There's More To High Touch Customer Success Than The Art Of Relationships

A: Executive Engagement/Sponsorship

CSMs might be working day-to-day with a director-level person, and that work is critical. But it’s equally important to ensure that you’re in close touch with the executive, who sets the objectives for the engagement and makes the decision on the renewal. Your leadership provides air cover for his/her team members by aligning with executives at your clients.

How to set up an Exec Check-in:

The last one could mean anything from sharing thoughts on how to structure a team or process to get the most of the product, to sharing learnings from customers who have faced similar challenges.

We suggest that your VP of CS (or other member of leadership, depending on the customer relationship) reach out to an Exec-level individual at each of your customers on a quarterly or twice quarterly basis. Your senior leaders are busy people, so you can set up these reminders via a CTA.

Figure 4: Leaders should receive a CTA for a specific customer reminding him/her to reach out to the Exec contact at that customer. The CTA can also have an associated Task with an Email Assist to make the process seamless.

B: VoC Program

A strong Voice of Customer (VoC) program is a critical component to providing high-touch Customer Success. But a VoC program is more than simply listening to your customers—it also means closing the loop and following up with an action, so responses translate to improvements in the product and customer experience.

Step One: Listen

Develop a Set of Personas

In high-touch model customer success management, you don’t have just one stakeholder, you have multiple—and you want to make sure you are gathering feedback from all of them. There are five common stakeholders you’ll likely run across in your customers: the End User, the Admin, the Adoption Champion, the Executive Sponsor, and the Big Boss.

For each persona, we suggest you carefully lay out (1) what you’d love to see from them and, in turn, (2) what they need to see from you to be happy.

In practice, to track these roles, create a new field on the object to capture these roles for each customer. Try to fill these out as early as possible in the customer relationship—e.g. at the beginning of the post-sales kickoff with the customer but ideally in pre-sales.

Listen Through a Regular Feedback Cadence

Send an NPS survey to all stakeholders at each of our customers on a regular cadence, such as once every six months. Slice and dice the NPS results by each of your persona types. That’s critical, since for a given customer, you might find (for example) that the End User NPS is very high (the actual users love it!) but the Executive Sponsor NPS is low (indicating that the Exec contact may need some help seeing the value of the product).

Listen Through Transactional Surveys

You should also collect feedback after key milestones in the customer’s lifecycle or after service touch-points to gauge whether expectations were met.

Step Two: Act

It is important to close the loop and follow up on customer feedback immediately—be it positive or critical. Implement follow-ups in an “if this, then that” manner. For example, upon receiving a particularly low NPS score from a given customer, you can trigger a CTA with with an associated Email Assist response in order to reach out for a conversation.

Conversely, if an NPS score (or set of scores) is extremely high for a customer, your CSM might consider reaching out to ask whether the customer would be willing to serve as a Sales reference or participate in a testimonial for your Customer Marketing efforts.

Figure 5: Insert Image D and caption: NPS scores can trigger immediate action when a Detractor is identified, or aggregate scores can be used to identify trends that lead to improvements in the overall customer experience.

Figure 6: NPS follow-up Email Assist.

Step Three: Analyze

Once you have a strong listening program up and running, you will very quickly be collecting a large amount of valuable data. One of the most important uses of this data is benchmarking—that is, seeing how customers (or personas) stack up against each other or over time. The quickest way to visualize the results of a given customer’s NPS survey (both at a current point in time as well as the trend) is to access the Surveys section of the C360.

Figure 7: C360 provides a quick view of the customer and provides the ability to drill down into specific issues and responses which may have triggered Risk CTAs or other escalations.

Within some of clients, there are often multiple BUs, geographies, or functions that may have different stakeholders, business goals or even be in completely different lifecycle stages (i.e. stages of product deployment/adoption). From an account perspective, they could even have completely different contracts. In a sense, this client is actually multiple clients internally (with sometimes very different high-touch workflows), and you may even consider staffing separate CSMs to each of them.

Imagine one of your clients has two completely separate business units with a different set of stakeholders and desired outcomes. Here are some of the most important metrics and features you will want to consider tracking and managing separately for each BU, which can be done with Relationships:

Tactically, once Relationships is configured, CSMs can navigate to the “Relationships” section of the C360 to view the various Relationships within an account (shown below as “cards”).

Finally, it is possible to port in contacts directly from SFDC to populate the contacts within each of your Relationships – which makes it easy and seamless to set up and navigate.

