It's no secret that customer success (CS) is key to a company's success. Every organization strives to create happy and satisfied customers, who are likely to return and refer others. But why is CS so important, and how can your business build and scale a customer success team?
Let’s find out
What is customer success?
Customer success (CS) is the new revenue center for businesses, especially SaaS. CS drives revenue growth by improving customer satisfaction. Success teams identify and add value to customers to achieve desired outcomes. Ultimately, CS focuses on enhancing customer satisfaction, happiness, and loyalty.
Why is Customer Success the Biggest Opportunity This Year?
While globalization connects companies with a large customer pool, it also creates a highly competitive landscape. Customers have unlimited vendors and tools to choose from. Here are some stats:
Customers are switching their vendors more frequently. According to 2019 SaaS research, 30% of cloud service companies have experienced an increase in customer churn rates over the past year, and the number is still rising (99firms).
Cost of Customer Acquisition (CAC) becomes much higher than retaining customers due to the competition (Forbes)
Since 2020, prices and products are becoming less significant, while customer experience has become the leading retention factor for many users and consumers.
And customer success is the most effective solution to improve user experience.
With the focus on helping customers succeed, CS departments grew into the top revenue strategies for many firms.
Most SaaS firms find customer renewals and upsell to be their top revenue growth channel in recent years (99firms).
With an improved customer experience and retention, customers become more loyal and willing to spread good words to their network. As a result, companies see an increase in word-of-mouth (WoM) referrals and recurring revenue.
How to Build and Scale a Customer Success Team?
As a company grows, it faces new challenges and opportunities. One challenge is building and scaling customer success operations to meet the needs of an expanding customer base. We have found that the top three most important factors for a successful customer success team include having the right people, setting up repeatable processes, and leveraging technology.
To get started, companies need to understand the fundamentals of their current customer journeys. Customer journey helps brands visualize and map out customer experience at every interaction throughout the life cycle.
Externally, companies can anticipate pain points, find solutions, and personalize the experience. On the other hand, the customer journey reflects the gaps companies need to improve and hire upon.
Once the foundation is established, it’s time to hire.
1. Having the right people
Success depends on great leaders. To scale your customer success organization, you must have strong leaders who can guide the team. It's not just the leader who matters but also those that provide critical support in key areas. One of the most underrated skills for CS rockstars is attentive listening. Team members who can listen and identify customers’ desired outcomes will greatly help level-up customer experience. They are the critical building blocks of your entire business.
2. Setting up repeatable processes
Building a repeatable process will improve your business efficiency. When it comes to scalability, you must centralize and operationalize repeating processes. This is particularly important when scaling customer success because they are responsible for our customer’s success in their desired outcome and the metrics that define them.
3. Leveraging technology
When scaling your customer success department, the best way to leverage technology is by finding ways to scale humans effectively without overburdening them. Integrating technology into CS will boost your team’s productivity and efficiency. A tool like involve.ai takes care of all heavy lifting in the back-end, so your team can focus on building and maintaining meaningful relationships with customers.
Involve.ai is your way of leveraging technology for the scalability of your customer success. Built for the new generation of customer leaders who have to be data-driven and action-oriented.
How does involve.ai work?
The involve.ai Brain™ unifies all your customer data to provide proactive recommendations that help you prioritize which customers to focus on and what actions to take next.
It transforms your data into actionable customer intelligence.
The only true Customer Intelligence Platform on the market that provides predictive insights & automation to take the guesswork out of retaining & growing your SaaS customer base.
In Conclusion
If you want your company to grow and maintain customer satisfaction, you must plan how to scale. There are three ways to build and scale a world-class customer success team.
Hire the right people
Have the right processes
Use the scalable tool
When you have like-minded team members, synergy in business processes, and a customer intelligence tool to support your customer success team, there’s no limit on how far they can go.