5 highly effective tools every CS team needs to use

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Hi, Markus here. Welcome to a premium edition of the Customer-Value-Led-Growth Newsletter.

Every week, I share strategies, guides, and frameworks to help you create exceptional value for your customers and company.

If you are not a paid subscriber, here’s what you might have missed:

• How to be more strategic as a Customer Success Manager

• How to build a 360° Customer View

• How CSMs win with the 80/20 principle

• 6 Bad habits that cost CSMs a fortune

• Customer Success is the new sales

Struggling with understanding why customers churn? Need to set the right priorities and distribute resources effectively? Don’t know how to build your strategy and set the right goals for the next year?

If one or more of these questions resonates today’s episode is a must-read for you.

Because I’ll walk you through 5 highly effective tools (NOT software) that will help you take your performance to the next level.

Let’s dive straight into action:

The 5-Why-Analysis

We start with the equivalent of the Swiss Army Knife. For Customer Success Managers Context is king.

The better you understand your customers, the higher the odds of success. That also includes why customers have decided to leave.

Sure, when a customer churns it hurts at first. There’s no sugarcoating of it. But here’s the thing:

Every new churn case puts you closer to solving it once and for all. That’s not some guru BS but a cold hard fact.

If you look at it from a bird’s eye perspective, churn is a data problem. The way to reduce it to a healthy level (“natural churn”) is to understand the patterns behind it.

Many CS teams and companies are only treating the symptoms of churn forever because their churn analysis does not go deep enough.

The 5-Why Analysis is a simple yet highly effective tool to get to the bottom of it.

As the name implies, you are (roughly) asking why customers left going deeper with every iteration.

One of the most common frustrations I hear from CSMs about their colleagues in sales is that they make exaggerated promises.

That’s a problem because customers will always evaluate your product based on the relationship between expectations and actual outcomes.

While it happens deliberately to close more deals that’s not always the case. None knows more about actual customer outcomes than a CSM.

Well, at least that’s how it should be. Consequently, they are responsible for sharing that information with marketing and sales.

The use of the 5-Why-Analysis is not limited to understanding churn.

Further fruitful use cases

• Discovering the root causes of customer problems

• Risk analysis

• Making customer feedback actionable

2. Prioritization Matrix

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