The 5 Stages of Customer Success Maturity
Repeatable (Established)
A customer success team is established with one or two customer success managers dedicated to handling customers—maybe focusing on high-touch customers first. Time is being tracked against activities, giving a better view of effort, allowing capacity to be understood and planned. Processes are customer-focused with proactive steps to make sure customers are healthy and happy. Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys are sent out at specific times within the customer life cycle, retrospectives are taking place, and product usage tracking is more robust. The customer success platform is integrated with the CRM platform—new closed-won accounts are being sent between the systems, with automated steps to start these accounts off on the right foot. Health scores (NPS survey results and product usage) are managed with triggers to make sure troubled accounts are taken care of quickly. Clear renewal dates and demonstrated value to customers assist customer success managers with initiating customer conversations well before those dates roll past.
Measureable (Agile)
Agile customer success is the preferred approach to managing multiple accounts with iterative, adaptive, and prescribed best practices. In this stage customer success teams are improving processes and skills to seamlessly address variability in customer needs. This can be done through expansion opportunities within accounts (which is more natural at this point), introducing functionality that was previously underutilized by the customer, or adding monetized levels of service. Data is clean and visible across teams with technology that is fully adopted and optimized. Team members and management can run reports across any measure and dimension to forecast revenue, time spent on specific customers or tiers of service, or total MRR on active accounts, etc. During this state therefore, customer success managers are also becoming more efficient and effective. New team members can be hired in a timely manner to match efforts for new accounts being closed because the team understands what it takes to do the job right. New team members can quickly be impactful because processes and activities are precise and automated.
Optimized (Evolved)
For most companies, this last stage is just a vision of the future that will change and evolve over time. This is currently how we envision greater success for our customers as they embrace change and new ideas, but this vision will likely change and improve over time. In this optimized state, multiple team members and roles within the organization are striving to evolve and improve processes and skills. Innovation and ideas are shared and grown for the internal team and customers alike. Specialization for team members and groups can be implemented, the process for which may begin in earlier stages. Customer success management teams are relying on proven agile processes that allow them to identify opportunity and deploy solutions to enhance the customer’s experience, which justifies ROI. At this stage, the team has evolved from simply protecting revenue to growing accounts, expanding revenue, and making a positive contribution to negative churn. The team’s—and the company’s—vision is being realized, and MRR goals met.
Does any of the above resonate with you, or sound like where you want to be? Begin the conversation with your peers and team to understand where you are today—and don’t be discouraged.
Kate Elliott is a customer success solutions executive at Bolstra. Elliott previously served as a customer success manager working directly with teams to define and deliver consistently superior experiences to their own customers. Tim Conder is the vice president of customer success at Bolstra. Prior to joining the leadership team at Bolstra, Conder had his own customer success consulting business, eServeo, where he built a comprehensive set of best practices around the full customer life cycle—from acquisition to on-boarding to renewals.