Every company looks to retain its customers as much as possible. This calls for a highly effective and functioning customer success strategy that focuses on customers and their journeys. Customer success teams need to choose data-driven and intelligent strategies to ensure customers meet their goals. This includes ensuring automation, buyer-driven alerts, connected experiences, omnichannel experiences, and more find a place in the customer success strategy.

A core component of this customer success strategy is the involvement of customer playbooks for specific use cases.

Decentralize customer success and build more revenue streams with increasing expansion revenue opportunities. Another goal of customer success teams is to drive more personalized and contextualized engagements as per customer segments.

This can happen when customer success playbooks are tweaked to take cognizance of enterprise customers.

Top 5 Reasons why Enterprise Customer Success is Different

SaaS (Software As A Service) companies need to know how enterprise customers are different. Here are the reasons why enterprise customer success is different.

High level of Important to data centricity

Enterprise customer success keeps data at the core of all behavior. This data is the heart for all enterprise customers. Data needs to be intelligently analyzed to address any concerns and goals.

Multi-use and multiple users involved

Customers in enterprises are usually choosing the product for more than one user. For example: Take marketing software used by the whole marketing team for different outcomes and results. This can also be used by other teams, such as product, sales, and more, for their own growth.

More need for integrations

Enterprises need more integrations since they need to connect with more tools. Enterprise customers help increase revenue potential but also need more integrations. They need to be connected to all major tools and products.

Increased security needs

Enterprise customers have increased security needs. They need more data privacy, security, and safety. The decision-makers always look for enhanced security and opportunities with the brand.

Communication

Enterprise contacts thrive on communication. There is a need for cross-team communication and customized solutions. Enterprise customers are based on high levels of collaboration between the seller, customer success teams, and more.

How to build Customer or Account Engagement across the Customer Journey

The customer journey for enterprises needs to involve playbooks at every stage.

Let us call the four stages of the customer journey- Land, Onboard, Adopt, Expand

Land

Once a customer lands, teams need to segment customer accounts by the kind of usage, size, tech capabilities, contract types, and industry. You need to identify key strategic accounts and assign customer success managers. Using a playbook can help you simplify the complex parts of the strategy to set the ground for cross-selling, upselling, and renewal.

Playbooks can help reduce the time spent segregating and identifying customers’ goals and outcomes. They can also use data to set the foundation for the entire customer life cycle.

This is essential to avoid bad-fit customers and prevent early churning of customers. The process includes evaluating customers, mapping them with solutions, and setting trials.

Onboard

Customer onboarding is the most significant activity in the customer lifecycle. The customer needs to look at the product from a long-term perspective. This will only happen when the value is brought to light. Customer success teams need to put effort into customer onboarding to build a strong process for the future.

The primary goal of customer success managers is to speed up customer time to value. Customers want to achieve key milestones they signed up for soon. Ensuring they do that will help improve the onboarding process and experience.

Enterprises have specific goals and would like to achieve these at scale. This is why tailoring onboarding experience with automation and playbooks will help. An onboarding playbook will also help optimize various moving parts and timelines. Customer success playbooks can help enterprise clients increase accountability and alignment between teams.

Adopt

Product adoption is when your customers will choose whether to be with the product or not. Track product usage through a customer success platform and measure usage of the features, usage frequency, and time users spend on the product. This will improve customer usage and know what makes them tick. For enterprise customers, it is important to enhance engagement at multiple levels and personas.

Adoption and engagement for enterprise clients will help drive meaningful conversations and outcomes. Enterprise customers have more need for integrations and require advanced security configurations.

For example: If a customer is supposed to access a set of features after 15 days of kickstarting product usage, it is important to create a success play that triggers action. This success play needs to talk about the new feature and personalize aspects as per customer needs.

• Drive and automate best success plays based on customer engagement and behavior
• Increase the new product features, funding, and improve customer outreach
• Set forth success plays to accelerate engagement

Enterprise companies have multiple challenges and need constant work to ensure revenue and returns. Enterprise customer success management involves using playbooks to bring changes and acquire repeat customers.

Expand

In this stage, enterprise customers need to be proactively monitored so that CSMs (Customer Success Managers) can forecast expansion potential and renewals. Knowing customer priorities, pitching other products, and seeing if customer conversations change is important. By this time, users will be product champions. You need to check if the enterprise customers have other needs and take advantage of that to ensure proactive growth. Key features to track in enterprise clients include-

• Product usage, engagement, feature utilization
• results, product survey results
• Satisfaction rating
• Support tickets, bugs issues, online reviews
• Customer maturity, customer sentiment, product stickiness

In this phase, the goal is also to retain customers and ensure good health scores. It is also important to prepare the organization for changes in the product and developments. This might increase the relevance of the tool and increase change.

Building triggers can help scale and automate the process easily. Flagging customers can help you know activities and create buffer systems in place to fix issues.

What should you include in your playbook for enterprise customers?

For enterprise customers, it is important to include the following aspects in the playbook.

• The desired outcome – this is what the customer wants from the product or service
• The entry point of playbook – this is where we choose when the user must enter to kickstart or trigger the playbook
• The exit point of the playbook – this is where the user needs to leave the playbook
• Goals, milestones, or product adoption steps – these are various steps that a customer needs to check off to reach the desired outcome
• Segment – this is your customer category (based on size, niche, industry, etc.)
• Tasks – these are the specific actions that a user needs to take in the playbook

Bottom Line: Playbooks Need to be data-driven

For enterprise clients, it is important to look at leveraging data-driven insights. This will improve the customer journey and see how customers can benefit from the product in the long run. With enterprise customers, it is important to create productive feedback loops and improve how data is used to enhance their experiences. It is necessary to build the right set of processes so that enterprise clients are happy and scale.

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