The growth and development of the company will certainly require a reorganization of the departments responsible for the success of clients. To maintain a high level of customer satisfaction and enhance customer experience, it is important to plan ahead of time to ensure customer success when scaling the business – before that moment arrives and you have to whip things up.
If you are promoting solutions that can relieve users of certain problems for a long time, it will not be enough just to hire more employees in the support department: a sustainable customer success plan is the starting point from which your team will build on in the process of scaling.
There are five areas that executives should watch out for the procedure, hiring, management, metrics, and learning. Let’s consider each of them in more detail. Today, however, addressing consumers’ needs and expectations necessitate getting to know them as individuals. That entails gathering their feedback on a regular basis, removing barriers to communication, and taking steps to develop a long-term connection with them rather than just a transactional one. Your high quality of service is the “ace in the hole” that will keep potential consumers from fleeing if they become overwhelmed, confused, or just can’t find what they want.
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Optimizing customer interaction
As you scale your business, you cannot rely on people who believe that you can achieve success by acting on the sidelines. Defining a specific procedure for interacting with customers is especially important because, unlike other work functions, this is real-time work.
In addition, a consistent procedure ensures a consistent experience. During the scaling phases of a company, the Customer Success Team helps fill the product gaps that are causing subscribers to stop using the service and never return.
So when should work begin to develop a uniform procedure?
The ideal time is when your customer success department grows to 5 people. In extreme cases – 10. Otherwise, you will not avoid a catastrophe.
The development of a procedure usually begins with documentation. Challenge your managers to set aside time on the work schedule to document their progress, starting with the most common scenarios (flowcharts can be extremely useful here).
You shouldn’t try to document every workflow, but for you to be able to scale the department, you need to record about 80%. The remainder can be finalized by senior managers, who can then effectively implement these procedures in the department.
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Hiring
One of the important processes you will need to put in place once you’re ready to scale is hiring. Most companies, unfortunately, do not pay enough attention to the process of hiring those specialists who will conduct a dialogue with clients on behalf of the organization. Plan to invest in hiring more money and attention – because if you get the right people on your team, things will become much easier.
To be able to hire the best talent for the client success department, you first need to define the criteria for selection. Fortunately, most of the skills can be learned, but the following are not:
- Assertiveness: Customer success managers need to be persistent, goal-oriented, and easy-going. True CSMs are those who are eager to prove themselves. They want to move up the rankings, and they know they have to work hard to get it done.
- Commitment to Learning: The CSMs you need should be willing to learn, but also be able to take criticism appropriately.
- Positive Attitude: This is an often-overlooked quality. A negative person can reduce not only the morale of the entire department but also the performance of your business by mistreating customers. Every beginner should be, above all, a positive person.
- Empathy: If you are going to put someone on the phone, you must make sure that these people are not indifferent to the problems of the people who turn to them for advice. Empathy must be sincere. Otherwise, the interlocutor on the other end of the line will feel it pretty quickly.
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Management.
As your company grows, you will need to consider creating multiple levels of management. A single person can solely run a small startup, but as your organization grows, you will also need middle managers. The manager is responsible for the overall strategy, definition of initiatives, metrics, and also helps his managers to cope with their responsibilities better. Middle levels of management are generally responsible for the quality work of the consultants.
Managers should have at least a year of customer experience, and ideally some kind of management experience as well. They must not only possess all the qualities and skills of an effective CSM, but also the ability to teach it. Also, from time to time, they have to sit down at the phone themselves in order to keep their finger on the pulse and not lose touch with their team.
One of the common mistakes is to promote a person up the career ladder simply because there are vacancies. The candidate must be prepared for this kind of work internally. The best way to determine this readiness is to delegate to the employee some of the tasks performed by the manager. Once he proves that he can handle this level of work, he can be given a promotion.
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Data and indicators.
As the CSM grows, data becomes more and more important. While most platforms for customer success have built-in metrics, it often happens that you have to tie together different data sources. For this reason, the customer success department should enlist the support of technical and other business services to set up the infrastructure. Customer success teams need two types of metrics: customer satisfaction and productivity.
Customer satisfaction is a metric that indicates whether the CSM department is doing well in its primary mission of helping customers. Common customer satisfaction metrics include Service Level, First Call Result -FCR, CSAT, Net Promoter Score (NPS).
By looking at performance metrics, you can gauge how well a department is performing. This indicator can be the number of closed tickets per hour or the average ticket processing time by one consultant per week.
The head of the department should not only keep track of most of the indicators but also constantly work on their growth and improvement.
It is important to see metrics at several levels: company, manager, and consultant. Over time, you will understand what values are optimal for you. Also, pay attention to all sorts of anomalies. If one of the counselors consistently exceeds one of the metrics, find out what he is doing differently and teach others to do the same.
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Training and development.
Most companies do not invest enough in the training and development of their people. This is a big mistake. Learning starts with onboarding. The initial training process should cover all processes for which the employee will be responsible. After a person gets acquainted with the peculiarities of his work, he should spend a couple of days observing how professionals do their work.
It is important to show how the client’s success fits into the big picture. If an employee simply follows a pattern without realizing how important this function is, they will inevitably lose motivation. A candidate needs to understand a simple point: Even a small change in customer retention can have a big impact on the entire business.
If you do not perceive employee training as an ongoing process, then make another common mistake. Training should not end for at least two reasons: first, it will make your customers happier, and second, it will make the employees themselves happier, as training will develop them as professionals and help them stay involved in the process.