According to HubSpot’s State of Service Report, companies with strong customer engagement realise a 50% higher customer retention rate and a 33% increase in customer loyalty. Customer engagement is one of the most potent drivers of retention and loyalty. In our recent CS Snack breakfast event in Berlin, over 60 Customer Success (CS) executives shared their insights and successful strategies for boosting customer engagement. 

Keeping our customers involved generally makes them more informed and knowledgeable about the business. This can benefit companies as it forms stronger customer relationships and increases the customer’s willingness to advocate for the brand, especially during challenging times. 

In April, in Berlin, we met with CS professionals from various industries, including Microsoft, Epidemic Sound, Wix, and Asana, and benchmarked new ideas with each other. This article is brought to you by our great moderators, who helped make the event successful: Giorgia Pedenzini, Giulia Perini, Lars Boehle, Sally Stoewe, Maximilian Richter, and Andreas Tollschein.

Here are some proven strategies you can mimic for Customer Success. 

Scaling Customer Success through Digitalisation

“Always remember what problem you are trying to solve and your Main KPI for Digitalisation.”

In today’s digital landscape, businesses that increase their focus on customer success see it as a critical driver of growth and retention. There are a lot of opportunities to enhance the customer journey. However, digitalising your customer success journey requires building the framework and laying out the problem firsthand. 

Here are three strategies to consider:

1. The right sales expectations for future Customer Success: Customer segmentation will help you determine your sales expectations; hence, it’s equally important to use this approach to align with customer needs. 

2. The Power of AI tools: Integrating AI tools, like Gong for note-taking and Microsoft Copilot to take meeting minutes, helps lessen the CS workload, allowing more time to focus on customers. Communicating with customers about your use of AI also sets expectations and eliminates the idea that you are trying to dupe them or fool them in any kind.

3. Digital tools should be accessible to all teams: The effectiveness of digitalisation lies in how it is implemented across all departments and channels within the organisation. It must be a collaborative effort rather than a one-way process. This way, all teams, especially those communicating directly to customers, can benefit and work around digitalisation. 

Building ROI for your customer as a Customer Success Manager

“Focus on fewer KPIs that describe customer health!”

According to a study by Bain & Company, businesses that prioritise measuring and improving customer health through strategic KPIs achieve a 5-10% increase in revenue and a 10-15% increase in market valuation over competitors who do not focus on these metrics.

Direct your focus on more impactful KPIs, which can prompt clarity and focus and boost more relevance and impact for the organisation and the Customer Success journey. Here are two factors to prioritise:

1. Customer 360° Dashboard: Implementing a dashboard that describes clients’ footprints mobilises CSMs to be more proactive. 

2. Build a vibrant community: Encourage customers to collaborate with others, and let this be a gateway towards a community that helps solve problems, reduces support’s workload, and identifies client’s footprints. 

Strategic/enterprise Account Management 

“In-depth knowledge of customers is essential.”

As a business, apart from the initial customer segmentation and demographics you have created, how well do you know your customers? Deep customer knowledge is beneficial and essential for success in strategic or enterprise account management scenarios where Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) exceeds $100,000. 

Account managers can meet customer needs and respond to their pain points through tailored solutions. Here are three tips we’ve learnt throughout the session:

1. Work Smarter, not Harder: Empower your customers to become more involved by cultivating advocates to promote your brand effectively. 

2. Map stakeholders to uncover blind spots and nurture relationships: To gather buyer and end-user feedback, understand each individual’s unique goals and motivation, and host lunch-and-learn sessions during Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs).

3. Embrace saying “No” and learning from mistakes: Perfection isn’t always ideal, and calculated failures often provide more insights and knowledge. Saying “No” and offering recommendations to both the team and the customers instead will set expectations and prevent stress on both ends.

Influencing Organisational change as a Customer Success Manager

“Convincing customers to adopt a new solution is a marathon, not a sprint.”

Understanding the customer journey raises awareness on the business side of how to keep customers engaged and invested. Forcing them to digest new information will only result in Customer Frustration. 

In a study by Harvard Business Review, we learned that businesses that improve their understanding of the customer journey see an average 15-20% increase in customer satisfaction and 20-30% increase in customer retention. But how can you understand the customer journey as a Customer Success executive?

Here are three insights for better strategies:

1. Educate and Engage Customers: From a customer perspective, knowing about the benefits and realities of the product plays a crucial role in decision-making. Involve customers in the User Acceptance Testing (UAT) to ensure the product meets their needs. 

2. Internal Change Management is Crucial: Ensure that the internal alignment is done before driving any change externally to prevent miscommunication on the outside. Create a customer advisory board for any feedback that can improve the change management strategy. 

3. Adopting a New Solution is a Gradual Process: Not all customers will understand right away how a new solution can benefit them so it might be tedious, but with patience, it can be an effective way to retain customers. 

The Customer Success Snack community is built to scale CS teams through our events, toolkits, and community-driven knowledge sharing. Join our community and share your insights with over 400 European CS professionals. Did you like what you read? Join our Community to learn more about what we do and participate in our next event.

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