“If you invest in the post-sale, and you have somebody that can focus just on the digital journey, you’re going to keep more customers, and you’re going to expand them, because they’re going to have a better experience.” – Katie Yagodnik, Director, Customer Success Operations and Digital Programs, Totango + Catalyst
Customer success operations (CS Ops) can be the “wizard” behind the scenes of your customer-centric strategy.
But making it work demands a balancing act of two core things: supporting customer outcomes and empowering the internal CS team with business-critical insights. In particular, you need to arm your customer success team with razor-sharp processes and cutting-edge tools that optimize long-term customer value throughout the post-sales journey.
Customer success operations can also be a secret weapon for fine-tuning a variety of customer success and GTM needs such as: sharpening the ideal customer profile (ICP), crafting unique marketing messages, and injecting the customer’s voice into every interaction.
To pull this triple-win maneuver off, you need actionable customer data and a robust customer success platform (CSP).
As a leader in customer success operations and a CSP implementation veteran, I was thrilled to join Matthew Lind and Jean Nairon on a recent episode of their Spotlight on Customer Success Operations webinar series to share the many tips, tricks, and wand-like strategies I’ve picked up throughout my CS career. We dove into:
- The essential ingredients needed for an effective CS operations framework
- How to build a data-driven CS operations motion from the ground up
- The exciting advancements on the horizon to advance customer success value as a whole
Check out the highlights below and be sure to watch our full discussion for a quick masterclass on creating a sharp customer success operations discipline.
The secret potion: Key ingredients for an effective customer success operations function
Driving customer success isn’t about grand gestures – it’s about helping customers achieve valuable outcomes. While there are many moving parts, these four elements are non-negotiable ways a CS operations motion can amplify the total customer success program:
- Customer segmentation: Providing ancillary data to understand who your customers are and confirming, realigning, or challenging the segmentation to craft tailored strategies for different customer types.
- Risk management: Developing a risk program to identify and mitigate potential churn.
- Voice of the customer: Supporting or implementing a program to gather and act on customer feedback.
- Stakeholder engagement: Being a congruent partner to engage with stakeholders to align on goals and progress.
“There are so many pieces to the pie when you look at the evolution of the customer journey from the first year and beyond that you want to make sure you’re putting all of those things in place to lead to the overall success of the customer.”
Segment, analyze, conquer: Building your operations magic box
The foundation of any effective customer success operations program is understanding your customers, so I recommend beginning with customer segmentation. This isn’t the sole responsibility of the CS operations leader, but it is a significant place where an operations program can augment or amplify the total customer success program.
Here are a few questions, for example, that you should be able to answer:
- Do you have segments?
- Can you segment customers by contract value?
- Is there likeness between industries?
- What data is available for each segment?
The most important first step is to start gathering this data—if you don’t have it, you can’t fix it.
Once you’re able to segment customers with value, then you can focus on gathering churn data. This information is the first step toward addressing retention challenges, and an opportunity for the CS operations function to support long-term customer value. Ask these critical questions:
- Is value realization an issue?
- Are business changes driving churn?
- Is our product meeting expectations?
For most companies I’ve worked with, building a customer success operations motion from the ground up is a reality. While this may feel daunting, a collection of sharp tools and processes built around a data-driven architecture can help you create a robust program with two key goals: first, help customers achieve their outcomes. And second, empower internal partners to be the best they can be in supporting your customers.
Or, simply put, the CS Ops is to CSMs as your CSMs are to customers.
“Just start gathering information so that you can leverage it to take the next step to fixing the problems.”
The future of customer success: Cost of goods to revenue generation
As companies continue to realize that maintaining and expanding existing customer relationships is more durable than constantly acquiring new ones, we can expect to see more resources and greater strategic focus directed toward post-sale customer experiences.
Here’s what I predict is on the horizon:
The evolution of customer success platforms (CSPs): Go-to-market and CS teams are using upwards of 30+ different tools across the business to drive outcomes. Advanced platforms will excel in the technical ability to track and accelerate customers to their desired outcomes and metrics. At the same time, they will integrate with functional-specific tools to make use of that data most efficiently.
The growing influence of CS in defining business strategy: As more companies recognize the value and need to drive expansion to thrive, CS operations will play a major role in both the architecture and on-going efficiency of the customer success practice to execute a customer-led growth motion. Operations will be the ‘magic behind the curtain’ in supporting CSMs and CS leaders with the optimal processes and insights.
“My prediction is that customer success is going to continue to be more and more important. More companies are going to put time and effort into understanding the value of expansion and maintaining the business.”
Check out the Spotlight on Customer Success Operations webinar for more of my tips for building an effective customer success operations program. Ready to sharpen your CS Ops game? Learn how Totango + Catalyst can help optimize your processes, unlock data-driven insights, and drive more revenue from your customer base.
