Scaling Customer Success to the Rest of Your Customers

If you already have a customer success practice, you may be doing a good job managing your largest, most strategic accounts. Meanwhile, the rest of your customers—those “long tail” or “C” accounts that represent as much as 80% of your customer base—are churning. Maybe you’re ignoring increased share of wallet opportunities through upsell and cross-sell, or you’re simply not ensuring these customers get the full value of your product or solution.

No matter which segments comprise the rest of your customers, you know who they are. And you know losing them would hurt.

Companies of all sizes struggle with how to manage the rest of their customers at scale. A growing number of customer success leaders under pressure to do more with less are seeking fresh ways to realize efficiencies while maximizing every revenue opportunity. Digital engagement is the smartest way to achieve both. In fact, if you’re not already looking at digital as the means to scale, you’re being left behind.

Why Scale Customer Success?

As a customer success leader, you’re looking for cost-effective, efficient, profitable ways to manage ALL of your customers. That demands you scale customer success. More on that in a moment.

But first, what is scale? At a high level, scaling is efficiently repeating core functions to establish and increase their profitability. For customer success, this means further moving from a reactive to proactive mode while simultaneously increasing asynchronous, digital-first, and self-serve customer enablement. It involves:

• Uncovering your customers’ lived experiences with your product. What are they experiencing? What do they want to get out of your product to realize its maximum value?
• One-to-many customer interactions that feel high touch and solve bespoke customer issues
• Proactive guidance around engagement across standardized touchpoints along the customer’s journey
• Insights into common customer trends and patterns you can feed back into your digital enablement strategy
• Better means for customer success managers to make proactive recommendations on account expansion

And it’s the only profitable way to serve the rest of your customers. A one-to-many approach allows you to serve your at-risk customers in a way that’s efficient for you yet feels high touch to them.

It’s all about optimizing customer motions and outcomes by using tech-enabled customer success to create digital touches across targeted segments. Explore this in more detail in our blog, A Maturity Model for Building a Customer Success Practice.

Digital Customer Success: The Linchpin to Serving Long-Tail Customers

The transition to digital customer success is a movement driven by inflation and fluctuating economic conditions, advances in digital engagement technology, and its promise of delivering a better customer experience.

Digital is helpful with managing all your accounts, but when it comes to your long-tail customers, it’s a game changer. Digital allows you to make customer engagements feel high touch, even when they’re not, efficiently. It also enables you to target your underserved accounts with consistent, personalized engagement and deliver them an experience that makes them feel as valued as your big accounts do.

It also enables asynchronous digital customer self-service—an important part of the future of scaling customer success—whereby customers have push- and on-demand access to the content and support they want, how and when they want it.

A robust digital engagement strategy automates those daily tasks your reps undertake every day, such as task reminders, customer health checks, responses to customer FAQs, knowledge base updates, or sending email templates after customer onboarding or cadence calls with your customers. A digital engagement strategy is a reliably efficient framework that will hold for your team, no matter how they change or grow. As you build your team, you can institutionalize it and make it inherent to your culture and practices.

Your tech stack should enable:

• Anyone connected to the account will be able to rely on automation that tells them where to be, the type of touch, with whom, the frequency of engagement needed, and recommended follow ups. They’ll also be able to see account health scoring.
• Anyone on the team will have clear directives about what action they should take with any level of client at any given moment.
• A deeper level of insight into what’s going on in your customers’ businesses, enabling greater intimacy that allows you to tune into and deliver the value they WANT to get from your product.
• A talk track module that helps everyone on the team – from individual contributors to the head of the company – know when/what type/what language to use when they engage with customers. Consistent messaging provides for a cohesive customer experience across your brand from one rep to the next.
• Your tech stack should synchronize and read data from your CRM to the email and marketing software you use to interact with your customers so you can be sure you’re providing sellers with consistent messaging and content.
• Access to robust reporting capabilities and dashboards that establish a baseline of value realization and provide visibility across the organization to help you manage your progress toward your customers’ goals. It’s essential to give this level of visibility to both your front-line/upstream managers and across the organization.
• A 360-degree view of the customer relationship, allowing everyone to see how each rep is interfacing with the client, benefiting customers and building team cohesion.

The best outcomes occur when all customer success teammates are on the same page, equipped to deliver a well-orchestrated service that translates into a world-class customer experience. A digital + scaled practice can return quick, low-cost, repeatable profits from an audience you previously dismissed because, while you attempted to manage them with an unsustainable, one-to-one approach, chances are, you weren’t managing well.