This post is written by our guest Doug Nugent. Doug has been in the Customer Success and CRM worlds for most of his career: leading ProfessionalServices and Customer Success teams, and then guiding SaaS companies on how to keep their customers coming back for more.

Scaling any department in a rapid growth SaaS company isn’t easy. And for Customer Success (the guardians of recurring revenue), it can be especially challenging: keep the growing customer base so happy they won’t leave and will keep buying more, and do it as efficiently as possible.

The stakes are high, but many of the scaling tactics typically discussed today aren’t fundamentally effective enough to really move the needle.

Let’s look at the biggest blockers to scaling Customer Success, the first two of which are relatively under-rated and often don’t even enter the conversation – primarily because they require involvement from departments beyond Customer Success.

Blocker #1: Bad fit customers who waste resources (and drive churn)

It’s happened to practically every person who’s ever had to engage with customers – “this customer should not have signed up for our service…”.  Meanwhile, the customer either thinks he/she bought something else; that it’s a “good enough” fit with some tweaking (a potential “stretch” fit); or that his/her level of post-purchase effort is dramatically less than what’s necessary. As a result, the CSM ends up having to spend an inordinate amount of time re-selling the value propositions, helping them customize, or helping build a business case to justify the necessary resources. And often, these customers end up churning anyway.

Potential Solutions:  

Qualify for fit. Define exactly what the “best fit” customer looks like, and then evaluate prospects as they move through the sales process. Prioritize the best fit customers and be clear with marginal fit customers that your solution may not be ideal, and the reasons why.

Communicate Retention Risk & Prioritize Resources. There’s always a set of poor-fit prospects that turn into customers, and it’s important to communicate internally the degree to which those customers might churn, and that putting extra effort into keeping them would be better spent on good-fit, or stretch customers.

Blocker #2: Lack of in-app orientation/training

This may be the most under-rated scalability blocker. It’s more complex than meets the eye and impacts all customer-facing roles.

Guiding customers through the steps necessary to achieve value (or Jobs-To-Be-Done (JTBD)) has typically not been embedded into the software design process. Often, products get designed and then handed to an “education” entity that’s got an impossibly short window of time (prior to release) to prepare, communicate and publish new (and update old) training content. The typical result is hastily written content that isn’t presented contextually in-app, and isn’t adequately oriented to helping customers achieve their goals, resulting in the need for CSM intervention/manual guidance.

What’s worse is when customers are in the app and can’t intuitively figure out how to achieve their goals - they end up having to use effort they likely hadn’t bargained for – undermining customer satisfaction.

Potential Solutions:

Incorporate in-app orientation/training to drive organic feature adoption. Luckily, this obstacle has not gone completely unnoticed and there are now software applications designed to specifically address the need - Walk Me, Toonimo and Pendo are all designed to move the education process right into the UX. Structure the organization so product “orientation” is part of the Product development process.

Orient training to the Job to Be Done. Constantly remind users of the short and long-term wins they’ll experience by following your instructions. Without the carrot, adoption is at risk.

Incorporate automated low usage alerts. Communicate low or no usage internally and to customers - to create awareness and encourage feature adoption. Whether it’s getting 100% of the way through an initial setup configuration, or having customers adopt features they may not have considered, letting customers know what they’re likely missing out on – preferably within the app – is critical.

MOST CRITICAL - Make Product accountable for usage of the product features they’ve created. By incorporating usage into the product team’s KPIs, their focus won’t just be on getting an MVP out the door with as few bugs as possible. Here’s an article that goes into significant depth on how to apply the JTBD framework to feature adoption.

Blocker #3: Poor access to churn risk data and insights

It’s common knowledge that without access to accurate and complete data, the business is essentially flying blind and can only react to potential churn when it’s blatantly obvious – at which point it’s probably too late. But proper investments in defining the best data and providing easy access to it is not so common. As a result, CSMs can be saddled with having to find the data or uncover the insights themselves – taking valuable time away from strategically engaging with customers.

Potential Solutions:

Identify and aggregate churn Indicators. Compile all the attributes that may indicate churn risk and combine them into one or a series of formulas that could be used to quantify risk or indicate a level of “health”.

Make integrated usage and CRM data easily accessible. Integrate usage/adoption data and your churn indicators with customer data and make it all easily accessible on the platform your customer-facing staff use on a daily basis – such as a CRM system like Salesforce, or a CSM-specific tool like Gainsight, ChurnZero or Totango. Combining user data with usage data is critical.

