Balancing CS Strategy with Starting Now

I often share tools to use at the beginning of your Customer Success journey, namely creating a Customer Journey Map and a Customer Health scoring methodology. While taking a strategic approach is critical, lately I have had several conversations about piloting Customer Success for projects that are in motion right now. Here are a few thoughts on how to find a balance between a broader strategic approach and putting the wheels in motion for current projects right away.

• Customer Success starts with your mindset - make decisions based on what is best for your customer and their long-term goals. You can do this without letting your customers pull you in different directions - be curious about their needs and take them into account as you build your strategy and take daily actions.

• Make time for a Customer Journey workshop - spending a few hours to take a step back and view your lifecycle through the customer’s eyes makes such a difference!

• Build simple outcome playbooks/success plans - what does success look like for your customer? What key things do they need to see to justify buying more?

• Pick a few key metrics to measure proactively. For example, how often is your customer logging in to your dashboard? Are you connecting with the right stakeholders? What is their ROI? If you don’t have resources to set up a robust Health scoring methodology, you can start with a few metrics and increase your chances of highlighting issues sooner.

• If you are ready to apply your new tools more strategically, pick just a few clients first. Try measuring them and see how it goes, then scale.

• Don’t be afraid to start with your new tools manually, then automate later. This will help you to test and adjust before automating through sophisticated systems.

Many companies may not have the resources to set up a robust system, to measure regularly, and to act on risk items as thoroughly as they would like. However, finding a way to spend a bit of time on applying a CS approach can pay off in the long term. I was speaking with a colleague recently about a customer who recently churned, and they were spending a lot of time after losing the customer trying to figure out what went wrong. Spending this same time proactively instead can make the difference in losing customers vs. delighting them.

No matter how mature a business is, there are steps that can be taken to improve its Customer Success approach and increase the likelihood of having delighted customers.