Is Your CS Team Effective? 30 CS Strategies from our Customer Success Community: Event Recap from our Ghent Breakfast
With companies exerting massive efforts to navigate and survive the ballooning challenges, brought by today’s economic climate, the question is, Are we on the right track?
We gathered over 40 leaders and pioneers in the Customer Success field, to engage in an intuitive dialogue. Here’s a glimpse of the valuable exchange we had.
Rounding up the challenges circled us to one dilemma – the effectiveness of our current CS teams, and how businesses will adapt to the modern challenges of today’s business landscape.
Ghent is no exception to the current challenges affecting businesses. With the alarming decline of renewal rates, and customers seeking cost-cutting measures, CS teams in Ghent are devising resilient strategies to help mitigate losses.
We hosted over 40 professionals, from different companies – Yuki Software, Materialise, Silver Fin, and many more, for a breakfast & share at Ghent on April 4. If you want to join a future Customer Success Snack event in your city, make sure to become part of the community.
Below are some notes of what we’ve learned and identified from the event. This article is brought to you by our great moderators Pieter Boon, Kataryna Vitenko, Kristof Bonne, Laurence de Klerk Wolters & Thomas Laureys
Building a customer-centric business: “Make sure CX is embedded in every aspect of the company”
There are numerous factors to consider in building a customer-centric business, and even more difficult, turning your existing business into customer-centric. A company’s long-term success isn’t bound to just making a sale, and we’ve seen hundreds of entities collapse relying on one-time purchases.
Through the Rose-Thorn-Bud Formula, we were able to round up the challenges that were often encountered and hindered a company from becoming customer-centric.
- Build a dedicated CX Team and make it a priority for the company to prompt career growth by having people grow into other roles spreading the customer focus within every aspect of the company.
- A CX Team is only the onset. Set up a team that will audit the initiatives and define the workability and success rate of each.
- Touch base with customers on feedback and ensure that it will be directed to the CX Team, for more customer-favorable updates and plans.
- Tap bigger markets and scale customers, through proactive partnerships.
Retaining revenue in tougher times: “Implement surveys, and user interviews, and leverage this data to understand customer patterns”
With Customer Success Teams and insights, we were able to gather the actionable measures that need to be optimized to scale amidst the economic downturns.
- Companies should pay attention to reviewing and enhancing renewal processes through CS teams that proactively collaborate with existing customers.
- Customer Success Programs can be optimized through incentivization strategies such as flexible pricing models, discounts for early renewals, and incentives for multi-year commitments.
- Renewal challenges can be solved by refining strategies and assigning clear ownership of the renewal process within the organization.
- To stay ahead of competitors, continuously innovate the product offerings, highlighting unique features and value propositions, leveraging on Innovation.
- Customer Success Teams can collaborate with other departments, to explore strategic partnerships with complementary service providers.
- Conduct a Competitor’s analysis to understand the SWOT that can help companies create counter-competitive measures, amidst the growing competition.
- Companies should focus on their products to contribute to customer success and the importance of continuous values as a key retention strategy.
- Develop a framework to quantify the value customers receive from the products they have, involves the setting and reviewing of KPIs.
- Implement surveys, and user interviews, and leverage this data to understand customer patterns to better understand customer-centric solutions that will help boost revenue streams.
- Promote educational content and training to educate customers on how to maximize the utilization of products and services being offered, allowing the customer success team to better engage, and improve customer loyalty.
- Be proactive on sleeping accounts, search for touchpoints, and use cases to determine what is causing turnovers.
- Focus on the customer health cycle and asses the bottlenecks from usage, invoice payments, and referrals.
Building ROI for your customer as CSM: “Maintain transparency with customers and collaborate closely with the sales team”
Customer Success Managers should set achievable customer goals together, broadcast customer success, and enhance transparency and collaboration between customers and sales.
- Develop a system for educating ROI for customers(external), and the company(internal).
- Determine the different needs of a client depending on segmentation to assess the KPIs that will measure success and collaborate effectively to create a joint-goal setting.
- Customer Success Managers should be proactive in aligning with sales on customer expectations based on the sales process, aligning customer objectives, for a smoother transition of customer goals.
- Celebrate milestones both internally and externally to promote stakeholder success, and encourage current customers about the achievable benefits of the company’s products and services.
- Be transparent and collaborative with customers to determine their expected ROI and conduct regular check-ins on the agreed milestones keeping the CS team and Sales in the loop on the touchpoints that need to be addressed.
Scaling CS through Digitalisation: “Invest in AI tools like Gong, or Co-Pilot to analyze meetings real-time”
CSMs play a big role in scaling through digitalization with tools, that optimize processes reducing human intervention in repetitive tasks and processes. With AI on the surface, it’s important to gauge and assess how it can help streamline processes rather than see it as a competitor for companies.
- CS tools like Planhat or Gainsight allow companies to focus on managing relationships with customers rather than manual repetitive activities that often affect churn risks.
- AI tools such as Gong or Co-pilot of Microsoft aid in analyzing meeting conversations in real-time, extracting key insights, action items, and follow-up tasks.
- Before scaling through digitalization, analyze the customer journey to assess the various touchpoints and create a valuable analysis of customer behavior. This can help make companies make informed decisions on the necessity of customer segmentation.
“AI will even help CSM to be more Human because it will help with eliminating repetitive tasks and focus on real conversations with your customers.”
Change management as a CSM: “If you don’t agree with the change, give it at least a try and provide feedback.”
With representatives from Mollie, Yuki, and Materialise, we were able to gather insights on Internal and External Change Management.
From the Internal perspective we’ve come up with the following:
- Embrace change and acknowledge within the group the evolving needs of customers and how a flexible mindset can be a key to successfully navigating this challenge.
- Strive for balanced transparency amongst the organization, keeping a line between those that need to be shared and those left for non-disclosure.
- Ensure that everyone in the team understands the
At the External, these are the points addressed:
- CSMs should emphasize the importance of strategic pacing when guiding customers on change management, ensuring they are able to build a solid foundation before accelerating to new tools.
- CSMs to facilitate connections between struggling and championing customers.
- Prepare for roadblocks and risks as change cannot be 100% prepared for.
Strategic/enterprise account management (100k+ ARR): “Make the CS work billable”
- Build realistic customer expectations by being diplomatic and transparent so that not all requests can be granted.
- Make the CS work billable to add more value and neutralize the cost in the CS department.
The effectiveness of CS Initiatives highly depends on the team’s ability to gauge and interpret results and vary from that. Through our Customer Success Snack events, we hear different expert thoughts and experiences that lead us to be more proactive as a whole.
The Customer Success Snack community fuels CS teams to success, through our community-driven education, events and extensive toolkits. Be part of our community and share your insights with over 400 CS professionals from Europe.
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