Create action plans for varying churn risk scenarios. Align risk attributes to resolution plans (and resources) so that when risk gets defined, there’s a clear corresponding action plan that can be set in motion – without having to re-create the wheel.

Blocker #4: Repetitive tasks and question answering

Inevitably, CSMs can get overloaded with a large portfolio of customers, and minimizing repetitive tasks and conversations is critical.

Potential Solutions:

Give CSMs tools to minimize their effort and establish consistency. Be prescriptive to CSMs for their repetitive task, with process definitions, data, and presentation templates. Making activities like QBRs easy to prepare for and present can free-up significant time and reinforce consistency and professionalism.

Build an open customer community. Create an online community where people can ask and answer questions and submit new ideas. And put your FAQs in the community so they’re easy to find. One of the key value propositions of an online community is support scalability – having your customers answer each other’s questions rather than your staff. If you’re an iPhone user, you’ve probably seen community in action here.

Blocker #5: CSMs get bogged-down in reactive problem solving

Building a “trusted advisor” relationship with customers is a common practice, but it comes with a potential burden – customers want to engage with that one trusted individual, regardless of the nature of the engagement. And when they should be calling the support department, they end up reaching out to their CSM.

Potential Solutions:

Make communication channels intuitive and easy to find. Communicate to customers that there is a separate Support organization designed to handle reactive support quickly and effectively – and make those channels very easy to access (phone, chat, text, email, community…). CSMs can gently re-enforce this delineation by letting customers know they’ll likely get the fastest response to many of their questions if they contact Support directly, as they are generally booked helping customers pro-actively reach their goals.

Preempt questions with contextual in-app guidance. Answer questions before they get asked using in-app orientations as described in Blocker #2.

Bonus Blocker #6: CSM portfolio overflow undermines CSM effectiveness

Assuming solid business growth, managing the number of customers a CSM can handle will eventually become an issue, but staying in front of it, and laying a foundation to at least minimize it, will prevent it from undermining team morale and customer retention.

Potential Solutions:

Segment customers for effective resource allocation. Develop and implement a segmentation strategy to ensure your efforts aren’t being wasted. Be open-minded and thorough when looking at what to consider for one segment over another, like profile (industry, revenue…), what their primary objective is, expansion opportunities, % of ARR contribution, and strategic value.

Focus on delivering core value in the UX. Define what “MVS” (Minimum Viable Success) is for your customers and make sure the user experience (not the CSM) intuitively guides them to achieve it. MVS could also be considered the “main” JTBD. Then, have the CSMs engage beyond MVS, ideally oriented towards incremental value, or “related” JTBDs (developing up-sell opportunities). Apologies for the slew of acronyms.

Cheat Sheet Checklist

Here’s a summary of the tactics in the form of a checklist:

Bad fit customers prevent the ability to scale by consuming resources.

• Define what constitutes Good, Stretch and Bad fit customers.
• Rigorously qualify prospects for fit.
• Prioritize and communicate risk due to fit, both to the customer and internally.

Lack of in-app contextual training.

• Incorporate training into the UX, contextually, so users get what they need when they need it. This can be done using an application like Pendo, Walk Me, or Toonimo.
• Orient in-app training content around helping the user achieve their desired outcome (or JTBD) – to keep them motivated.
• Instrument the application to send usage alerts to both customers and customer-facing teams.

Limited churn-risk data and insights.

• Define what attributes contribute to churn and create a risk or health score.
• Aggregate all the data included in the score with customer data and make it easily accessible to all customer-facing staff.
• Make sure you’ve got very clear action plans that correspond to the various types of risk.

Repetitive tasks and questions.

• Be prescriptive with repetitive tasks to minimize effort without compromising quality.
• Create an online customer community and integrate it into your application so users can get quick answers and can support each other.

Distracted by reactive support.

• Communicate to customers that going directly to Support for reactive help will be faster than reaching out to their CSM.
• Give customers every possible channel for them to reach Support.
• Provide in-app contextual guidance to preempt potential support questions.

CSM Portfolio bloating

• Develop and implement a segmentation strategy to ensure resource allocation is as effective as possible.
• Define what constitutes “MVS” (Minimum Viable Success) for your customers and ensure there’s a path built into the user experience to help customers get there.

Adopting these tactics will help you scale Customer Success effectively – by keeping your CS headcount to a minimum while driving adoption and effectively blocking potential churn.