In the modern age of lightning-fast communications on social media, bad reviews travel fast. If you want to keep your bottom line growing while ensuring your customers are satisfied, your customer success department can be one of the most influential parts of your company.
Customer success ops are an often hidden but crucial aspect of any growing brand. Whether your company is just starting or already well-established, retaining as many customers as possible is pivotal to its success.
In this blog, we’ll show you how you can improve your customer success ops department to supercharge your revenue and create a healthier, more productive workplace.
Reward Your Top-Performers
Working in customer success ops can be a daunting task. After all, your performance will usually make the difference between a retained customer and churned one. As such, people working in customer success can easily get discouraged if they feel like their performance or the product they represent is making customers unsatisfied.
While this might not initially seem like a pressing issue, it can lead to significant burnout and moral loss over time at the employee level. And lost revenue equating to hundreds of thousands of dollars in lifetime value (LTV) of your customer. How can you counteract the pressures and anxieties of working in customer success ops? By rewarding your people.
When your customer success representatives perform, reward them. Deconstruct the activities of your high performers. Look for repeatable processes and patterns. Work to build a program that can be taught to help everyone on the team improve. Aside from compensation, teaching and giving your team a growth mindset and experience is a requirement for employee retention. If you do not offer this, then someone else will.
So what are the things a Customer Success Ops teams should be tracking? Net retention, the percentage of customers that renew their contracts compared to those who do not. Lifetime Value (LTV). Whether you sell Saas or traditional products or services, understanding how much money you can expect from a customer is very important to growth. Even traditional companies like Verizon or ATT calculate an LTV. What’s the LTV of someone out of college to a mobile phone company for 50 years? How about the cable company, or your grocery store?
Usage statistics are critical too. Things like DAU (Daily Active Users), Login Frequency, Average time in your platform or service and support requests. All of this can give you valuable insights into how your customers are using your service. It can provide visibility to churn if the numbers are low, and it can help you identify patterns of success by your customer to share with new customers to ensure they are equally successful.
Furthermore, critical client reviews can help you alter and optimize your sales process by ironing out the kinks that might get in the way of a sale.
The more your customer success reps talk to existing satisfied and unsatisfied clients, the more knowledge your entire organization will have. This affects revenue, the product roadmap, better handling customer objections and it will teach you and your team exactly what to say, and how to say it in relation to your customers’ points of view, not your features and benefits. Empower your sales reps by ensuring that your sales department and customer success ops communicate regularly.
Avoid These Customer Success Mistakes
Customer success ops can change the course of your business. But they can also become a liability if your organization makes some common mistakes. Here are a couple to look out for when directing your customer success ops department:
Ambiguous Tasks
ustomer success operations have a tough task ahead of them. Their job requires merging the responsibilities of the sales, customer service, and customer success, while also keeping a keen eye on the lookout for information for product marketing, and your engineering team for new features to be built or added.Because their duties cover such a wide range of activities, the life of a CSOps person can often become stressful – but it doesn’t have to.
Business studies have shown that one of the leading causes of burnout and workplace mental fatigue is job ambiguity. In other words, when people don’t know precisely what their duties are, they can suffer from immense stress and pressure at work. They can never feel truly fulfilled with their job because they never know exactly what their job is.
One of the simplest yet most influential things you can do to ensure all of your employees can have a productive, efficient, and fulfilling work experience is to give them a well-defined job. Whether you look at the business, sports, or military world, all top performers have one thing in common: they’re highly specialized. If you can’t describe your CSM’s job in one sentence, it’s too general.
Not Celebrating Small Wins
If you’re not celebrating small wins in your CS department, your company culture is dying. Customer success ops are unique in that their work is never truly done. There will always be a new customer to retain or another crisis to pacify. As such, many customer success reps can begin to feel as if the goalposts are always moving – they can never reach their goal. Making sure you have a strong relationship between your customer success team and your customer success ops team is critical to culture and company growth.
If you want your customer success ops to succeed, you must start celebrating the small wins. Not every day will one of your customer success reps retain a client who everyone thought was unsavable. That report they build, it matters. The dashboard to help leadership, it matters. The tools they choose and have implemented, matter. By paying attention to the little things, the revenue takes care of itself. Do not take your Customer Success Ops team for granted. Their actions and activities may not seem as interesting or action-packed as retaining a lost client, but they make up the backbone of your business’s revenue. Let them know you are aware, and let them know you care.
The term “corporate culture” is often thrown around in modern business. Every company leader wants their organization to have a culture, but few know what it is and how to build it. Some business leaders think that installing a pingpong table in the break room creates culture – it doesn’t. Corporate culture is forged when the values and behaviors of workers are aligned and unified toward a singular goal. Celebrate the small wins, and the big wins will come!
Customer success ops is a unique part of your organization. Similar to the sales department, it works on the front lines, interacts with clients, and has a direct impact on your company’s bottom line. But unlike salespeople, customer success reps don’t have a well-defined, rigid goal when working with customers. For salespeople, the task is clear: close a deal. For customer success representatives, things are a bit more tricky. They must have not only the problem-solving skills to retain clients but also the psychological knowledge and tactics to get customers to open up about what’s bothering them. When it comes to running customer success ops, mentally tough, purpose-driven CSMs can make the difference between a successful department and an unmotivated one.
If you want to learn more about supercharging your customer success ops department, check out our webinar on-demand here, where CEO of Gainsight, Nick Mehta joins us.
