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 goal of an Exec Check-in is threefold:
- Get a pulse-check on an individual customer from the Exec’s perspective
- Learn about any top-of-mind initiatives they are working on
- Share any insights or best practices that might be helpful in the current moment
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.
Here’s an easy 3-step framework for VoC:
- Listen: Capture insightful feedback by giving your customers frequent opportunities to submit feedback.
- Act: Follow up promptly so customers know that they are heard. Quicker response to customer feedback results in a greater impact.
- Analyze: Assess progress against goals and measure improvement to keep the program on track.
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.
- X-days after deal closure: Distribute a Sales Expectations Survey a set number of days after a deal has closed to gather feedback on expectations were met in onboarding that the AE set for the customer duringthe sales process.
- Post-Onboarding: Once the onboarding phase has been completed, send an Onboarding survey to gather feedback on the engagement.
- After a support case: Once a support case is closed, you could trigger a Support survey 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.