How to Drive Efficiency With Automated Customer Success Plays

Editor's Notes

• #4: My name is Irit Eizips and I want to welcome you to how to drive efficiency and introduce scalability by automating customer success plays! I know a lot of you have registered from different places and I’d love to hear where everyone’s hailing from! Go ahead and put
• #6: Quickly with a show of hands, tell me if you have automated any of your customer success playbooks yet? For those of you who haven’t raised your hands, don’t worry, we’re going to crack the code and give you some examples of common playbook automation. The best way to nailing your automation approach is to follow a systematic approach. Start with playbooks that have already been proven and come ready knowing exactly what to do, what tools you’re going to leverage, and know when is the exact time to deploy automation to get the results you want.
• #7: So right now, right this minute, you are in the right place if you can identify with any of these scenarios.
• #9: I remember the first time a client ever asked me to come build their customer success program. It’s how I started consulting. I remember a month before hand I met with this incredible lady who ran the customer success and sales team at a high growth SaaS company. I was so impressed with her that I asked her if she would keep in touch with me. She said yes (to my humbled surprise) and a few weeks later we set down for coffee. Back then the main goal in setting one up was to create a competitive advantage through a better customer experience. We started working on the program a month later. Although our main focus was to define the customer journey and playbooks, something occurred to me in the process. What we did initially was to look at what processes our strategic CSMs were doing and translating that to the entire customer base. The main challenge was the difference in annual revenues that incurred from one account to the next. At the top the customer base, we had a segment that paid north of high 5 figure annual revenues. At the bottom, we had clients that were contributing less than 5K a year. It didn’t make sense to offer those clients the same level of service as those who paid nearly 1 million a year. What more, the ratio of CSM to the mid sized accounts, did not leave a lot of time for a CSM to be truly strategic and proactive. We then resolved to begin our first automated playbook. Today, three years into working with dozens of clients, I’d like to share with you the different types of playbooks I have helped automate and the tools we’ve used so that you too can improve your existing customer success strategy in a way that would free up your time to do more every day, to allow you to be more proactive and strategic fairly quickly.
• #11: Before I start, I want to tell you why I do consulting for customer success. This is my uncle, Benny. Back in the 70s my entire family got into the business of fumigation. You had to have a special license for it, and I’d say the first few hundreds were probably all owned by either one of my uncles, their cousins and of course, my dad. As a child, I watched this family completely take over the industry. But what was most interesting to me, was to see how some family members did a lot better than others. In fact, the one in the picture, is now a multi-millionaire. To put things in perspective, he recently purchased his own mountain. Anyway, early on that made me become extremely curious as to figuring out how do big companies work and what makes them successful. And without really planning on it, it became my life passion and I’ve become a management consultant straight out of college.
• #12: So, I can definitely say with confidence that there’s a system behind creating scalability and efficiency and if all my clients followed this approach, we can systematize how CSMs cater to their smaller clients and how they can become much more efficient and productive with their strategic ones.
• #14: If you take one thing away from this presentation, is that CSM Teams don’t become GREAT on their own. To get great results from team, the secret is to help them scale through automation of repeatable plays.
• #15: So now I’m going to show you how you can scale and maximize productivity with automated success plays
• #16: I’m a bit of an old school, and I love formulas and templates to help me create new content for my clients. That’s why I created this cheat sheet to help you get started quickly on this important concept.
• #17: So let’s talk about the automating playbooks and discuss each one of these playbook types. I’m going to talk about each one of them really specifically. But real fast I’ll give you just a quick snapshot of what kind of playbooks you can easily start with, whether you have a CSM system or you’re going to leverage your CRM system.  Number one: the Onboarding playbooks – that would include the moment a client signs a contract off to when they go live. Number two: the adoption phase – that’s when we ideally try to leverage usage data or survey data, that genuinely can help us trigger playbooks that would help drive more usage of sticky features and help our customers drive more value. Number three: The SAVE playbooks – and don’t worry , if you haven’t done one before, I got your back and I’m going to show you how to do this. And finally, number four the advocacy playbooks – which is playbook that most CSM team skip, but it’s the most important playbook in driving an impact on revenues. Existing as well as new.
• #18: So here’s what you will discover
• #19: In this type I am going to share the three most common emails my clients automate during onboarding, that not only improves onboarding but helps promote adoption faster and renewal rates like nobody’s business.
• #20: Everyone wants to promote adoption, I’m going to show you how to leverage your usage data to promote adoption like crazy. Specifically, I’m going to give you the three aspects to focus on when designing automated playbooks to drive stickiness.
• #21: This section of the webinar includes examples of SAVE playbooks strategies that are working right now to discover clients at risk and take action in a programmatic and automated way to handle the risk and reduce churn.
