Have you ever started a new exercise routine? As things begin to open up, people are returning to gyms, yoga classes, and exercise clubs to create a level of health they lost during the COVID-19 pandemic shutdown.
Be patient with yourself. There may be a little rust on your downward dog or tree pose, and you’re not as flexible as you used to be.
With everyone, no matter the sport or training, it takes practice to reach your next level of performance. Even starting a new exercise regimen takes at least 30 days to make it part of a healthy habit. Have you ever heard that practice makes perfect? Well, we believe that perfect practice makes perfect. Does this apply to customer success? Absolutely!
Your CS Exercises
So, look at what you have in your CS exercise routine. You have a technology platform. But is it being adopted and utilized correctly? You have your best practices and your Playbooks. Are you implementing them at the right time and place? You are creating visibility and moving towards more efficient processes. However, are you getting it right enough to deliver the results you want to see? That is why we say perfect practice makes perfect.
Using the right CS tech platform should provide you with features and functionality to give you visibility into your customer base. But are you leveraging it enough and in the proper manner to leverage the advanced analytics to uncover more meaningful insights? First, if that platform does not offer that functionality, it may be time for you to look for a new one. Second, if it does offer you those features to shift from basic reporting to more sophisticated reports and dashboards, are you educated and using them to your advantage? Having those two abilities in your CS routine can help you uncover more precise and actionable insights. It can also aid in making more data-driven decisions. It may take a good stretch, but the benefits are so worth it.
How was that, Coach?
In any new exercise, it benefits you greatly to have a trainer or coach who can give you feedback and perhaps “tweak” your motions to get more out of what you are doing. There is no difference between “tweaking” your routine for better performance and refining your health scores motion. Remember the customer health scores we previously discussed? Well, now you need to level up your routine to maximize your results. Both can be refined beyond the basics to generate the best outcomes.
For instance, there is something called “micro-segmentation” that you can implement. When you look at customers, you may not see all the new unique qualities or changes they have, such as what sub-industry they are in, the importance of their segment size adjustment, or their lifecycle stage changes. Those alone may not mean much. However, pulled together in aggregate, the information can create a more precise picture of your customer.
Your health score process must be solid enough to build upon to move beyond the basic health scores. If they are, refine and adjust them to learn nuances about your customer at a deeper level. And don’t be afraid to ask them what health means to them and their business to adjust accordingly. Their responses may prove valuable in “tweaking” your health score system.
One part that can’t be overlooked is how you iterate your customer’s health. When leveling up your CS practices and processes, be sure to consider how vital iteration is to monitoring customer health. You want the proper motions and information to build on, make the correct conclusions, and improve your practice to perfection.
Fine-tuning your health scores will undoubtedly help you pinpoint customer health and what’s causing changes more precisely. Regularly evaluating existing metrics can help determine if they are still relevant to your business and the customer. If not, adjust the inputs that impact health by adding new measures and data points—for example, product insights or feature-level health scores. Don’t forget to include executive engagement, changing support measures depending on the number and type of tickets submitted. Collecting more information and adjusting health scores as necessary delivers a clearer picture of your customer’s health.
Seeing the Results
With every adjustment, refinement, and change you make to the picture of your customer, you create a more sophisticated and seamless customer experience and journey. Even if that journey is mainly automated, they may have started with simple automation at the customer journey. Such automation can include triggering a ‘welcome’ email for new customers or milestone surveys. But if that is all you use, you aren’t going to progress to the next level. Remember your exercise routine? If you stay at a certain level of performance and never challenge yourself to improve, you will stay in the beginners class.
It’s time to rethink the customer journey and consider building them out to leverage more sophisticated automation for greater efficiency. An excellent example of this is a fully automated path to guide customers through the onboarding process. You can take it a step further and request customer Promoters to leave a review as a follow-up to a survey.
Taking full advantage of your CS platform’s automation capabilities also means you can optimize renewal and expansion motions. CS technology is purpose-built for analysis and to reveal renewal and expansion opportunities with enriched customer data. You will be fully informed with predictive analytics to know how likely a customer will renew through health scores, NPS, and usage data. If they have a high renewal score, you can create automated, standardized processes and workflows around that information to create perfect results every time. This efficiency will save CSMs time and allow them to focus on customers who are at-risk and not likely to renew.
Lastly, you can leverage your platform to reveal rich customer insights to identify those who are open and ready for expansions and upsells. Armed with this information, you can create an Account Plan to help your team execute all opportunities in a standardized way.
In business, the best way to compete with competitors is to be the best form of yourself. So, instead, elevate yourself to the next level by utilizing your technology to automate, streamline, raise visibility and take advantage of the data revealed. When you do this, you help your customers find value in your products and services by reaching their outcomes. Learn expert tips on unlocking these levels of CS strategy with Gainsight by joining our solution architects and CS leaders in our two-part webinar series here.
