• Author: Jennifer Chiang
  • Full Title: The Startup's Guide to Customer Success
  • Tags: #Inbox #books

Highlights

  • What does customer experience mean? (Location 247)
  • Flawless onboarding: (Location 248)
  • Quick signal of a positive and non-trivial return on investment: (Location 249)
    1. Easy-to-find and easy-to-understand help when they need it: (Location 251)
  • A top of the line customer service experience: (Location 253)
  • If customer success is secondary, then you’ve placed the customer as secondary and customers will realize that quickly. To achieve this, customer success needs to exceed expectations in all three foci – external, internal, and multiplicative. (Location 270)
  • Customer success’s focus externally is to create champions of both the product and brand. To create a champion of a product, customer success must help the customer maximize their return on investment. To create a champion of a brand, customer success must create an emotional experience branded through stellar customer experience and customer service. (Location 273)
  • Customer success’s focus internally is to establish and empower a customer-centric mindset within the company. To establish this mindset, customer success needs to beat the drum around customer centricity to prove value. To empower this mindset, customer success needs to provide continuous feedback (which includes creating a good relationship between the company and clients to get constructive, continuous feedback) to enable other verticals to be customer focused. (Location 276)
  • Marketing will have testimonials, good content, and a deeper understanding of customers. Sales will have more sales because of a better brand and more referrals. The product, engineering, and operations teams will better understand customer needs and requests. Furthermore, customer success can spearhead improvements in overall company morale and team synergy. (Location 280)
  • customer success department grew to include customer support, documentation, and training. (Location 353)
  • he created an organization within his company to specifically focus on increasing usage of the product (and therefore the derived value) (Location 358)
  • You may already have a customer-success-like function or none at all and want to figure out how to create one. (Location 391)
  • There are two main factors that play into how a customer success function would operate in a company: Product Complexity and User Complexity. (Location 413)
  • Automate: For companies that are high in Product Complexity but have low User Complexity, the customer success team’s focus is to “automate” – automate processes that had been headaches for your customer so that they can be more efficient. The user has clearly indicated that there is a significant need for your services and is therefore willing to put in the effort. Your service is most likely going to help free up a lot of time for your customers to do more high priority tasks. (Location 482)
  • PC1. How quickly can a customer start using your product at its fullest capacity? (Location 512)
  • PC3. How much technical support does your customer need from your team? (Location 518)
  • PC5. Is the industry standard’s product similar to yours? (Location 523)
  • There is nothing like us out there (Location 525)
  • PC6. How many core – as you define it – features does your product have? (Location 526)
  • PC10. How often are customers coming from a similar product to yours? (Location 538)
  • How personal does your product get with your users? (Location 545)
  • How would your rate your users expectation of your product? (Location 548)
  • How emotionally invested is the user when they buy your product? (Location 550)
  • What are they thinking about in those moments when they pay the bill?“ (Location 553)
  • If the customer encounters a minor bug, how do they respond? (Location 559)
  • How well-defined is the customer’s pain point(s)? (Location 562)
  • How important are testimonials to your sales pitch/marketing content? (Location 564)
  • Do you have someone within the company who can sincerely vouch for the customer during tough discussions? (Location 662)
  • starting the moment the customer first sees your company’s marketing material and ending around when the contract renews. (Location 693)
  • Are there any touch points that are designed so that the customer must reach out to you? For example, are they supposed to ask to expand their contract? (Location 702)
  • In 2017, 90% of marketers agree that designing a successful customer journey and working at close quarters with customer success represents their top priority. (Location 707)
  • realizing what our customer’s journey is and understanding at every point where the success team can add the value.” (Location 711)
  • since our core metric is retention, we’re focused on reducing our churn to zero which means that we need to understand the silent majority: Why are they churning? How can we get a better pulse before they churn? How can we engage them to get more value from the product?” (Location 716)
  • the activity is no longer to map out the optimal customer journey. It is to create and then operationalize the customer lifecycle so that it delivers the desired outcome for your customers and, ultimately, the financial results for you.” (Location 725)