• #22: So ultimately, I’m going to show you how to drive more value for your clients using automated plays. Customer Success teams that apply automation, see massive results.
• #23: Imagine the feeling having more time to be proactive and strategic with your clients. Being able to find upsells, cross sells, and increase adoption not only with your premier clients, but with your SMBs too. It is life changing. And that’s what I want to share with you today.
• #24: So where do we start?
• #25: So there are three magical emails that I want you to pay close attention to. Meaning I want you to put these emails in your very next client onboarding experience. So here we go.
• #26: Well, we start at the top of the customer journey with the onboarding phase. And the onboarding plays are all about creating efficiency and promoting change management while reducing extensive manual efforts.
• #27: Your users’ first experience is absolutely critical. Here’s how to make it count. What happens when a customer signs up for your product or service? A lot of people think that that moment—the signup—is when they’ve “won” the customer. But the reality is that in a world where 40-60% of software users will open an app once, and never log in again, that’s simply not true. For most businesses, there are two key milestones that need to be reached before a customer can reach their full value potential: The moment they sign up for your product, and… The moment they achieve their first “success” with your product
• #28: What’s easier: starting a journey when you have no idea where you’re going, or starting a journey when you know exactly what it will take to complete? Of course the latter is easier, and this applies in spades to onboarding. By showing your users exactly where they are in the process and how much they have left to go, you make it easier to get started, and via the endowed progress effect, make them more motivated to finish with every step that they take. You can do something simple by working with your product team to clarify what the process looks like, or if you have a human touch complicated onboarding, you can significantly improve you customers experience by automating as many parts of the internal processes within your CRM and CSM system to ensure a smoother and more cohesive experience.
• #30: Perhaps the most common onboarding mistake is asking users to do too much from the outset. It’s overwhelming and, often, scary enough to ensure that they never return. To avoid onboarding overwhelm, make every step in the process as small and simple as possible. Overlaying onboarding instructions directly into your app or website used to require the help of a developer, but tools like WalkMe, AppCues and Nickelled, among others, make this easy for anyone to do today. By creating an a-ha moment for your client, you take the initiative to a specific and well defined onboarding journey. This will help accelerate the onboarding process and make it more consistent across different clients.
• #31: https://www.groovehq.com/support/great-examples-of-customer-onboarding
• #32: Quickly with a show of hands, tell me if you have automated any of your customer success playbooks yet?
• #33: To fully automate this process, you might have an app where you can incorporate a solution that shows a client where to client and what to do in their first few clicks. The journey should be defined based on usage data patterns and interviewing customers to better understand their journey within your app. Marketing or Product teams typically take the time to implement this approach, and you will most likely need to collaborate with them. Many companies hire a “Customer Experience” specialist and survey their clients. There are several solutions out there who monitor usage and will give you valuable insights about the effective user paths during the first few clicks, if you wanted to try it out yourself first.
• #34: What if you have a highly customized approach to onboarding and each client is very different than the other? You’d still want to define and communicate to your clients what it would take from them and from you to make the onboarding process successful. This concept is true no matter how you execute it. And you can still do a lot to make the process a lot more automated, even if the process of onboarding is highly customized for each client.
• #36: How so?! Many of my clients are using a customer success operations solution to introduce some level of automation. For example, as soon as a new client has signed up, the system will initiate a client onboarding call to action with pre-defined tasks. Story: BloomReach – client is created and it takes Sales Ops a few days to a week to update it in the CRM system, meanwhile important time is lost. By automating this process the client has a better experience. In addition, you can automate the emails you send out to the client as soon as the deal is closed from the CSM to ensure they feel welcome. You will do one over if you can send them a list of what they need to prepare in order to be successful during the onboarding process – this will ensure consistency in the level or client preparation and accountability to their own success during onboarding. Finally, you should want to keep track of the onboarding process by phases in your CRM or CSM system. We help clients configure this all the time. Even if these fields are tracked manually y your team, you will be able to automate the onabording reports instead of manually creating them. ‘
• #37: So now let’s get to our second stage in the customer journey, the adoption. This is going to be really really valueable. If you ever ran into a situation where you either couldn’t get your client interested in adopting your solution or simply couldn’t get them to use enough of it, the following strategies, will help you get them not only to use it but to reduce churn too. So I’m going to give you the strategies that are working right now to support your customer success team in getting adoption.
• #38: I’ve personally have helped a number of my clients leverage Salesforce and CSM systems to empower them to get better insights and support an actionable and automated approach to customer success. There’s a lot you can do in terms of smart automation by investing in getting more data into both. Most of my clients who have thousands of users choose to use Intercom or Zendesk Zopim to allow for a quick and easy resolution of issues and elevate the customer experience. Beyond the fact that these alone could help you scale your support, the integration of the two with your current CRM or CSM systems will allow you to have a cockpit for all your clients and creating an automated Customer 360 view for each client as well as user. Integrating data between your CSM System and other systems and databases storing important information about your client is going to be key to automating your customer journey.
