Strategies for Scaling Customer Experience in SaaS

Reflecting on a recent lesson learned by my Digital Success team, while companies traditionally concentrate on managing customer intake primarily for support, there's immense value in expanding this focus to encompass all go-to-market teams. Recently, we launched an intake process for our unnamed customer success segments, and in doing so, we were inundated with requests unrelated to success and queries spanning sales and renewals. Instead of stopping there, we decided: why not provide a single platform for customers to address all their inquiries across all teams? Consequently, we expanded intake to include renewals and sales, enabling customers to choose from a menu of options to get help. Here are the advantages of adopting such a strategy: 🔔 Deeper Insight into Customer Needs: Broadening intake across all GTM teams provides a holistic view of customer needs throughout their journey. By allowing customers to tell us what they need, we are informing our roadmap for new areas of automation or digitization.  📌 Clarity in Team Responsibilities: Defining roles and responsibilities across multiple teams can be challenging. By integrating intake processes across all GTM functions, leaders facilitate clearer task delineation, thereby enhancing efficiency and accountability.  🔑 Consistency in Customer Experience: Consistency is the cornerstone of exceptional customer experience. Standardizing intake processes across all GTM teams guarantees that every customer interaction receives consistent attention and care, irrespective of the touchpoint or channel used. Not only that but it gives the customer a consistent place to request help no matter which team they need that help from. Take note, there are challenges to this strategy that are equally important: 1️⃣ Routing: Ensuring that tickets are routed to the appropriate system for each team is essential. We do not want teams operating out of multiple systems or things will get lost and therefore not addressed. 2️⃣ Audit: Regular auditing of incoming tickets and timely responses is crucial. If you are going to open up an intake channel for customers you need to ensure you are responding to all incoming tickets and requests.  3️⃣ Data Analysis: Periodically review the types of tickets received, understand if customers are exploring different avenues to address pain points, and identifying areas for digitization or self-service options that are vital for continually improving the customer experience. #customerintake #digitalsuccess #cxstrategy #customersuccess #innovation 

What if you could reduce headcount on the right side of the bowtie, while at the same time increasing expansion rates? TLDR; Two things: Do away with your one size serves all: focus on accounts with the most white space And Talk to your customers when it matters: more triggered and fewer scheduled touchpoints Using these strategies we have seen clients reduce headcount by 33% paired while increasing retention by 7% (absolute). How does this work? Many CSMs spent their time mostly on the customers who scream loudest, not on the customers that are most deserving of their time.. Instead segment customers by white space and likelihood to expand, then put the low white space clients on a self-service or 1:many path, giving your CSMs and AMs more time to spend with strategic accounts. Note that a strategic account is NOT necessarily the account who has already purchased the most from you or the largest company. Instead strategic accounts are those with the most future potential. Second, think about when your customers wants to hear from you. Move away from purely scheduled check ins to conversations that are triggered by an event, good or bad. Triggers could be something that’s in the news, a new stakeholder, a new product, or signals of concern such as low usage or high customer ticket volume. If you spend more time with your accounts which have most white space, you’ll see more expansion. If you talk to your strategic accounts when it matters most, you’ll see better retention and expansion. Have you deployed any of these strategies in your company? What were the results? #saas #customersuccess #expansion #retention #nrr #churn #revenuearchitecture #bowtie

Are you seeing your CS team grow to huge numbers? Is your CFO balking at your headcount request for 2023 to match sales projected numbers? A common problem is that many B2B SaaS companies have only 1 tier for their CX team. Even though sales may have many segments and acquisition models, your team still does a white-glove approach, whether they are paying $1000 a year or $100,000. While many opt for a big pendulum swing and try to scale their CS team Digital First Engagement Model (link to an article on this in comments), there are other options before going full tilt no touch. Questions to ask yourself: - Do you have tiers in your CS engagement model? - Do you have different success metrics across the tiers? - Do you implement customers differently based on tiers? - Do you have CSM's run different playbooks based on the tiers? - Are there functions that ALL tiers could benefit from a tech touch? - Do you have a lightweight training platform where new users can learn and do? In-app tools, FAQs, videos, etc. If this seems daunting, post a comment to ask or feel free to book some time to discuss.