  • need to keep in mind how we may be treating different customer segments. (Location 735)
  • second thing to note when completing this exercise is whether the events are triggered proactively or reactively. For example, there are scheduled events, such as weekly sync meetings or annual on-site visits, or unscheduled events, such as a large drop in usage or an overdue invoice. (Location 741)
  • map out the healthy customer’s experience, but also the unhealthy customer’s experience and build events and strategies around addressing those warning signs. (Location 743)
  • “If you want to stand out from the 83 other people your client interacts with on a day-to-day basis, then ... you must maintain a high level of geniality even in the most insignificant of interactions.” (Location 758)
  • Ask yourself these two questions: 1) Who currently owns each part of the user journey, and 2) Does that department have the bandwidth to handle this part of the user’s journey to a high enough caliber in your opinion? (Location 765)
  • make sure every department within your company is focused on their primary charter and isn’t stretched too thin. (Location 768)
  • customer education need was the seed to customer success. (Location 800)
  • It’s the customer success leader’s responsibility to ensure that the marketing team is producing content that drives the right sort of conversations, that the engineering team is building a product or platform that meets every need of your ideal customers, and that the sales team is setting the right expectations with prospects before they ever become customers.” – Sam Brennand, Director of Customer Success at Uberflip (Location 822)
  • A customer success team is like a conductor making sure the internal teams are in sync and harmonizing with the customers’ needs. (Location 828)
  • the biggest challenge to becoming more customer-centric was “functional silos prevent customer data sharing.”38 (Location 829)
  • Determining customer pain points is much more than just saying, “The customer wants x,” but rather “The customer is experiencing x problem which is making them feel y.” (Location 839)
  • do we optimize for fixing product now or investing in building customer relationships to fill in these gaps?” (Location 858)
  • Increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases profits by 25% to 95%. – Bain & Company45 (Location 946)
  • 80% of your company’s future revenue will come from just 20% of your existing customers. – Gartner Group46 (Location 948)
  • lot of what customer success does is hard to quantify and are mostly long-term plays. (Location 966)
  • The Temkin Group, a customer experience consulting firm, found that on average, a typical $1 billion company can gain $775 million over three years through modest customer experience improvements (e.g. streamlining the support ticket submission process). (Location 1003)
  • “The best time to bring up customer success is when you’ve lost a key customer or account,” (Location 1052)
  • Customer success isn’t just about securing revenue. It’s about your reputation as a company and the value you place on your own products, services, employees, and customer relationships.” (Location 1061)
  • the marketing team needs stories that they can tell to reel in more customers. Customer success can help provide those stories, which then helps provide content for marketing to be able to publish. The sales team want referrals, such as customer references. Customer success can also provide that if they are doing their job in a proactive manner. Product needs feature recommendations especially from the highest value customers.” (Location 1076)
  • Even in a small team, you should be looking at customer sentiment and churn between your control group versus your managed group.” (Location 1088)
  • You will continually need to make the case for customer success to continue existing at your company by showing progress. This is showing progress through data such as number of renewals or an increased net promoter score (NPS) score, but also through a more customer-centric culture and a more beloved brand. (Location 1111)
  • “It takes a special type of person to work in customer success. They must be built to serve. They must thrive in an environment of helping other people. They must derive success from watching other people succeed. They must focus on other people’s problems.”64 (Location 1174)
  • “Hire your first Customer Success Manager as early as possible. You definitely need one by the time you hit about $2 million in annual recurring revenue, or as soon as you have one customer that represents 20% or more of your income (because you don’t want to lose that one).”65 (Location 1181)
  • so make it clear that you’re looking for someone who hasn’t necessarily worked customer success before, but has the appropriate skills. Search for strengths, not titles.” (Location 1193)
  • Ask questions during hiring to see how they think and more theoretical/planning questions, because this person will likely end up in leadership team at some point.” (Location 1210)
  • but you do need someone who is motivated, gritty, a good communicator, (Location 1237)