The lifecycle for your high-touch customer segment captures the heart of your methodology. What is your process for getting customers to value?

Next lay out a detailed internal playbook for each stage in the Lifecycle: exactly what activities (internal and external) would occur at each stage, what we’d like the customer experience to look like, as well as the results we expect to be achieved upon the stage completion.

In addition to creating a detailed playbook, also map key customer touch points for each stage. This includes everything from the formal kick-off, initial exec alignment meeting, and onsite configuration all the way to product feedback sessions with the customer once they are fully adopting.

Finally, we create a third mapping that defines what team internally (Sales, CSMs, Onboarding, Tech Success) is responsible for at each stage. This is critical in order to both clearly define ownership as well as coordinate cross-functionally to deliver success throughout the customer’s lifecycle.

The aforementioned stages are what just an example, you should come up with your own based on your product and specific customer needs. Once you’ve done so, it is critical (and relatively straightforward) to create CTAs for different activities such as:

From here you can build out additional processes to further manage critical lifecycle events.

In a high-touch Customer Success world, CSMs build deep long-lasting relationships with as well as collect an enormous amount of “institutional” knowledge about their customers. This could include anything from an individual stakeholder’s sentiment about your product to challenges they are having internally with change management. The CSM is a treasure trove of the most critical pieces of customer information—which poses a huge risk to your organization given that this individual could transition out of the company or into another role at a moment’s notice.

It’s therefore hugely helpful that CSMs record all their notes from customer interactions in Timeline, the ultimate note-taking tool. Within Timeline, CSMs log key “Activities” (such as a customer meeting, an update, an email, or a call) and can write detailed notes about these interactions.

Here are some examples of situations for which a CSM should use Timeline:

Every logged Activity is preserved chronologically in the system and is easily accessible to others who need to be informed. Furthermore, Timeline allows the CSM to reference specific contacts in his/her that can be connected to a CRM contact records.

Customer should have very strong hygiene around recording customer interactions and general customer knowledge. With all of this information neatly, chronologically, and consistently documented in one centralized location, you have peace of mind that our customers will be in good hands should you need to transition them to another CSM.

Your Sales team has Account Plans to lay out how they will expand and upsell an account. The equivalent for your CSMs is a Success Plan. A Success Plan is the CSM’s internal account plan or roadmap for how s/he plans to achieve specific objectives within a client. A Success Plan could be defined together with the client, but we also use Success Plans to internally to align on a strategy to grow the account.

Start with the following four types of Success Plans for your customers and then thinking through other use cases:

CSMs are high-leverage, strategic thinkers who want to be meeting with and helping their customers, not spending hours writing emails. But digital-led Customer Success doesn’t work for high touch customers. These customers require a slightly more tailored message, or oftentimes the CSM wants to add a personal touch.

At the same time, CSMs need not formulate emails completely from scratch. CSMs can use Email Assist to leverage tokenized email templates for common use cases (see below) that can then be edited and personalized. In addition to saving your CSM’s precious time, customer communications are more consistent because a standardized template is always used as a base.

Here are popular ways Email Assists are used among Gainsight customers:

As a general rule, think of using Email Assist for any “if this, then that” scenario, particularly because CSMs can directly send Email Assists from Playbook tasks within a CTA. For example, if a customer responds to an NPS survey with a low rating, a CTA can trigger with an associated Email Assist that allows the CSM to respond with a tailored message. Similarly, if a customer’s renewal is coming up within the next 90 days, an Email Assist can be sent with auto-populated customer data points (e.g. the customer’s renewal date).

CSMs in a high-touch model are always searching for ways to drive upsell and expansion into new BUs or other functions (i.e. Sales) within large customers. The keys to not missing an expansion opportunity within an existing customer are 1) ensuring that CSMs and AEs/CAMs are communicating regularly and working collaboratively and 2) providing them with clear indicators that a customer is ripe for expansion, including suggestions for specific opportunities. For (1), we recommend creating a jointly owned Account Plan that CSMs and Sales Reps create together (we discussed this already in tip #6). This is a great first step in making sure your CSMs and Sales Reps are always on the same page, have aligned on expansion goals, and are reaching out to the right role at the right time within the customer.

