CUSTOMER SUCCESS MANAGEMENT
Consulting Services
Are you in a growing software-as-a-service company, and need strategies to drive customer retention and growth? ... Are you hearing patterns of customer complaints that are hard to resolve? Are you seeing churn rates that are digging into your bottom line? Are your customer-facing staff and product staff working in silos? Does your product adoption need a boost? ... Contact me to help you build programs that will make your customers happy and make you the customer-revenue hero.
ALLOW ME TO HELP YOU WITH...
CUSTOMER SUCCESS VISION & GOALS
A guiding customer success vision is essential, and setting smart goals will pull everyone in the same direction -- toward customer retention, satisfaction and growth. One part careful discernment, one part internal marketing: I can work with you to develop and promote a compelling view of what's to come.
BUILDING AN OUTSTANDING TEAM
High performing teams don't just happen. They are built with care to establish trust, balance individual strengths and maintain high motivation. In the world of customer care it's important to have a team that can rely on one another and work in sync. I can provide tried-and-true practices to help you attain high employee retention and high output.
CSM OBJECTIVES & PROCESSES
CSMs need clear processes and systems to support their work. I can help you develop business requirements, actionable reporting, project plans, customer segmentations, CSM playbooks and training so CSMs are enabled to spend time where it counts -- with customers, rather than hunting down information.
METRICS & KPI DEVELOPMENT
Customer metrics -- churn, net revenue, lifetime value, satisfaction levels, usage rates -- need to make sense for your business, and allow employees and leadership to quickly assess the health of the business. I can help you understand metrics best practices for SaaS, evaluate metrics options, build requirements for regular reporting, evaluate results, and help design improvement initiatives.
CUSTOMER JOURNEY
Your customers' journey is where your company's products and services are put to the test every day. Understanding the perspective of a customer, and how their experience is shaped by the communications, policies, support options and internal processes of your company is the first step in listening, so you can shape their impressions. I can facilitate identifying those key interaction points and creating a journey map.
RAPID PRODUCT ADOPTION
Onboarding customers so they are using your product soon after purchase is critical. Applying your CSM or implementation team effectively to that task can be vital for renewals. Key elements include segmenting your customer base, providing services levels appropriate to revenue contribution, developing clear process and systems for employees to manage their work at scale, and tracking clear KPIs to measure effectiveness and efficiency.
ENGAGEMENT STRATEGIES
Keep customers engaged with your product is another key to retention -- usage is typically correlated with renewal. And engagement is an ongoing task, from friendly tips to product updates and educational events to usage reporting and quarterly business reviews. Knowing what to say to whom will optimize each customer's experience, and you can depend on my years in customer marketing to help you plan it out and make it happen.
RENEWAL STRATEGIES
Renewals are critical to the success of any SaaS organization, and an investment in a successful implementation and ongoing engagement with customers will lay the groundwork for this moment of truth. I can help you design renewal communications, using automation if that's an option. Your clients will likely also respond to a regular review of your product's use and value, building the case for their continuing investment.
ANALYSIS & FORECASTING
I recommend using analysis as a discovery tool as well as a monitoring tool. There's so much to be learned about your customers by examining their usage patterns, their spending, their choices and habits together with demographics and firmographics: what can we do better? Can we profile those who are most profitable? Where are we most efficient? And on the monitoring side, which clients are showing signs of being at-risk? Who is coming up for renewal? How are we doing relative to our goals?
VOICE OF THE CUSTOMER PROGRAMS
Listening to customers is powerful. They will tell you where your products and services are falling short, or what additional features they need. I can lend you my experience building programs to elicit that information, and working with teams across your company to understand and respond to customer feedback in a way that's collaborative and will add to your bottom line.
CUSTOMER ADVOCACY
Customer advocacy is more than sharing survey feedback. It's anticipating when a technical update may adversely affect a segment of your customer base. It's understanding their work, their needs and pressures in order to shape your company's development pipeline appropriately. It's knowing how they will need to hear information in order to understand it. I help companies facilitate cross-team collaboration to expose customers' point of view.
CROSS-SELL/UPSELL STRATEGIES
Existing customers are prime candidates for your products and services: they trusted you as a vendor once, and if you're doing things right you've reinforced that. CSMs are often in a great place as a trusted advisor to recommend additional products and services. They are also hearing clues about add-on purchase behavior that can inform marketing and sales. I can help you develop a virtuous cycle for your CSM interactions and up-sell/cross-sell activities, as well as marketing strategies.
PLEASE REACH OUT AND WE CAN TALK ABOUT YOUR CUSTOMERS' SUCCESS!
Katy Klinkenberg
206-484-2233