  • start a support team, but also then turn that support team into a customer success team. (Location 1252)
  • We had to help leads understand the product, educate new customers, keep people engaged, and help guide the future direction of the product. None of that was in the job description.” (Location 1262)
  • a full-stack customer journey person.” (Location 1264)
  • You’re after someone with strong written and verbal communication skills and a desire (and proven ability) to learn new things.” (Location 1269)
  • Some say that customer support is a natural precursor to customer success. After all, customer support is the reactive version of customer success and often sits within customer success. (Location 1276)
  • We wanted to transform our team from one with a reactive approach to customer service into a one with a proactive approach to making our customers successful.” (Location 1293)
  • onboarding, coaching, renewals, upsell, support, and services.” (Location 1296)
  • “At LearnUpon, customer success means following up on requests, checking a status, and coming up with a workaround in the meantime. Sometimes that means using features that are already in the LMS. Other times, we pass requests to the development team. When a customer requests something, it’s not always available immediately, so the team helps you to achieve what you need anyway.” (Location 1317)
  • Success is more like ‘Here’s the answer to your question – but have you thought about doing it this other way? Or this might work better for you, based on your workflow and what I understand about your company.’” (Location 1321)
  • I recommend that you have different people focus on support and over time as support cases go down, you can make the team become more proactive.” (Location 1331)
  • grew out the support team and built out the customer experience team under customer success, which included customer education, sales, and account management. (Location 1348)
  • “After a while, we started trying to understand where our customers’ pain points were to better serve them. As part of that effort we launched our NPS program, and we started to put together what is now called ‘Customer Voice’ where we gather all the feedback from all the different sources and aggregate it to identify trends. As we started to understand our customers better, we focused more of our attention on proactive engagement to improve retention. All of this now falls under customer experience.” (Location 1351)
  • “We introduced Account Management when we introduced a higher price plan. (Location 1355)
  • Account Management focuses on providing one-to-one engagement with our higher value customers.” (Location 1356)
  • I decided to move into the post-sales world because I wanted to get closer to the product, to the value proposition, and to the customer challenges that can be addressed through software.” (Location 1382)
  • We needed a customer success team because we have to help those people who had been told to use Slack because they needed to change the way they work. That change can be very hard.” (Location 1416)
  • “My first customer success role was Nulogy – it used to be called Technical Account Manager. (Location 1430)
  • Three months after joining Moz, Ellie rose to become the Customer Success lead. She grew the team from 3 people to 13 and drove adoption, growth, and expansion for $33 million/year of product. (Location 1471)
  • You can find your customer hero currently in support, sales, business, or from some other department. Regardless of where you find them, remember to value their strengths and skills over their resume. (Location 1480)
  • Before even diving into what the layout of your customer success strategy should be, focus on your customer success team and the culture you want to create. After all, customer success is a relationship-focused role. That starts with creating a good culture and work ethic for your team to reach their goals. (Location 1568)
  • I knew I could teach them other skills, but there were three that I couldn’t train. So, I wanted to find someone who had these four attributes: 1. Empathy 2. Strong communication skills  3. Hustle 4. A potential to thrive within our customer success team (Location 1573)
  • To create a strong culture for the customer success function, tackle the following 3 steps: 1. Hire talented individuals: (Location 1591)
    1. Create a stellar team culture that is conducive to customer success’s success: Customer success can be a tiring job, create a culture that not only motivates your team, but also empowers them to take more ownership and champion the customer throughout the company. 3. Recognize and retain top talent: Good customer success hires can be hard to keep, especially in the early days; the knowledge that they have from working with some of your first customers can really help your team and company grow; create a culture where they can advance their career in your company. (Location 1595)
  • “There are four main attributes to a good CSM: 1. Project management skills, 2. communication skills, 3. An understanding of the business domain, and 4. Selling skills. (Location 1630)
