Sabina Pons is Operating Partner at Growth Molecules™ and a 2022 Top 100 CS Strategist.
In today’s market, companies need to do more with less. For SaaS organizations, that means it’s becoming table stakes to invest in product-led growth (PLG) and operationalize customer success (CS) with digital touchpoints. But how does a company scale without sacrificing the customer experience?
Enter digital customer success. Digital-led CS allows businesses to deliver fast, personalized customer touchpoints without having to manually handle every customer interaction. Automated processes save time, enabling customer success managers (CSMs) to be more productive with higher accuracy. But where do you start, especially when the pressure to implement digital scale is NOW?!
Aligning Your Digital-Led Strategy to Customer Moments of Truth
One of the greatest challenges is knowing where to start with your digital-led strategy. You have to answer questions like:
- Which customer segments should we start with as a pilot?
- How well do we actually know our segments?
- Which customer personas (admins, executives, etc.) should we include?
A great place to begin is by understanding your customers’ lifecycle. Many organizations don’t take the time to map out the various steps a customer experiences while engaging with their products. It’s critical to understand this journey to clearly see how the customer receives value and solves pain points with your products. It also helps to identify potential risks that can happen along the journey, and how you can keep the customer on track for successful adoption and renewal.
Throughout that customer journey, you’ll find moments of truth when value is either realized, or the opportunity to provide value is missed. These moments define whether or not the measure of success is reached. These are vulnerable times in the relationship with your customer, and this is the time to really zero in on the customer experience.
Here are examples of moments of truth in each phase of the customer lifecycle:
Source: Gainsight: How to Manage Your Customer Lifecycle
By strategically aligning the digital strategy to moments of truth in the customer journey, businesses can create digital interactions that add up to highly successful and engaging customer experiences.
Digital-Led Strategies Require Human Accountability
Once you’ve identified the moments of truth you want to build your digital CS strategy around, the next step is to revisit (or create) a RACI matrix for the customer journey. You’ll need to consider how roles and responsibilities change from high-touch playbooks to segments with more digital touchpoints. Here’s more context on the different roles to map out in your RACI:
Source: Growth Molecules™
Mapping each role to your moments of truth provides clarity around the responsibility that each role has within the RACI matrix. To get started, leverage the example below:
Source: Growth Molecules™
Mapping out these roles ensures clear communication and seamless workflows within your organization. For your digital strategy, it helps define the playbooks, CTAs, and workflow communications that you’ll need to craft. It’ll also help you identify which human touchpoints to maintain as a priority to ensure high-value outcomes are reached.
Self-Service Resources Fuel Digital Customer Success at Scale
Self-service resources are imperative to a digital customer success program. Your digital-led strategy should enable users to have greater access to the tools, resources, and support needed to onboard and adopt your product. In turn, this empowers you to serve more customers with fewer people.
With effective self-service resources in place, CSMs have the ability to spend more time focusing on the human touch elements that build personal relationships with users and decision-makers within their customer organizations. With those stronger relationships comes greater retention, expansion opportunities, and the ability to identify the ROI and impact your product is making on your customers’ businesses.
So how can you balance the personal human touch at scale while driving greater efficiency with digital touchpoints? This can all be accomplished while also keeping the customer at the forefront of all that you do. By strategically aligning the digital strategy to moments of truth in the customer journey, businesses can create successful and engaging customer experiences.
Want to learn more about creating a well-oiled CS machine? Check out our interactive tool to align your organization around customer success.
