How To Optimize and Scale your Customer Success Workflows

What is a Customer Success Workflow?

If you’re a Customer Success Manager (CSM), you know how tough the job is. Your data is scattered across multiple platforms. So you must manage chat, email, calendars, call notes, ticketing systems, and Customer Success platforms. With so much clutter and so many tasks to complete, it’s easy for you to lose track of how your clients are really doing. This is why having a Customer Success Workflow becomes critical!

Put simply, a Customer Success workflow is a set of activities carried out by a CSM to boost product adoption and generate more consistent and proven value for their customers. Some examples include- Phone calls, Emails, Online conferences, Evaluation of product feature usage trends, Research about a customer’s firm and/or business, etc.

Why should you document workflows for CSMs?

Providing value to the customers is the ultimate goal for you, as a CSM. For that to happen, you need to document customer success workflows/processes. This helps you to identify what’s working and what is not. It also helps to build repeatable, scalable, and profitable processes.

Creating and documenting effective workflows is definitely a challenge. But once that’s sorted and out of the way, CSMs can use the newly built workflows/processes to select the right approach for each customer. The purpose is to create customer success workflows that help your company and its customers grow together. To accomplish this, consider the milestones and experiences that arise along the customer journey. This allows you to specify the procedures that customer success teams should take to provide a positive customer experience.

Examples of Customer Success Workflows

The workflows are designed to proactively help your customers succeed. Handle customer lifecycle events including onboarding, product adoption, renewals, and more with structured customer success workflows.

Onboarding workflow

Onboard your customers using time-bound customer success workflows. To accomplish successful automated customer onboarding, create, manage, and assign tasks. Take your customers through a well-planned onboarding process. Create a product adoption process and track your customers’ progress.

Product adoption workflow

Creating tasks and triggers (automating) is a way to scale your customer success game. Configure triggers and send automated emails to customers encouraging them to explore features not included in their current plan. Create a task for the CSM to confirm the opportunity.

With automated workflows, you will never miss an opportunity for interaction with your customers. When customers’ last login was “n” days ago, bring in a human. Do the same when an essential feature utilization has dropped dramatically, or key lifecycle milestones have been missed. The CSM’s assistance can get the account back on track.

Retention and Renewal workflow

Customer Success Intelligence (CSI) uses AI, machine learning, and big data to figure out what drives renewals and upsells. Give CSM unrivaled authority to push product adoption, give value, and ensure shot upsells. These Customer Success workflows ensure that the CSMs and the team don’t ever miss a touchpoint with customers.

Upsell Workflow

Automate all upsell processes and communications so that your clients can experience high-touch solutions without your CSM doing any of the labor while still driving growth. Consider going beyond the Onboarding Playbook. You can develop an upsell strategy in CustomerSuccessBox to identify when a customer is ready for an upgrade. Set tasks for the CSM to guarantee that the upsell process is smooth.

Optimize and Scale your CS workflows

Customer Success Technology

Having a robust Customer Success tech is, rather, an underrated requirement to optimize and scale your customer success workflows. Use proven technology to assist you in doing so. Remember to choose a customer success software that allows CSMs to quickly choose the best course of action in a range of situations.

Streamline your Workflows

This is a critical component of a strong customer success workflow since it guarantees a positive customer experience. As mentioned earlier, developing scalable and profitable processes is important to provide consistent value to customers. Using technology to build a shared roadmap of best practices empowers the team and serves as a reference point when needed.

Manage customer lifecycle events including onboarding, renewals, and more with structured workflows.

Establish benchmarks to track overall growth.
Make to-do lists and next action tasks.
Workflows can be deployed automatically based on rules.

Access and Employ Real-Time Data

A customer success team’s ability to make timely and relevant decisions is dependent on having access to correct data. Your team should be able to convey the intended message at the right time and have meaningful, relevant interactions by “slicing and dicing” the data. Bringing together all of your data gives your staff a comprehensive picture of the customer’s health.

Give your customer success team a solution with all the tools they need to make the most of their unique workflows. Customer data is accessible from a single location, ensuring that all people of your organization have easy access to it. It should serve as an early warning system and a decision-making framework for best customer practices. It should also enable your team to create milestones and track progress, allowing them to see the immediate results of their work. Customers will have a top-quality experience through their journey if all of these factors are still together.

Standardize your processes/playbooks

Stop creating new processes with every new customer. To save time and keep everybody aligned across the customer journey, use templates for repeating processes.

Communication is key

Communication with customers is crucial. Optimizing and scaling customer success workflows is incomplete without a proper communication channel. Different campaigns can be used by CS teams for a variety of purposes, including customer enablement, feature releases, outreach for renewals, and more.

Acquire feedback from customers

Gather customer input on a regular basis and alter workflows as needed. Data from the Voice of Customer tells you if your processes are having the desired effect. Keep in mind that the client experience evolves with time, so you may need to revisit and refine your current procedures.

Final Thoughts on Customer Success Workflows

A customer success workflow is a set of actions that a customer success team follows to provide more long-term value to its customers. These actions must be performed in a specific order in order to fulfill and maintain a customer’s lifetime journey.

A strong workflow is one that maintains the agility to shape procedures in response to changing customer needs and demands. Understand and follow the above points to optimize and scale your CS processes/workflows.

Puneet Kataria, Customer Success Box
Original post here.