Business success and growth can dilute the ability to measure and optimize customer success. The larger a customer base grows, the more difficult it becomes to clearly and efficiently observe whether or not customers are reaching their goals for your product or service. Customer success can seem like it is a human-focused component of the customer lifecycle. Often, successful small to mid-sized businesses tout their close personal attention in delivering to their customers. But for companies that offer their product or service in a SaaS method of delivery, growth is certainly a constant goal.

Because customer success is often intertwined with a one-on-one relationship, growth can overwhelm a Customer Success team. Customer success can suffer if a business does not plan for scale. To sustain success and experience even more growth, companies need to find a way to ensure customer success in a highly efficient manner that delivers the relationship customers want while being easily replicable and responsive to changes in customer needs.

Scalability requires an intelligent application of automation. To achieve optimal automation, businesses need a solution that allows them to scale without losing touch of customers. With a clear understanding of what success means to your customers, growth can enhance customer success.

Personalize

The first step in scaling customer success is to identify how your customer defines success. More important than any particular tactic, defining success clears up any potential misunderstandings that can worsen as a business takes on more customers. It also provides a business with information that can be used to create rules, trigger actions and alerts, and enable dynamic segmentation for increased efficiencies.

Putting personalization into action means collecting the right kind of information in both the sakes and post-sales process.

Centralize processes

Once you know your customers’ goals, you can take steps to centralize processes so that, at a high level, you can better control these processes. Just as you need to know which direction your customer is headed; you also need to know what resources you have at your disposal to help them with their goals. Centralized processes are scalable because they are easier to repeat.

Also, visibility increases so you can get granular with events and design custom triggers at the automation process. When your processes are highly efficient, scalable delivery is less likely to result in dilution of service quality. Centralized processes help you generate efficiencies of scale, by managing tasks, alerts, and touchpoints through automated dashboards that follow the customer journey.

Segment

When you have processes centralized, you then need to breakdown the individual customer journey in a manner that uncovers what has to happen for a customer to be successful. This is different from identifying success, as it looks more closely at which actions will most likely lead to the desired result.

Segmenting the post-sales process helps businesses identify customers that might require a more hands-on approach in managing their success, and also identify customer relationships that are easier to scale. It boils down to a straightforward application of efficient processes building.

Automate actions

Once you know your customer, centralize processes, and breakdown the customer lifecycle, you can automate operations accordingly. Automation can involve creating multi-channel communication and alerts to provide feedback on features and events and can deploy notifications and surveys through an in-app experience. It’s easy to see how the efficiencies built into the early stages of preparing for scale allow more efficient automation.

Analyze usage behavior

Efficiencies do not end with automation. The right system enables monitoring customer interactions and success and adapting when necessary. Also, usage behavior is a key metric for success, especially when a SaaS solution is highly customized. If your organization sells a tailored solution in a SaaS format, both your and your customer’s success is tied to an ongoing relationship that can scale, and behavior insights are crucial to that relationship. 

Weaving customer success throughout your organization

Once optimized and automated, customer success initiatives can more easily become second nature in your organization. Automation frees executives, such as Customer Support Officers, to give appropriate one-on-one time with customers when needed. The goal may not ultimately be to remove all human involvement from the process, but rather to create efficiencies that help your customers achieve success.

Implementing these steps to improved scalability through automation requires the right solution.  SmartKarrot helps businesses achieve customer success at scale. Through behavioral analytics, personalization, and automation, SmartKarrot allows businesses to have unmatched visibility for a clear picture of customer success, no matter how many accounts they handle.

SmartKarrot operationalizes customer success through account monitoring and predefined relevant actions in response to customer behavior. SmartKarrot helps reduce churn rate, create an ongoing dialogue between businesses and customers on their level of success with a product or service, and help cement the relationship needed by customers to reach goals and businesses in attaining growth.

WRITTEN BYRakhin V

Rakhin has over 10 years of experience driving business development and client services. In his prior roles, he stayed close to customers to understand their requirements and help them achieve their business goals. He is passionate about customer success.

• 
• 
• 
• Copy link