Complete Guide to an Ideal Customer Success Team Structure
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The growing businesses of the world are increasingly emphasizing customer success nowadays and setting up their customer success teams. In fact, a study shows 70% of those business leaders mark customer success as very important.
Although CEOs have understood it is one of the most cost-effective ways to run and grow a business today, they still have some common questions, especially regarding their customer success strategy.
As the customer success team structure forms the organizational backbone that supports the cs strategy, we are going to explore this topic first. Let’s get started.
What is Customer Success, and Why It Matters?
Customer success is a fascinating approach to helping your customers achieve their desired outcomes by utilizing your products or services most efficiently.
The goal of customer success is to improve your customer satisfaction, trust, and engagement, as well as drive revenue growth for the business.
Effective customer success is all about connecting with your customers, learning about their needs and goals, and then helping them achieve with the support, resources, and direction they need.
With all the focus on the customer and experiences overlapping, it’s easy to become confused between customer success and customer service. The two are distinct from one another. Most of the customer support interactions are tightly focused on specific customer problems. The customer contacts the company for assistance, and the customer support team resolves the issue.
On the other hand, customer success is more concerned with assisting clients in achieving broad business objectives. Your team forms a bond with your customers. They learn about your customer’s goals and assist the customer in achieving those goals by providing training and strategic counsel.
Now that you understand the basics, let me explain why customer success is essential for your startup.
- You can develop solid relationships with your consumers, which can result in increased customer loyalty and retention.
- Your customer brand experience and product satisfaction directly result in customer success. Successful customer journeys give customers a positive brand experience.
- If you are a saas or subscription-based business owner, you know renewal depends on customers seeing value and success with the product; customer success can help you.
- Customer success helps you to increase revenue growth by reducing churn and increasing customer lifetime value (LTV).
- By gaining valuable insights from customer success initiatives, you can prevent future customer problems and identify consumer demands.
Responsibilities of a Customer Success Team
So far, we’ve highlighted the immense value a customer success team brings to your business. Let’s break down what a customer success team does and their responsibilities.
Taking Over from the Sales Department
Your customer success teams take over from sales teams after sales conversations and processes. At this point, your customer success team needs to sync with your sales team and present the customer with all the information to manage the customer churn rate. If they execute this right, your customer will be delighted and understand your company’s positive bottom line.
User onboarding process
User onboarding is crucial for ensuring your customer success.
Some companies use email campaigns, calls, or webinars for one-to-many onboarding. But there is no need for a long onboarding process- your team can direct users on the quickest route to success via minimum-viable onboarding, as your goal is getting active users as soon as possible.
Improve the customer experience by educating them
Another responsibility of customer success teams is educating customers about your product and services, although it’s an ongoing process. You can also have a dedicated education or training team. Depending on your customer engagement model, your team can educate the customers through channels such as in-app guides, video tutorials, a knowledge base, one-to-one strategy sessions, etc.
Providing customer support
Your first-time customers face many problems, and your customer success teams help customers overcome these obstacles. Also, sometimes they need to support the clients they are managing. The customer success team usually focuses on product adoption and answers “how-to” questions instead of dealing with product issues.
Representing the customer by collecting feedback and suggestions
Your customer success team represents your customers by collecting feedback, identifying pain points, and measuring satisfaction levels. You can use various channels to collect active and passive feedback, such as NPS surveys, customer satisfaction surveys, in-app feature surveys, reviews, etc. Sometimes the customer’s requests and needs can differ from the company’s vision, and as the most customer-involved team, they need to balance these opposing viewpoints.
Help the customers with renewals
Your customer success team can assist your customers with renewal to keep the customer churn rate low. They can achieve this by demonstrating the product’s value and providing the necessary information to the customers. Also, the team can suggest features or upgrades that could benefit the customer based on their goals to retain customers.
Building relationships and monitoring customer health scores
Another responsibility of your customer success team is making ongoing connections with customers to gain customer loyalty. You can increase customer loyalty by offering loyalty programs, rewards, personalized offers, and guidance based on in-app activity and events. Also, you can monitor customer health, a custom score that you can measure by combining product usage, service usage, and login metrics, which shows your customer’s chance to renew and the product’s most and least used regions.
Conveying customer insights to other teams
One of the vital roles of your customer success team is to share customer insight with other teams so that they can improve. For example, your marketing can analyze the insights and create more relatable and helpful content for the customers. This will also help your marketing team to get better leads.
A collaboration between your customer success team and engineering team often ends up improving your product as your customer demand. When product and engineering teams plan for the future, the customer success team provides feedback on the usefulness of new updates based on customer needs.
Creating preselling and upselling opportunities
Your customer success team can participate in pre-sales with sales.
They can help the sales team with information and suggestions before and after sales, this involvement makes the handover and transition easy.
Sometimes the plan that the customer is using can dissatisfy them. The customer success team is responsible for convincing the customer
how your other product offerings can meet their demands to set up upselling opportunities for new solutions.
Connecting the customer with the necessary teams
Your success team may not answer all your customer’s questions, but they know the best person to answer those questions. These lead us to their role of connecting customers to the appropriate resources within the company for efficient and effective problem-solving.
Documenting Customer Success Stories
Customer success teams are the best ones to put together these social proofs because they know every step of a customer’s journey, both normal and special. They can document customer success stories and case studies to help promote your business and product by showing how well it has worked for others and convince some other customers to purchase your product.
The Common Roles in a Customer Success Team
Now it’s time to discuss the team. Each team member has a specific role that contributes to the team’s overall success. Customer success team roles can vary depending on your product or service or the customer base’s size or complexity. Here I have discussed some common roles in a customer success team.
Vice President of customer success
Vice President of Customer Success (VP of CS) is a senior leadership role of your CS team. He /She is responsible for bringing a strategic vision and innovative approach to ensure customer success. He/she is also responsible for leading and managing the customer success team.