How To Build a Successful Customer Journey?

Too often, after installing new software, a customer is left to their own devices. They should have an Account Manager or key contact assigned to contact with questions, but this isn’t always the case.

Two of the most common causes of churn are a poor onboarding process and clients struggling to accomplish their first “success” using your product. Both can get solved if your organization has a dedicated individual whose mission is to assure a customer’s success with your product.

An increasing number of companies are creating Customer Success Manager (CSM) roles, responsible for guiding customers to success with the product. They collaborate cross-functionally with support, sales, and product teams, gather, manage, and evaluate various vital metrics.

What is Customer Experience?

Customer Experience (CX) is a term used to describe how a company engages with its customers at every point of their journey. Customer experience is in large part, the sum total of all interactions a customer has with your brand. That impression has the power to shape how people see your company and how likely they are to conduct business with you and speak positively about your brand.

CX affects customer satisfaction since the degree to which customers feel they are understood has a strong influence over their level of satisfaction and their decision to engage, Companies get scored higher for customer satisfaction if they provide a good customer experience.

Excellent customer service is connected to greater brand loyalty and retention rates. After all, customers who have a positive customer experience are five times more likely to suggest a brand to others. According to the research, customers with a positive CX are also 54% more likely to buy from you again.

What is a Customer Success Manager?

CSMs are a unique combination of customer service and sales. Their primary purpose is to assist clients when they go from prospects to active users. They’re usually in charge of retaining customer relationships, upselling existing customers on new products, cultivating long-term relationships with them, and ensuring that their customers achieve the goals they set out to achieve when they bought your product.

In recent years, it’s become more expensive for businesses to acquire new customers. That’s why you need to focus on keeping existing customers happy — happy customers become your advocates:

• Customer Success is an Operating Philosophy for your company.
• Customer Success Management is an Operating Model for your company.
• Customer Success is a Growth Engine if you operationalize accordingly.

The cause for the tremendous growth of CSM roles in the SaaS industry is simple: in recent years, it’s become more expensive for businesses to acquire new customers. Focusing on keeping existing customers engaged and happy — leads to lifetime customer loyalty and decreased loss. In the long run, investing resources to improve a customer’s experience and ensure they are as successful as possible with the product pays off.

It’s important to note that the CSM’s role does not include giving technical assistance or sales. Its purpose is to ensure that the customer is satisfied with the product and has everything they require. Even though the function is relatively new in the SaaS space, it has had a 34% annual growth rate.

How Revenue Operations Support the Customer Success Team?

Customer Success Operations is an extension of Revenue Operations. You’ll need to start establishing effective methods for managing your team after you have roughly 5 CSMs. That’s when you should hire a Revenue Operations Manager.

Some of the major tasks of Revenue Operations is to create repeatable procedures for:

• NPS/CSAT/CES metrics
• Systems implementation
• Customer communication
• Revenue operations and forecasting

Revenue Operations additionally establishes performance measures for these processes to assess their efficacy and steer their growth. They should track performance metrics in four critical categories:

• Revenue: RevOps creates a revenue projection to reflect impending renewals and revenue that is at risk. As a CSM, you should be prepared to enter into a board meeting with a transparent PowerPoint detailing what quarterly revenue is up for renewal and at-risk, as well as why.
• Product: RevOps provides product usage and adoption data to the CS team, with the support of your Chief Product Officer and Product Managers so that they may make informed, data-backed decisions.
• Customer feedback: RevOps examines the results of customer satisfaction surveys (such as NPS, CSAT, and CES) to advise leadership on areas for improvement.
• Customer experience: RevOps keeps track of service quality and productivity concerning overall operational effectiveness.

What Does a Revenue Operations Manager Need to Know?

The RevOps team plays a pivotal role in balancing between the resources input and production capabilities to meet the business goals.

Therefore, they should be familiar with the following:

• CRM Software (e.g. Salesforce, Gainsight, Totango)
• In-app messaging Software (e.g.Intercom)
• Support platforms (e.g. Zendesk, FreshDesk)
• KPIs for Customer Success

Having transparency in these areas is crucial for the role since data silos are a major hindrance to organizational efficiency and detract from your customers’ experience.

How to do it Right with Revenue Operations?

• Monitoring the CRM system
• Handling the Customer Success Platform
• Revenue forecasting, including renewal pipeline and expansions
• Account risk management
• Monitoring customer usage
• Binding advocacy
• Track and report service or product issues

Measuring Customer Satisfaction with Revenue Operations

There are various customer satisfaction metrics, with the most common being:

• NPS
• CSAT
• CES

It will be up to you to determine which is the best metric to use for your business.

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

NPS can be considered as a growth indicator, as it’s an indicator that determines the following:

• How satisfied your clients are with your products or services
• How loyal they are to your brand
• How likely they are to endorse your business to others

NPS surveys are quick and easy to complete and can be sent at any step of the customer lifecycle using various survey channels such as web, email, text messages, etc. An NPS question, for example, can be prompted to appear:

• When a customer makes a purchase or starts a trial
• When a customer contacts your support service
• When a user does a specific activity on your website

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

The Customer Satisfaction Score is a customer experience metric that assesses customer satisfaction directly. CSAT surveys help determine how satisfied customers are with a company action or specific components of your products or services.

For example, after a client has completed the onboarding process, you can send a CSAT survey to determine efficiency and if any modifications are needed.

Customer Effect Score (CES)

CES is defined as a metric for measuring customer satisfaction levels by focusing on how much effort customers put in to interact with your business.

The goal of the survey is to assist you in figuring out if customers are having trouble executing particular tasks while dealing with your brand and then take the required steps to streamline procedures based on the survey results.

CES surveys most often get used in the following instances:

· Following a client’s interaction with customer service

· When a customer interacts with a product or service and makes a purchase or signs up for a subscription

· When a company wants to know how satisfied customers are with their products or services

Why Do You Need Revenue Operations to Scale your Success Team?

To ensure effective customer engagement, renewal, expansions processes you must avoid poor strategy, organization, and execution, otherwise it will hurt your productivity and therefore your scalability and you will not be able to reduce churn rates.

RevOps becomes viably and financially beneficial when adding a resource focused on process, procedures, and automation/playbooks more than pays back your investment in that resource. They set performance metrics for these processes, like net MMR churn, to measure the effectiveness and guide the CSMs to continual improvement. At a minimum, they should track performance metrics across four key areas: revenue, product, customer feedback, and customer experience.

In short, revenue operations managers are responsible for providing tactical support to the rest of the success team, helping them improve their KPIs and their efficiency.

Conclusion

Leadership in Customer Success should be focused on their team and strategy, with customers being the primary focus of Customer Success Managers.

We know that putting the client first increases retention and revenue for SaaS companies. The dynamic nature of your everyday operations will continue to evolve as your business and Customer Success team grow.

You’ll have more customers, each with its own set of requirements and data. It is not feasible to hire to meet this need. Instead, through Revenue Operations and your fuel for scalability, productivity, and long-term business value, you’ll need to improve your operations to cut inefficiencies and expenses.

Customers can give honest feedback on any part of your product that bothers, upsets, or disappoints them. They have complete control over what is and isn’t relevant, allowing them to deliver the most helpful feedback.

The final result is more direct, actionable, and relevant feedback that your team can utilize to make simple adjustments to your product that will enhance retention and monthly recurring revenue.

I co-wrote this blog post with Revital Hacham; Revital has been helping customers succeed for over ten years — by building relationships and creating a customer success strategy centered around retention, growth, and delighting customers.