• #42: How can you trigger this automatically? Many times the first step in automating our customer success approach is to consolidate data from other systems or simply starting tracking important information in better data architecture. For this specific welcome email you can track one of two things: The date the customer closed/won the deal – this would be more of a welcome email If you do track usage data – this would be after usage has become a bit more substantial. In this example, the first email was sent after I have established a PulseLocalSV event and 30 Customer Success professionals from Silicon Valley signed up to it. If your onboarding is manual and you have all your contacts in your CRM system, you may want to have the onboarding team track the beginning onboarding date and the go live date and trigger this email to go out automatically based on one of these dates. Email marketing for clients could be sent from either a marketing platform, such as Pardot or Marketo to name a couple or your CSM system, like Amity’s.
• #44: Scope of work bullet points that apply: Modifying our classic sales structure to a model based on Client Success
• #45: OK so we are moving on to save playbooks
• #46: I’ve personally have helped a number of my clients leverage Salesforce and CSM systems to empower them to get better insights and support an actionable and automated approach to customer success. There’s a lot you can do in terms of smart automation by investing in getting more data into both. Most of my clients who have thousands of users choose to use Intercom or Zendesk Zopim to allow for a quick and easy resolution of issues and elevate the customer experience. Beyond the fact that these alone could help you scale your support, the integration of the two with your current CRM or CSM systems will allow you to have a cockpit for all your clients and creating an automated Customer 360 view for each client as well as user. Integrating data between your CSM System and other systems and databases storing important information about your client is going to be key to automating your customer journey.
• #51: Story: PulseLocalSV and SplashThat The second automated play I want you to try and make sure you have in your list of playbooks to automate, is the CEO Welcome email. Basically this email is going to give them a big reason to want to share their initial experience with you and some sort of a personalized experience even though we’re serving a tech couth engagement model here. This email will encourage a first time user to flush out any issues or frustration, and give you the opportunity to proactively mitigate churn. Now, SplashThat does this with their ability to analyze their client’s usage. What if you have a high touch model? This email works for all engagement models. Everyone wants to fill important and an email from the CEO is just the one to make them feel like one.
• #53: How can you trigger this automatically? Many times the first step in automating our customer success approach is to consolidate data from other systems or simply starting tracking important information in better data architecture. For this specific welcome email you can track one of two things: The date the customer closed/won the deal – this would be more of a welcome email If you do track usage data – this would be after usage has become a bit more substantial. In this example, the first email was sent after I have established a PulseLocalSV event and 30 Customer Success professionals from Silicon Valley signed up to it. If your onboarding is manual and you have all your contacts in your CRM system, you may want to have the onboarding team track the beginning onboarding date and the go live date and trigger this email to go out automatically based on one of these dates. Email marketing for clients could be sent from either a marketing platform, such as Pardot or Marketo to name a couple or your CSM system, like Amity’s.
• #54: So what do you think? Are you excited about possibly introducing more automation? Allowing your team to do more? Trying out some new automation playbooks? I hope you’re excited cause I know I’m excited for you.
• #57: It’s your time. If you find yourself taking notes and actively listening to this presentation, you’re obviously interested in adding something to your customer success toolkit that will help you build the foundation of consistent results. EBRs can help you with that.
• #58: Now remember Nothing, not one single thing that I’ve shared with you today is theory. Every single one of these strategies are used by other Customer Success managers, just like you, to maximize the lifetime value from their customer base. Was it an easy process to develop a successful EBR playbook? heck no! Did it me take a while to hone in on systemizing this process to perfection? sure did. But once you know the playbook and how to do it. Everything can change.
• #60: I’m a bit of an old school, and I love formulas and templates to help me create new content for my clients. That’s why I created this cheat sheet to help you get started quickly on this important concept.
• #65: I want to thank you for listening and taking notes today. The CSM Practice is a team of experts in the field of customer success and we’d love to partner with you by providing strategy sessions, certifying your team by offering one of our unique on site workshops or simply help you with your CSM software, We love helping our clients implement it, optimize it (phase 2) or simply help maintain it.
• #66: If you liked the content I shared today, you may want to take a few minutes now to pull out your mobile phones and follow me on twitter, facebook or bookmark our blogs page. Before I finish this presentation, I want to finish with these words: There are two things to do right now. I gave enough information to go take action right now and you can try to do this stuff yourself on your own. Or, you can come through and engage with our customer success consultants and learn faster and better than you could possibly do by yourself.
• #68: Whichever way you choose, I wish you the best of luck with your clients and your customer success career. Thank you for listening.