Lean Customer Success Management

Author

Markus Rentsch
October 24, 2024

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Hi, Markus here. Welcome to a new episode 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.

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Customer Success Management has a single mission and goal - helping customers to accomplish their desired outcomes.

But in the recent past, it has become increasingly more difficult. Customer expectations have risen and while budgets for CSM teams got cut.

Doing “more with less” has become the ultimate buzzword. None knows what it means and even fewer people how it’s done (besides adding more technology).

In today’s post, I want to show you how you can improve efficiency by reducing your waste of resources.

1. Handling Escalations

Small issues accumulate into a full-blown crisis. Customers sending you angry messages. Customers informing you that they are not renewing their contracts.

Handling escalations is one of the most demanding parts of the CSM life. They are taking a mental toll and they are requiring a lot of attention. Where are they coming from?

What few people have on the radar are premature scaling and over-relying on superficial metrics. Customers are going through your self-service education and training program that does not properly enable them.

Customers have adopted most product features and are using them regularly. But what you don’t know is that while they keep trying they are not making any progress. Until the day their frustration blows up in your face.

Another “classic” is reminding customers about the upcoming renewal date. Only to learn that they are not renewing their contracts. What are the odds that you can fix 11 months of failure in the last 30 days?

Solution: Follow up with customers regularly. Evaluate their progress and get their feedback. This way you can spot promptly gaps and shortcomings and respond immediately.

2. Dogmatic Service Model

What does customer segmentation in CSM typically look like? Customers are split by their size, industry, and revenue. The latter defines whether customers are entitled to high-, medium- or low-touch services.

That’s easy to do but it is incredibly short-sided. For starters, it does not consider individual customer needs.

What if customers need more help? What if their use case is too complex for self-learning? Do you say no to customers if they ask for a 1:1 meeting?

What this static service model also does not consider is that the amount of help customers need changes over time. That means you can not only under but also overserve your customers.

If you have a customer who has been with you for 5 years already - do they really need a business review every quarter? Most likely reducing them to twice a year is enough.

Some customers might not need any at all. Running them for the sake of it is a waste of everybody’s time.

Solution: Segment your customers by their skills and knowledge. Seasoned professionals need less input and hand-holding than startup founders who have never done the job before. Track their progress and maturity and adjust the amount of inputs and touchpoints.

3. Pointless Meetings

I’ve never hidden my strong dislike for doing “check-ins” with your customers. They may seem to signal that you really care but they are a total waste of time. At least the way they are performed.

A typical check-in happens in response to a negative event or development. Product usage took a dive. Account health has turned from green to yellow. Customers did not respond to your messages.

They happen at a random point in time with no agenda or goal. You and your customers alike are as smart as before after they have been done. A total waste of time.

What if you actually identify a customer issue? You are most likely not able to provide any immediate solution unless you are prepared for every possible turn of events.

Solution: Replace check-ins with follow-ups that happen

  • at specific points in time (e.g. 2 weeks after customers completed your webinar series).

  • with a clear agenda (verifying whether customers were able to implement their learnings)

  • and lead to a specific outcome (mitigating risks through additional inputs in case they were not able to implement their learnings)

4. Irrelevant outreach

You have the best of intentions. You are sending your customers links to useful articles in your knowledge base. The latest industry reports and case studies.

You even craft hyper-personalized messages with content that’s supposedly a game changer. But on your customers’ side … crickets.

Most of your outreach ends up unread and deleted. Why is that happening? Shouldn’t your customers be happy to receive so many inputs?

The keyword here is relevance. Throwing everything you’ve got at customers and hoping something sticks is never a good idea.

It drives customers further and further away and is a total waste of resources. Despite all the automation that make your life easier.

The #1 rule when reaching out to customers, aside from writing compelling subject lines, is “show me that you know me”. Relevance is the keyword.

Solution: Run a thorough discovery to understand your customers’ needs. Don’t let them search for the right inputs in a sea of content. Tailor your outreach to the customer use case and their resulting needs. Ask for feedback to understand whether they found it useful (if they’ve read it in the first place).

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