By Russell Bourne
Welcome to 2023. It seems to happen every year: you end the previous year, you take time off for the holidays, you roll into the new year, and BAM! Before you know it, it’s the end of January and you let a full month slip by without making enough progress on your goals.
Or worse, as often happens, you haven’t gotten as far as even setting the goals.
This year is a special case because so many CS organizations are being asked to do more with less, leaving CS leaders unsure of where to start. In The Success League’s first blog post of 2023, our CEO Kristen Hayer encouraged CS leaders to focus on building a lean CS program. In this article, let’s zoom in on how you can make meaningful, easy-to-install changes to your customer journey.
What is a customer journey?
For the uninitiated, a touchpoint is defined as any customer-facing interaction. It’s best to name and describe touchpoints from the customer’s point of view. A customer journey is the collection of touchpoints a customer experiences during their time with you.
A well-functioning Customer Success program is one that defines its customer segments, and then writes a prescriptive, intentional journey for each segment. In best practice, each CSM only operates in one segment - meaning they only need to deliver one journey across their customers.
Typically, your most strategic segment of customers receives your highest-touch journey. Here, touchpoints are mostly manual, understanding you must deliver different value to decision-makers, champions, and end-users to make your business relationship a success. Other segments receive journeys tailored to the fact that they may not have such levels of customer contacts, or would prefer to interact digitally.
That being said, the reality is many CS programs haven’t written a journey for each segment or may have CSMs straddling segments. No judgment here, but let’s be clear about the consequences. Instead of targeted journeys, they may have written one customer journey for all customers, and are struggling to deliver it because it’s impossible to deliver high-touch journeys at high volume. What happens is, CSMs get overloaded, touchpoints randomly fall through the cracks, and each customer’s journey devolves into a soupy, reactive, undefined scatter. Unfortunately, the customers who suffer most are in the strategic segment.
Ask most CSMs and they’ll tell you they’re operating at more than 100% of their personal capacity. With that as a backdrop, imagine being asked to do more with less.
Choosing Touchpoints to Keep
If you’re tasked with building a leaner operation, your first instinct is probably to reduce the number of touchpoints in your journey. That’s great, but I recommend approaching it from the opposite angle, and deciding what to keep before deciding what to remove. Think through which touchpoints are best at a) ensuring customers receive the value they want from you, and b) communicating the value to them.
Again, the key here is you must do this differently for each customer segment.
In your strategic segment’s journey, for example, you should probably keep doing Executive Business Reviews. They are the primary vehicle for you to communicate your value to a decision maker. However, if you’re traveling to do EBRs onsite, you could get leaner by hosting them virtually in the short-term. Not only do you eliminate travel expenses, you allow your CSM to move onto other business-critical activities during time they’d have otherwise been in transit. On the other hand, in a downturn, customers may implement hiring freezes. If that’s the case, you can temporarily pause new-hire training touchpoints while keeping or possibly expanding ones dealing with ongoing education.
In a mid-market segment customer, employee attrition can devastate your business relationship, even at the end-user level. If even a single super-user leaves, the customer may stop adopting your solution simply because no one who’s left knows how - and then they’re certainly not seeing any value from your business relationship. In that case, it makes sense to keep or add enablement touchpoints. They may be a formal training program, informal coaching sessions with someone in your services team, or an expanded scope of what Support agents are allowed to show customers.
Choosing Touchpoints to Automate
If you must have a touchpoint but don’t feel it’s possible to deliver it manually, consider an automated version. There are two points to make here.
First, if you have a digital segment with its own customer journey already, learn from it and apply your learnings to higher-touch journeys. Staying with our EBR example, you might deliver automated, semi-tailored EBRs to your smallest customers already. Think of the monthly statement you get from your power utility; they make the high-likelihood assumptions that you care how much power you use (and consequently pay for), and you would like to know how you compare to other customers. Your monthly statements include that information as a mini-EBR. If your small customers seem to get value from that, there’s a good chance your mid-market customers would, too - and they’d probably enjoy repurposing the time you would have spent on the EBR.
Second, remember the first and only rule of touchpoints: always consider them from the customer’s point of view. In the context of automation, that means put yourself in their shoes and think about what they would rather experience digitally. Studies show most customers would rather troubleshoot online than call support - a small time investment into writing an FAQ could enhance customer experience and pay for itself by multiples, in the form of decreased CSM fire drills later.
Impact on CSM:Customer Ratios
If all of the above sounds great in theory, let’s drive it home with data. Each of your CSMs has a certain number of customers, accounting for a certain amount of revenue, on their list. Let’s say in your case a mid-market CSM has 150 customers with total annual recurring revenue (ARR) of $2M. And let’s say before you made any changes to the mid-market customer journey, those CSMs had no chance of taking on more customers and revenue, and they were struggling with ARR retention.
By streamlining the journey, each customer would take less time to manage per month. If you could cut 10% of time off each customer journey, you could theoretically increase the number of customers each CSM oversees by 10%. That’s data you can show from day 1. It means you can avoid laying people off, and you can accommodate more new customers without needing to hire more CSMs. This is music to your CFO and CEO’s ears.
Plus, what’s in the remaining 90% of touchpoints you kept? Not the reactive, soupy ones - it’s the value-added ones you hand-picked. And if you chose wisely, your ARR retention numbers will increase. Your CSMs will feel more in control, will have better results on their personal goals, and won’t churn as employees. These are tangible financial data points you can show over time.
Being asked to tighten your operation in a downturn doesn’t have to be bad. It doesn’t mean you have to lay off people - you can lay off touchpoints instead and show the ROI of doing so. The changes you make will get you through the hard times and position you to flourish in the good.
The Success League is now offering a CS Leadership bundle, helping teams to face the recession and win. We also offer classes that focus on selling, including Managing the Selling Cycle and Objections & Negotiation. For our full list of offerings, please visit TheSuccessLeague.io
RUSSELL BOURNE
Russell is a Customer Success Leader, Coach, Writer, and Consultant. In a Customer Success career spanning well over a decade, his human-first approaches to leadership and program management have consistently delivered overachievement on expansion sales and revenue goals, alongside much friendship and laughter.
Russell serves on the Board of Gain Grow Retain as co-lead for Content Creation. He is passionate about equipping individual contributors and business leaders alike to lean on their Success practices to grow their careers and help their companies thrive. He holds a BA from UCLA, and in his free time plays guitar semi-professionally.