus: Where should I improve right now?

• today’s state: How am I doing compared to how I should?

The statistical methodologies and tools to answer these questions are common, proven, and reliable.  Simple-CX will choose the right ones for your data and your business.  We then analyze it and help put it into context for your organization and strategy. No gimmicks or false promises, just results you can bet your business on.

PROCESS

Different teams within your organization work together by focusing on different parts of the customer’s journey.

The better your different teams can hand-off activities and tasks, the less likely you are to drop the ball and risk slowing (if not harming) your relationship with the client.

That’s why you create processes, policies, and procedures to govern how your organization operates. Some will be intermittent, ad-hoc, or manual. Others will be documented, enforced, or automated.

Regardless solid process management provides:

• clarity of responsibility and accountability

• accurate, timely knowledge

• smooth communication

• identify and adjust to potential problems before they break the system

• increase cooperation and innovation

The ultimate goal for customer success scaling is to maintain or improve quality and the customer’s experience while decreasing the time it takes to:

• complete an activity or task

• refine a process in response to new expectations, conditions, goals

TECHNOLOGY

You have your pick of the litter when it comes to technology tools for customer success. From CRMs to project management, CSPs to collaboration, training to self-help to data visualization to dozens more.

Customer Success uses technology to harden your processes and make them faster, more reliable, more consistent.

This results in a better customer experience and improved internal collaboration and cooperation.

Keys to the best use of technology:

• Choose the tool that fits your company, not the other way around to

  Reduce inefficiencies

  Focus on your business, not the software

  Drive innovation without restrictions

• Make sure anyone and everyone can access the data they need, when they need it

• Automate everything you can

• Automate everything proactively

• Invest in alerts, analysis, and modeling (AI and ML)