For (2), there are a few different ways of “flagging” that a customer could be a good candidate for an expansion opportunity. Some of these include:

Deployment Scorecard

One of the most useful scorecards to alert CSMs of whether there is an opportunity for upsell (or conversely a product usage risk) is Deployment Score. A high deployment number a strong indicator that a customer is in need of more licenses, or potentially even licenses for customers in new functions (i.e. Sales or Marketing). CSMs should regularly take a look at a list of their customers and Deployment scores, which can get mapped to “Green” through “Red” indicators. For customers in “Green,” CSMs should proactively reach out regarding expansion. For those in “Red” or “Orange,” the CSM should launch other efforts in order to deploy undeployed licenses in a systematic way.

Figure 9: “Scorecards can be set up and configured to highlight critical insights that CSMs can then take appropriate action on based on what they are seeing.”

Product Whitespace Dashboard

One of the most critical pieces of information for a CSM or Rep to know when trying to upsell a customer is understanding what they have already bought from you. The difference between what they already have and the full set of SKUs they could buy is what we call the product whitespace. This is essentially a list of all of the potential products a customer could buy from you but hasn’t yet taken advantage of. Armed with this information, a CSM can start having strategic conversations with a customer long before renewal time in order to guide them in the direction of purchasing new SKUs.

Feature Usage

It’s important to track usage of your “stickiest” features—those that are highly correlated with strong adoption and retention. We do this by creating scorecards for individual features (with metrics like “monthly pageviews / full users”) based off of usage data. You can then track, on a weekly basis, how strongly a given customer is using a feature and how they are trending towards better feature adoption. A customer that is in “Green” (strong usage) across five or more of the seven features we track is considered a strong, healthy user of our product.

CSMs who live in this feature data as it allows them the visibility into where customers are struggling with the product and gives them the tools to have very structured, focused customer conversations about best practices and ways to drive better adoption. Conversely, for customers that are healthy users, our CSMs can confidently hold conversations about upsell or cross-sell opportunities knowing that the customer is already seeing significant value from the product. Similar to the Deployment CTA, we recommend creating a CTA that triggers when a customer moves into “healthy” usage and following up with that customer about expansion.

Learn More About PX Essentials →
Figure 10: “PX Essentials is a tool that can provide visibility into product usage. It can also help drive engagement and adoption so that you can leverage Product-led Growth strategies in your program.”

With Services: Define the Initial Value Moment

The official handover from your onboarding team to your CS team is a critical moment that you don’t want to get wrong. Services must make sure the customer is set up and seeing sufficient value out of the product before getting CS involved for the long-haul. This is often referred to as the “Initial Value Moment” or IVM—and we have a standardized set of criteria a customer has to meet before Services can ask the CSM team to engage.

During the Onboarding of customers, consider rolling out to a pilot group of users. Then set thresholds that must be met before the CSM team gets involved.

Sample threshold indicators on when to involve CSM team members:

With Product: Treat Your Clients as Partners

The most valuable product feedback comes directly from your customers. But instead of having your CSMs serve as a go-between for this feedback, we recommend actively facilitating direct two-way conversations between your company’s Product team and the customer.

Here are some ways we suggest creating these points of contact for your high-touch customers:

With Services: Define the Initial Value Moment

Organize a customer invite-only webinar where the Product team shares the upcoming product roadmap, asks directly for feedback on in-progress features as well as future areas of focus

Personalized release announcements (at release):

Send an email to announce an upcoming product release. Email Assist can be used to add a personal touch and call out specific features that will be impactful to an individual customer

Product Risk CTAs (ongoing):

Send an email to announce an upcoming product release. Email Assist can be used to add a personal touch and call out specific features that will be impactful to an individual customer

With Support: Manage Risk

Your support team is far from a siloed function. Given that Support risks can often be early signs of customer frustration, it is critical to implement a robust support risk process to get ahead of the situation and work closely with the key stakeholders internally and at the customer. It’s important to collaborate cross functionally with the onboarding and CSM teams on Product Risks.

Support teams can also utilize a combination of Calls to Action and Scorecards to address risks. A Support Risk CTA will trigger for a given customer in one of three situations:

When it comes to bugs, you can roll out very similar process which focuses on tickets which have been classified as
product bugs

A Bug Risk CTA triggers when there is one of three situations:

When risks are triggered (either for Support or for Bugs), they can be assigned to respective support managers with a task in the playbook assigned to the CSM to keep them informed.

A Final Note

If you manage stow important it is to not miss a beat. Hopefully this ebook has given you a better sense of recommended processes that should be deployed to achieve best-in-class high-touch Customer Success. You likely are already implementing many of these processes in some form or fashion with your customers today, but if not, we recommend getting started ASAP!