How to implement your customer success strategy: a step-by-step guide

Aside from meeting—or exceeding—customer expectations, there are dozens of reasons to prioritize customer success (CS), including:

• Increased customer satisfaction (CSAT)
• Lower churn and higher retention rates
• Higher monthly recurring revenue (MRR)
• Improved customer experience

But, like with any other initiative, the success of your CS efforts depends on your strategy. Is it well-defined? Have you established goals and success metrics? Does everyone know their role? 

A successful CS strategy puts the customer front and center—it’s built around customers meeting business objectives, relationship-building, and an open feedback loop.

"[A] company’s vision must be driven by the aspirations of its customers.” - Kōnosuke Matsushita, Panasonic founder

Once you’ve designed your strategy, it's time to roll it out across the company. But it’s not as simple as telling people about it. 

Your customer success strategy is only as good as its implementation. A clear and definitive plan gives the strategy the best chance of success within your organization. 

We’ll walk you through the steps for a successful customer success rollout. First up? Metrics.

Step 1: Define your success metrics

Without any clear way to define whether you've achieved the goals you set when building your customer success strategy, there's no way to understand whether your efforts have made an impact. And worse, there are no insights into how you can improve, because you don't know what's working and what's not.

Key performance indicators (KPIs)—measurements that evaluate success—reflect your CS team its efforts to make sure customers are successful with your product and in meeting their business objectives.

These metrics provide invaluable insights into your CS strategy and where you can improve, making them a crucial part of any successful customer success plan. 

7 customer success metrics to track 

It'll take time to see whether your CS program is effective, but once you have enough data to understand its impact fully, you'll want to track a few key metrics:

• Net promoter score (NPS)
• Customer satisfaction score
• Qualitative customer feedback
• Churn rate
• Renewal rate
• Monthly recurring revenue (MRR)
• Customer lifetime value (CLTV)

It’s not enough to have metrics, though. You need to align them to your KPIs to truly understand whether you’re accomplishing what you set out to do.

Let’s say one of your overarching CS goals is to reduce churn. A decreased churn rate would obviously indicate that your CS strategy is working. But you could also look at:

• How your retention rate has changed
• If your CSAT scores have increased
• Whether your average MRR has gone up 

Or maybe you want to understand if your customers get value from your product. Your CSAT and NPS scores can provide answers. 

Whatever your KPIs, connect them to the metrics intended to measure their success.

Step 2: Align your teams

Customer success isn't one person, one team, or one department's responsibility. Everyone in your company needs to work together to execute your strategy—from the customer success team to sales and marketing setting expectations to customer service providing exceptional support.

“The biggest barrier to customer success is CEOs not making it an important part of the culture.” - Nick Mehta, Gainsight CEO

The interconnectedness of your teams is crucial for an effective customer success implementation. And it starts with clear communication. A few ways you can make sure communication doesn't become a barrier to a thriving CS program include:

• Quickly identifying where there are communication gaps between teams
• Making sure each team (member?) knows its role in your customers' success
• Setting up the proper communication channels and tools—like a customer relationship management (CRM) platform and customer support ticketing system
• Proactively communicate the strategy across your organization and make sure employees understand it

Custify—a customer success platform—also recommends reviewing your handoff process to work out any kinks and create a seamless experience for your customers. The best way to do this? Create a journey map that shows when different teams take over.

For example, does your sales team know when to transition customers to a customer success manager (CSM)? Or, how will a service rep know when they're supposed to support a customer vs. a CSM?  

Discovering and working out any communication kinks in the early stages of your customer success implementation (or before) will create a smoother experience for everyone.

Step 3: Train your CSMs

While your customers will likely interact with a dozen departments before, during, and after they become paying customers, your CSMs will be their primary contact. Well-trained CSMs can make all the difference between customers who churn or renew.

Customer success starts with CSM success. Zendesk recommends training them thoroughly by providing resources and training and:

• Access to resources that explain your offerings
• Insights from customer feedback
• Product demos
• Access to sales and marketing materials
• Documents that explain how to handle different customer interactions
• Competitor information
• Help Center content

These resources prepare your CSMs to handle objections, highlight the value of your offerings, and give them the information necessary to help your customers meet business outcomes.

Step 4: Automate, automate, automate

Now that the novelty of artificial intelligence (AI) has worn off, savvy organizations are leveraging any way possible to automate tasks. Customer success is no different. Once you roll out your customer success strategy, think of ways to automate the less personalized aspects of customer success.

Not sure where to start? Try automating these tasks:

• Customer onboarding
• Emails, like a welcome sequence
• Proactive support, like help content you send through automated emails
• Reminders, like renewals or to activate features
• Data collection, like feedback or gathering customer data
• Workflow creation and execution
• At-risk notifications, like when a customer's health score goes below a set threshold

Automation requires technology and tools to work properly. Make sure you have the right platforms to create successful automations.

Step 5: Review and improve

You use customer feedback to create better, more personalized experiences for them. Why not do the same for your customer success team? Your CSMs are in the weeds, day in and day out, giving them unique insights into what's working and what isn't.

Asking your customer success team for continual feedback on the process and strategy can help you iterate and create a more impactful program that benefits your team and customers.

Data also provides a wealth of information on where you can improve. Have your reps been proactively sending help content to customers, but nobody's reading it? Or are they canceling their check-in calls? You can measure every part of your CS strategy with data—use it to find the weak spots where you can improve.

Once you've established what needs to change and what you need to double down on, make the changes quickly. Fixing as many issues as possible early on will limit challenges with scaling your program.

At its core, customer success is simply helping your customers achieve their goals with your offering. Show them you're a reliable asset and a partner dedicated to their success.

“Companies need to prove their worth—day after day, month after month, year after year.” - Kaiser Mulla-Feroze, Former Benchling CMO

‍