  • “Project management skills is perhaps the most important. It’s about being good at expectation setting, and expectation setting is critical when you are a CSM. (Location 1634)
  • You must ensure that you are meeting deadlines and expectations and communicating early with updates and when problems arise.” (Location 1635)
  • “For example, if you have one customer that is always on fire, instead of reacting, pause and think, ‘We have other customers that are very similar (business size, problems that they are solving for with this product) and they’re not on fire. They’re actually successful with their use case. Why are they successful and why is this customer struggling?’ Dig in, learn, teach. Help your customers evolve.” (Location 1664)
  • also believe that CSMs should also be using the product themselves whenever possible.” (Location 1680)
  • “We’ve found that employee engagement explains two-thirds of our client experience scores. And if we’re able to increase client satisfaction by five points on an account, we see an extra 20% in revenue, on average. So clearly, there’s an impact. That’s the business case for the change.” (Location 1703)
  • Companies with happy employees enjoy 81% higher customer satisfaction and 50% lower employee turnover. (Location 1709)
  • “The biggest rule of thumb that I have when it comes to mitigating a situation where you need to build customer loyalty and delight and the account is at risk – is ‘never lose alone.’ (Location 1724)
  • The moment that you suspect that an account that is at risk, rush over and solicit other people’s help to strategically attack that situation. (Location 1725)
  • if you don’t share in that experience with others and seek their advice and counsel, the questions that you will get from the CEO will be ten times worse.” (Location 1733)
  • “Hire who is right for the company and find out how committed they are regarding staying with the company. What are their goals? Can you help them succeed?” (Location 1770)
  • “Then understand their currency. Some people are motivated by money, some want recognition, others want more trust to work on tougher projects. Find out what they like so you can give it when they perform well. Additionally, when you ask for feedback, you should take steps to appreciate the input, and take action to make changes needed. No one will leave feedback if it isn’t acted upon.” (Location 1772)
  • “To avoid fatigue and burnout associated with customer problem solving, and to keep CSM development on track, there are a few career development tactics that you can consider. For example, rotate CSMs across the customer lifecycle – onboarding, adoption, and renewal, or develop team members from one-to-many customer management to one-to-one customer management, or give CSMs additional leadership roles within the team.” (Location 1779)
  • motivates his team by telling them where they fit in the bigger picture and how they and the team will evolve going forward.100 (Location 1783)
  • best practices to help my team members transition to new teams. First, share with team members what growth options are available now, and what skills those options require. If those don’t appeal to a team member eager to move up, encourage them to be transparent about what they do want.” (Location 1800)
  • encourage people to seek out skill development, not higher titles. In a fast-changing company, being great at the work will be more rewarding (and make an employee more valuable) than taking a title that could become irrelevant.” (Location 1805)
  • KickOffLabs found that improvements in a user’s first 5 minutes can drive 50% increase in lifetime value. (Location 1921)
  • For the customer, onboarding is when they: 1. Learn how to use the product: Educate and familiarize the end user with the product so that they can get started. 2. Drive early adoption: Show them out how get value from the product. 3. Realize the long-term potential: Help your customers learn what long-term value your product provides! (Location 1953)
  • For the customer success team, onboarding is what you work on: 1. Seamless sales hand-off: Make a great first impression during the sales hand-off to show your customer how valued they are. 2. Efficiency: Because there aren’t enough hours in the day to show each customer everything that they need to know, be efficient to maximize impact per effort. (Location 1958)
  • For example, you could provide a one-to-many onboarding or self-serve options. 3. Segmentation: Each customer is different, and therefore may warrant a different onboarding experience. For example, a customer with a thousand employees should be catered to differently compared to an office of just ten employees. Segment your customers so that you can provide the best experience possible that matches their needs! 4. Expectation management: Build on the customer’s momentum, curiosity, and manage expectations early on to set both your customer and yourself up for success. (Location 1962)
  • help our customers learn how to use Slido, we have three methods. One, we’ve tried to push as many of our training sessions as possible into group training webinars. Two, we just launched our in-app video academy which quickly shares how to use our key features. And three, we run Master classes in the cities with the highest (Location 2029)
