With a greater understanding of post-sales functions, many of the SaaS Businesses have already started implementing Customer Success as a dedicated functionality to run their Business. However, one of the challenges of building a customer success team in a SaaS organization is that most have still not acknowledged that Customer Success is a distinct discipline, with entirely different goals and metrics than Sales, Support, and Service and hence often Customer Success fails.
Here are some situations to why the Customer Success functions fail in a SaaS Business along with the measures that could be taken to step up your CS game.
A very obvious reason why most of the time Customer Success fails in an organization is when Customer Health is not rightly monitored. This data-driven way of measuring the customer’s overall engagement with your product or platform is an integral part of your customer success process once you grow from a small company to a large one.
It’s important to gather your customer’s Health scores and ensure you’re taking every opportunity to recognize what makes them stay with your brand. Health Score acts as an early warning signal, encouraging you to take proactive actions.
Most SaaS businesses mistake Customer health with only product adoption but Customer Health is not only about product adoption. There are various dimensions to the overall Customer Health than merely as to how a customer adopts your product.
The traditional form of Health Score was calculated as a single score. However, health never comes in one shape and form. As mentioned before, there are multiple dimensions to health. Applying it back to the health of an account, a single customer health score is a deception.
The need for a comprehensive picture led to the ideation of the concept of the customer 360 view.
Customer 360-degree view allows you to be proactive
360 view of a customer’s data, or 360 Account Health takes into account every interaction, from product usage, the financial status of an account, touchpoints maintained and tracked, high-level risk score, segment level health to the efficiency and the effectiveness of the customer support system.
Needless to say that Customers will always have questions. The actual test of an interested customer is his or her ability to ask questions. The moment your customers go in and out of your business life without asking questions, you should begin suspecting.
If you are a customer success leader, you can’t just walk to a CSM’s desk and ask what’s going on with an XYZ account. You need to keep a tab on all communications between CSMs and customers (especially key accounts) so that you know when to step in to save a customer.
Failed communication
You could either do this by having a single inbox for all CSMs or if you have a customer success software like CustomerSuccessBox, all customer communication including calls, emails, and tasks would be in one centralized place as we integrate with Gmail (2-way), Outlook (2-way), Twilio (for making calls) and you can also auto-create tasks via playbooks and assign to CSMs.
Now, the CSM can perform all his daily tasks right from the platform without having to toggle between systems.. And as a leader, you can just log in to the platform and see what is happening in accounts at high risk of churn currently.
lack of a customer service strategy
underestimating the importance of customer onboarding
bombarding customers with too much information
bad design choices
effective customer onboarding is imperative to ensure your customer success efforts doesn't fail
3 Onboarding Strategies to Spur User Adoption and Empower Customers
The Customer Success Manager must ensure that all the things promised during the sales process are delivered to the customer. The manager can start off by understanding what are those first 90 days goals that the customer has and how can the CSM help customer achieve their first milestone in the first 90 days. The CSM needs to sit with the customer to prioritize those goals and handhold them in their journey of achieving those .
This could be done by keeping track of your customer’s behavior from time to time. Not just a month or two, but six months and beyond. Identifying customer trends is important. This will help you predict. When you see indicators of failure, proactively reach out.
When you do not segment your customers, you run into an additional problem — the risk of over-delivering. At first, glance, giving customers more than they expect doesn’t seem like much of a problem. We’ve all heard the mantra “under-promise and over-deliver” but while that approach may increase customer satisfaction, it is not focused on specific customer goals and can be a barrier to scalability. Find out what your customers want, what they need, and deliver it in a way that encourages continued use.
Final thoughts
Setting up a Customer success function could be really challenging but when done the right way could definitely be rewarding. With all the above-mentioned probable failure situations you can reevaluate the pitfalls coming to your business. Remember customer success is not just a mere function, it rather is a more holistic approach to achieving your company’s success synced with your customer’s success. Thus, formalizing those essential practices and making them the core of every part of your business will take you and your company a long way ahead of your competitors.
Check out this blog on -Knowledge transfer from sales to Customer Success
https://customersuccessbox.com/blog/transfer-from-sales-to-customer-success/