The one thing that managers love to do is strategize. But, for that, you need to have precise execution.

There is always a talk about sales and marketing when products are flying off the shelves, subscriptions are increasing gradually, and revenues are jumping. However, without operations, nothing can run smoothly.

This thing also applies to customer success. Your customer success strategy will define the direction your company takes. But, your customer success operations will ensure that you reach your destination without any diversion.

Operation balances between your resources and sales. When it’s well-balanced, you get optimal organizational performance.

However, it is never easy to set up the structure and assign duties for CS operations. It needs to be altered and adapted over a while as the company expands.

But, the most important thing is to plan from scratch and assign appropriate resources to make sure it pays for you in the long run.

Let’s now look at the definition of CS operations.

What is CS Operations?

Customer success operations (or CS Ops) refers to the role, activities, and processes that help the customer success organization run more effectively and efficiently. It is an area that affects people involved across various departments in an organization like human resources, sales, marketing, accounting, and IT.

It is responsible for managing the operations that relate to customer success.

It comprises four different areas of responsibilities held by customer success leaders:

• Data: renewal forecasting, NPS, adoption, account health
• People: goals, targets, performance, workforce/team planning
• Process: Renewal playbooks, cross-functional coordination, proactive touchpoints
• Strategic Initiatives: customer experience, marketing, engagement initiatives, product

Today, customer success leaders and managers are too busy acquiring, retaining, and growing customers. If they do not have the desired focus, initiative, and care of a dedicated owner, these operational areas of customer success cannot survive long.

One way to overcome this problem is by getting resourceful customer success software to help CSMs perform their CS operations effectively.

I will let you know about the role played by SmartKarrot CS software in leveling up your CS operations in a bit. But before that, it is important to learn about the different challenges that customer success managers face in their regular working days.

Challenges faced by customer success managers in their day-to-day life

Here are some of the challenges faced by customer success managers in their day-to-day life:

1. Lack of consistency in nurturing the customers

One of the biggest challenges faced by customer success managers is the lack of consistency in customer nurturing. Due to this inconsistency, the customer churn rate increases and pulls the organization into a downward spiral.

This is where it becomes important to track customer accounts and activity on your product so that the relationship between the brand and the user can be nurtured further.

2. Coordinating between different teams can be a difficult task

It can be difficult to collaborate with multiple teams internally to enable customers and resolve their problems. This includes coordinating with:

• The support team that wishes to know the status of the tickets raised by the clients and escalate if required;
• The engineering/solutions team to work on technical/integration challenges;
• The product team to be well-aware of the product roadmap and give feedback about the product in case you have received any from the customers;
• The accounts/finance team to raise invoices or confirm if the payment has been made. They may use ready-made invoice templates to make their everyday operations go more quickly;
• The marketing team to facilitate success stories, case studies, best practice docks, etc.

3. Onboarding new customers

Once the opportunity has been converted, it is the job of the customer success team to meet with the customer and onboard them with your product. This includes clarifying the happenings across the sales cycle by proper handoff between the Account Executive and Customer Success Manager. It would help if you evaluated what features the customers liked, which competitors you lined against, what made the deal in your favor, who signs on the dotted line, etc.

4. Training and executing breakthrough solutions

You need to train the customers/stakeholders. This is especially critical for SaaS applications as they have to start using the product themselves. The training needs to be effective and properly structured so that the customer does not feel overwhelmed with the wealth of information.

5. Deriving value and communicating it to the customers

The customer success manager also must ensure how effectively every customer is interacting with your application.

Check out the stage they are in. Have they started using the product? If yes, is it working properly for them? Are they achieving their desired outcome?

These are some of the important questions that will define the renewal with the organization. The next step is to use the different tools to get the data points and strategize and devise an action plan.

It is equally important to use account intelligence through analytics and past data related to that account and regularly communicate it with the customer. This way, the customers/stakeholders are appraised of the journey with your product.

One way to resolve all these challenges faced by the customer success managers while performing daily customer success operations is by using an innovative tool like SmartKarrot.

Level up your CS operations using SmartKarrot

SmartKarrot delivers winning customer outcomes at scale by leveraging its most intelligent and actionable customer success software – spanning onboarding, adoption, operations, engagement, retention, CX, and revenue growth.

Here are some of the features that you as a customer success manager can avail from SmartKarrot to level up your CS operations:

1. Get complete customer visibility

A customer success manager must enhance their customer visibility by creating a solitary source of truth. This can be done by centralizing your customer data.

Unlike other customer success software, SmartKarrot has its own SK 360-degree customer view that provides a unified view of customer data.

This is done by leveraging data from other business systems and effortlessly visualizing trends in your business book using fully functional reports and dashboards.

