As a Customer Success Professional, one of your primary goals is to ensure that your customers get the maximum value of their products, translating your strategies into meaningful and successful results for both the client and the business.

However, customer success is often challenging due to differing perceptions of ROI. Zendesk, a leading customer service platform, faced similar challenges in demonstrating ROI to their customers. Helping a client reduce average ticket resolution time by 25%, they were able to perceive the gap between perceived value and actual ROI.

Building ROI as a customer success professional has always been a challenge. In these latest events all over Europe, we have pinpointed strategies and actionable tips that are workable for all organisations on the same boat. We’ve encountered professionals from different industries, such as Social Talent, Materialise, Wix, Cegid, and Salesforce. 

Here are some notes on what we’ve learnt from the event. Our great moderators, Andreas Tollschein, Harry Bandell, Pablo Molano, and Nicki Hunt, made this article cohesive and insightful. 

Ghent: Romanticising the Power of Collaboration

Ineffective communication and the lack of collaboration have ultimately driven workplace failures. No matter how efficient the systems are or how advanced the technologies being used when an organisation needs more rapport, workplace failures will always occur. 

In addition, a Stanford Study mentioned that people who work collaboratively stick to their tasks 64% longer than their solitary peers, reporting higher engagement levels, lower fatigue, and a success rate nearly 25% higher. 

Let’s take the tech giant Google as an example. Google’s innovative products, such as Gmail, often result from cross-functional collaborations. The company promotes an environment that can be freely shared and developed, which has led to the creation of some of Google’s most successful products, including Google News and AdSense.

Now the question is how? During our event at Ghent, we witnessed collaboration take its form through the combined efforts of our Customer Success Professionals. Thus, here are three significant strategies you should start doing:

1. Set Achievable Customer Goals together.

Understanding your customers’ needs and expectations is the first step towards building their ROI. At this stage, collaboration helps establish customer goals rather than leaving them to navigate this crucial step independently. Co-creation is key, a success plan needs to be shared to be successful.

Here are four actionable tips to consider within this strategy:

• Create a Joint Goal Setting moment. Engage with Customers to define their Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and goals. 
• Educate on ROI. Help customers understand how to measure the value they are receiving.
• Align with the Sales Team to ensure a smooth transition between the customer expectations and customer success managers.
• Map the customer journey. 

2. Broadcast Customer Success.

You want to highlight and celebrate customer achievements because this is not only a milestone for your business but also reinforces the value of your service or products, empowering more engagement and loyalty.

Here are three actionable tips to consider within this strategy:

• Celebrate Milesones with Customers. You can do this through formal recognitions like Executive Business Reviews (EBRs) and Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs) or informal shout-outs like those on social media pages.
• Promote Stakeholder Success. 
• Utilise success stories through content. This demonstrates ROI to potential customers as well. 

3. Ensure transparency and collaboration between the Customer Success Team and Sales.

If two teams within the organisation need to communicate extensively and develop rapport to achieve customer success, it’s the CS and Sales teams. These two departments may often have different approaches, but what’s important is that they relay information properly and vice versa.

Here are three actionable tips you can do:

• Regularly involve the sales teams in customer success meetings to ensure alignment on customer goals. 
• Hold customers accountable by developing a system for regular check-ins and transparent documentation of milestones. 
• Educate the sales team by implementing training and feedback loops to ensure you set realistic expectations with potential customers. 

Berlin: Maximise Customer Value

Customer Success involves delivering exceptional service and relies on your ability to demonstrate tangible value to customers. As we strive to maximise ROI, it is vital to understand the factors contributing to customer ROI retention.

Speaking the customer language is vital in determining what helps them measure ROI effectively. Different customers will have various ways of measuring ROI, considering there are a variety of personas, so you have to be on the same page for smoother understanding.

Here are three primary strategies you can implement to maximise customer value and enhance ROI:

1. Create Stickiness through Subscription-Level Features

Apart from raising FOMO, this strategy also helps segment customers accordingly. Through a subscription-level feature, you give clients the option to decide on what features they want to enjoy rather than forcing one in which they don’t find value.

Photo by: https://www.paidmembershipspro.com/subscription-model-benefits/

Here are three actionable tips to consider within this strategy:

• Offer customisable features or configurations catering to different customer needs and preferences. 
• Provide exclusive access to premium subscription tiers.
• Conduct regular engagement to reinforce the value of subscription-level features. 

2. Create Measurement Guidelines for different Customer Types.

It’s essential to have a framework for customers on how to measure ROI, especially for different types of customers:

• Understand Customer Goals through customer industry challenges, language preferences, and business objectives.
• Customise ROI Metrics such as time savings and service revenue growth.
• Benchmark customer performance against different industries.

