Developing an optimal strategy for customer engagement and success at scale by Chitra Madhwacharyula

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Developing an Optimal Strategy for Scaling the Customer Success Function

Hello there! Today's discussion delves into an engaging and crucial topic: The Role of a Customer Success Center of Excellence in Scaling your Organization. This is a broad topic - so consider this article a high-level introduction to guide your strategy as your organization scales.

Understanding Customer Success

Customer Success or CS is gaining traction in many companies, marking its importance as a key factor in adoption, expansion, and growth. The ultimate goal is to make your customers successful, as fulfilled customers are more likely to stay with you and expand over time.

The Customer Success Maturity Model: Scaling Your Organization

Scaling the customer success function often starts with ad-hoc and aware models, gradually moving into a more regularized, repeatable pattern. Scaling involves an evolving focus as you move from initially being a point of contact for customers to building a more strategic relationship focused on value realization.

A typical growing pain for companies is in determining how to grow and retain their customers. There's no single solution - but a holistic customer-driven approach goes a long way in achieving this.

Scaling Your Customer Success Function: Key Considerations

  1. Standardization and Repetition: Defining customer journey maps, playbooks, workflows that can be standardized, and repeated across your CS functions.
  2. Efficient Operations: Focus on analytics, metrics, and measurement to optimize processing and delivery.
  3. Scope of Responsibilities: Determining what responsibilities your CS will undertake exactly.
  4. Stakeholder Buy-in: Aligning your scaling and optimization strategy with your stakeholders ensures its success.

Building a Customer Success Center of Excellence

Building a robust Customer Success Center of Excellence (CS CoE) for your organization begins by focusing on CS business operations. The CS CoE designs a scalable, repeatable customer success model to maximize value delivery to the customers. Establishing the vision, mission, and charter of your CS CoE is an excellent starting point.

Customer Success CoE Structure

A standard Customer Success CoE structure consists of core and extended functions that cater to standardizing workflows, adopting tools and analytics, and increasing account coverage. These core functions provide justification for your budget and directly contribute to operational standardization and efficiency.

Sub-functions within CS CoE

  1. Design and Standardizing: This sub-function is responsible for defining and scaling the CS operational model.
  2. Operational Tools: Deploying the right tools to facilitate the implementation of the CS operational model.
  3. Adoption Managers: Ensuring that the deployed processes and tools are adopted as planned by the CS community.
  4. Community Managers: Exciting and aligning the CS community with what your organization is trying to achieve.

The underlying theme when dealing with standardization and scaling is simplification. Simplicity ensures success in your adoption and scaling initiatives.

The Importance of Data

Data is an intrinsic friend in your journey to develop an optimal strategy for scaling the customer success function. The efficiency, predictability, and uniform customer experience offered by your CS CoE are driven by a strong data-centric model. Initiatives such as customer segmentation projects, NRRARR forecasting tools, and CS resource planning can be strongly driven by your CS CoE team, contributing significantly to the long-term success and scale of your CS organization.

The Essence of CS CoE and Scaling

The ultimate goal of establishing a customer success center of excellence (CS CoE) is to transition your CS function from a reactive to a proactive state at scale. By focusing on efficiencies and scale in your customer success strategy, you can lay the correct foundations and fast track the success and value of your CS function. Only then will you be set to write the next chapter in the customer success scaling story.

Need tailored advice? Reach out on LinkedIn

If you have questions or if you need tailored advice, feel free to connect with us on LinkedIn. We are happy to further discuss your organization's specific needs and suggest the leading and successful practices surrounding customer success scaling and efficiencies.

Happy Scaling!


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