SK 360-degree customer view helps uncover trends and insights to effortlessly consolidate and accumulate customer information from multiple sources and records.

It aids in uncovering the adoption data trends that aid in surfacing risks swiftly. Thus, it facilitates better customer conversations.

Customer success managers can leverage the robust rules engine present in SmartKarrot software to automatically trigger alerts to CSMs so that they can swiftly address churn risks or expansion opportunities.

CSMs also can use best-practice Playbooks to provide the much-needed consistency across the entire customer base.

It even aids in creating collaborative Success Plans that can be synced with your customer-facing teams. Thus, ensuring the implementation of key customer initiatives, objectives, and even tracking progress.

2. Move beyond the basic health scores

Typically, customer success software only has basic health scores under their purview. But, this is where SmartKarrot is different.

It comes with an SK health score feature wherein you can add different parameters, which are normally not present in various other customer success software.

With the help of these parameters, you can get comprehensive information about the health of your accounts.  

This includes a heat map that lets you know whether the health score of a particular customer is high or low. You can then take definite actions based on the information you collect.

You can add a custom index that gives you the liberty of doing much more than tracking the basic health scores of your customers. This gives you the freedom of including different parameters that can come in handy while evaluating the basic health scores of your customers.

SmartKarrot also supports multi-product and even multi-phase health scores as per the different stages of a customer lifecycle. This can perhaps be best used by enterprises with lots of customer success professionals working under them.

3. Save time

When you look closely at the daily routine of a customer success manager, you will understand how difficult their life is. They need to interact with the different departments in the organization, understand the customers’ needs, make the customer-facing departments more customer-centric, etc.

This is where it can be highly paying if they can save time from the mundane tasks they need to run into. This is what SmartKarrot customer success software does to the best of its ability.

With the help of different features like SK touchpoint, personalization, campaigns, project management, surveys, data mining, etc., customer success managers save ample time to concentrate on their main task of ensuring to make their customers successful.

4. Micro-segmentation

As a customer success manager, it becomes crucial to segment your customers to send campaigns to them during specific customer journey stages. This is done beautifully by SmartKarrot’s SK account segmentation.

Using this feature, CSMs can run an “n” number of campaigns in different customer journey stages. SmartKarrot allows customer success managers to run an “n” number of campaigns with an “n” number of combinations.

CSMs can even add account segments and additional filters like phases and categories to make things more streamlined. There is also an option to add financial filters to segment your customer base further.

You can even carry out user segments where you can have the option to add criteria to it.

All these features make SmartKarrot one of the most intelligent customer success software available in the market.

5. Rethink the customer journey

It is the job of a customer success manager to run the campaign and suggest which stage and what kind of action needs to be taken based on that particular CS campaign trigger the next goal. This is well-thought-out by SmartKarrot.

The company’s software allows CSMs to add a new campaign by defining the campaign units, target audience and then scheduling the campaign as per your convenience.

This helps generate a lot of traction for the organization and assists in capturing the attention of the target audience during the various stages of their customer journey.

6. Predictive analytics

Today it has become very important for customer success managers to use modern technology to track the renewal and expansion opportunities that the company might have come across.

SmartKarrot’s SK alerts augmented intelligence & ML, and accounts intelligence helps automate the various tasks of CSMs that make them concentrate on the bigger goal of satisfying the needs of their customers.

The predictive analytics at SmartKarrot helps automate the tasks of the customer success managers, which gives them the necessary time to contemplate the bigger things at hand.

7. Create custom dashboards

There are lots of stakeholders that use customer success software in an organization. This includes customer success teams and CSMs. Hence, it becomes important to have reporting mechanisms that meet the requirement of each and every stakeholder.

SmartKarrot understands this thing very well. The company has a feature called SK BI reports that allows the different stakeholders to track what’s important to them from the perspective of customer success.

With the help of insightful features like custom reports, different stakeholders can create different reports according to their specific requirements.

This way, SmartKarrot helps in satisfying the requirements of CS teams and CSMs harmoniously.

Leveling up CS operations leads to organizational success

It is the duty of a customer success manager to be focused on managing their customers. The processes and data systems should not bog them down.

By leveling up your CS operations, they can always put the customer first. This is what SmartKarrot’s Customer Success software intends to do for all the CSMs.

Everyone today is well aware that SaaS businesses tend to increase retention and revenue once they adopt the customer-first approach.

As your enterprise and customer success teams continue to expand, so will the nature of your CS operations. You will have more customers with more needs and more data.

This is where you will need to optimize your CS operations by reducing the inefficiencies and costs through the CS operations.

This can very well be done by an intelligent customer success software like SmartKarrot that can fuel your productivity, scale up your operations, and ensure long-term business value.

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