3. Calculate ROI for new features.

New features sound enticing to users, and whether you’re launching it as an addition or a new paid service, it’s vital to have an ROI calculation so users can quickly gauge whether they are benefiting from the feature or otherwise. Here are three actionable tips:

• Collaborate with customers on the ROI Calculation process for accuracy and relevance. 
• Conduct pilot programmes to test new features.
• Create case studies to showcase the successful outcomes of adopting new features.

Copenhagen: Maximising Platform Utilisation for Customer Success

“I want to see a return on investment” is a common phrase in business. It’s vague, a catch-all term that creates a shaky basis for defining value or expenditure. We often get rattled, misdefining what values customers are talking about. 

As executives who play a significant role in the business, we must learn to seek other measures to help us redefine their ROI in our language.

Often, customers do not receive ROI from the service because they need to utilise it more fully. Empowering your customers to use the platform fully will help improve your relationship with them. A major strategy is to maximise platform utilisation for customers. 

Optimise customer Utilisation of the Platform

Photo by: https://fastercapital.com/content/Usage-based-segmentation–Optimising-Customer-Experience–A-Usage-based-Segmentation-Framework.html 

Here are three tips to ensure customers leverage the platform to its fullest potential:

• Conduct Usage Tracking on Features to assess the most and least utilised. Through this, you can gauge which features you need to boost.
• Provide comprehensive training sessions where customers can better understand all the features and functionalities of the platform. 
• Provide proactive support and problem-solving. 

Paris: Tie most outcomes back to the bottom-line financial result 

While we always emphasise the value of qualitative outcomes, connecting it to tangible financial results is equally important. An example could be the financial, tangible effect of automation. 

Automating routine tasks can save employees significant amounts of time. If a platform saves 10 hours per month for each employee, and the average hourly wage is $50, this results in a monthly savings of $500 per employee. Given this, what is the Financial Impact? For a company with 100 employees, this translates to an annual savings of $600,000.

Here are the three actionable tips to consider:

• Quantify the time saved. Track and document the time saved by using your product or service. 
• Measure the attrition avoided. Analyse employee retention rates before and after the implementation of your product.
• Attract and Retain Talent. Demonstrate how your product makes the company a more attractive place to work.

In short, find a value metric you can tie to.

This approach ensures customer relationships and reinforces the strategic importance of solutions. Selling an outcome boosted with adding monetary value can further improve your strategy for building ROI.

Madrid: Define the types of ROI

A robust feedback loop is crucial to measure and effectively enhance internal and external ROI. This strategy includes continuous monitoring, adjustment, and communication, ensuring internal goals and customer expectations are met. 

There is a vast difference between the Internal ROI and External ROI. The Internal ROI is the value you provide to clients, while the External ROI is the value your customer gets from the CSM work. With External ROI, you can opt for new tools that increase employee efficiency. 

Here are three actionable tips you can do to define the types of ROI and classify them accordingly:

• Align Internal and External Goals. Regularly review and align your commercial teams’ goals with your customers’ needs and expectations.
• Utilise Data-Driven Insights. Leverage data analytics to track and measure the impact of your CSM efforts. 
• Prompt proactive customer engagement. Engage with customers proactively to understand their evolving needs and to demonstrate how your product can help them achieve their goals. 

Also, As shared during the session – “My two cents, from my point of view, the internal ROI is more related with the benefits that your own company (CSM company) can get from the CSM work”. 

For example, CSM efforts can help build strong relationships with customers, position yourself as a trusted advisor, and open new business opportunities. These factors then, can lead to product renewals, increased customer loyalty, and new avenues for growth.

A CSM who actively engages with customers to understand their needs and challenges is likely to build a stronger, more trusting relationship. This is an example of the benefits of Internal ROI.

Dublin: Understand your product’s ROI

The best way to maximise the value you provide to your company and customers is to ensure that you have a clear understanding of your product’s ROI. This involves identifying and measuring the specific benefits your product delivers, aligning these benefits with customer goals, and communicating the value effectively. 

Deep Dive into your Product’s ROI

Develop a comprehensive understanding of your product’s ROI by identifying the key metrics that demonstrate its value, aligning them with customer objectives, and using this information to effectively guide and support your customers. Here are three significant tips to do:

• Identify Key ROI Metrics. Determine the specific metrics that best represent the value your product delivers. 
• Recommend Metrics to Customers. Share these key metrics with your customers and help them understand how to measure and track them.
• Track Leading Indicators of Success. Identify and monitor early indicators that signal progress toward achieving ROI. 

Do you enjoy reading more about Customer Success Insights? Join our events and mingle with over 450 Customer Success Professionals all over Europe. 

Related posts

Maturing a Customer Success Mindset, the Status of Customer Success in Europe: Takeaways from the Amsterdam CS Snack Breakfast 

The Shift from Reactive to Proactive Customer Success: Takeaways from the Copenhagen CS Snack Breakfast 

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The Future of Customer Success: 16 Strategies from Our Paris Event

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