  • we assigned an Onboarding Specialist to our customers who weren’t receiving high-touch support. This specialist is the one who looks after new licenses in their first 90 days to ensure that they are able to implement and make the necessary changes in their organization. (Location 2033)
  • “What is critical is during the pre-sales process, ensure that your sales team (or pre-Sales Engineers) ask what success looks like from the customer’s perspective as an actual metric – both in the short term (i.e. when you can consider the implementation stage to be complete) and the long term (i.e. the factors that will decide to renew or grow).” (Location 2043)
  • During the early days of a customer’s journey, there is an “excitement multiplier” that will magnify the initiatives you run for your customers. By getting them engaged as soon as possible, not only are you setting them up for success, but your customer can also see derived value early. (Location 2049)
  • Seeing these early wins with your product will then act as an incentive to continue engagement. (Location 2054)
  • Driving early adoption also helps to identify key end users who could help not only prove value to the stakeholders, but also provide testimonials and contract negotiations later on. (Location 2056)
  • The objective behind dynamic early adoption is to figure out how their organization can derive the most value possible and to hit the ground running. (Location 2062)
    1. Define what “success” is from the customer’s point of view 2. Determine the onboarding strategy that sets them up for success 3. Create product stickiness to establish quick value wins (Location 2064)
  • “Facebook, for example, considers that moment reached when a user has added at least seven friends within the first 10 days.” (Location 2075)
  • Day Zero is the moment when a customer has completed the necessary tasks so they can start to realize the full value of your product for the job they are hiring it to do.” (Location 2087)
  • “Achieving Day Zero doesn’t mean customers are realizing value, it means they’re able to begin realizing the full value. (Location 2088)
  • As your customer, I’ve spent the past nine months of my life routinely running a report and checking key metrics in your platform with my morning coffee. The notification I receive in my inbox when the report is ready gives me a pleasant feeling, and it’s going to take a lot for me to abandon this habit.” (Location 2113)
    • Note: Addability to send lighthoue reports on a regulr schedule
  • “You can provide a perfect customer onboarding experience with seamless setup and great training; the customer can absolutely love your product or service; there can be a 100% adoption rate and you can still lose the customer. It happens across industries all the time. Why?” (Location 2120)
  • “It happens because decision makers and key stakeholders are unable to see the benefits of using the products or services in which they’ve invested. When they can’t see the value, they can’t justify spending money on it.” (Location 2123)
  • “The customer success plan is the map with the directions that provide details about the different steps, activities, and milestones along the way so the customer can track their progress.” (Location 2154)
  • “The best customer success plans tie the context of the overall product vision to the tactics that must be executed in order to realize the value proposition. (Location 2161)
  • “The most powerful part is something we call a maturity model, which tells the customer by using our software, what are the six different value domains you will receive and what are the different levels of maturity you can achieve. We have six value domains and five maturity levels.” “Think of it as a matrix with thirty boxes in it. We map all our customers to each of the boxes and we talk with their executives saying, which step do you want, do you want to go to level 3 this year, do you want to go to level 2 because of the internal process. Based on that, we create action items. I think that is our most powerful part in our engagement model.” (Location 2175)
  • Internal Onboarding Objective: Seamless Sales Handoff (Location 2186)
  • important for your Customer Success Manager to know if anyone in the organization was against the selection of your service (Location 2193)
  • the knowledge transfer should also expose any red flags that happened during the sales process that could reappear: lack of responsiveness, stakeholders going dark, inaccurate information, missed deadlines, etc. If any of these things happened during the sales process, there’s a strong likelihood that they will happen again during the handoff/implementation process.” (Location 2195)
  • does your customer success team (which includes everyone who will interact with the customer post-sales) have everything it needs to set customers up for success? When a customer calls, can the customer success team bring up the account in question quickly and efficiently and be able to have actionable next steps to help the customer? If a customer has any special circumstances, how does sales communicate that to the customer success team? (Location 2203)