Mickey Alon is the founder and CTO of Gainsight PX at Gainsight.
Customer success (CS) is a critical function for SaaS businesses of all sizes, but it can be challenging to scale your CS capabilities in a cost-effective way as your company grows. The reason is simple: Conventional CS is powered by people and requires dedicated teams of talented customer success managers (CSMs) to drive outcomes and help customers unlock the product’s full value.
In today’s market, where efficiency is valued above everything else, companies are turning to the power of digital tools to do more with less and increase the CSM-to-customer ratio. Put the right automation and digital tech in place, and you can jump from having one CSM for every 10 or 15 customers to having one for every 100 or 200 customers.
The appeal of that kind of efficiency and scalability is obvious, but only if you can deliver meaningful value and build customer relationships without losing the personal touch. Now, many SaaS companies are working to establish a highly efficient digital CS function by applying product-led growth (PLG) methods and adopting digital-led customer success strategies, as I’ve explained in a previous article. Let’s dig a bit deeper and see how your PLG infrastructure can help improve your CS.
Put the product first.
Customer success teams often see themselves as a bridge between the customer and the product. The CSM’s job, in this view, is to introduce the customer to the product, help them find their feet and work to eliminate any pain points or friction they encounter along the way.
A well-implemented digital-led CS approach inverts this. Instead of putting CS between the product and the customer, the product—and, crucially, the customer’s experience of the product—comes first. With a self-served onboarding process and personalized workflows, the customer takes charge of beginning their journey with your product. Their initial interactions can then be used to guide the customer through the steps they need to take in order to obtain value during the early stages of their relationship with your product.
Essentially, the product itself takes over the heavy lifting of driving customers to realize the initial value of using your product. That doesn’t eliminate the need for the human touch, but it enables you to interact with the customer later in the process. It also allows you to reduce the time-to-value and propel customers along the path to success.
Meet your users where they are.
By using PLG principles to streamline and automate the customer experience, from onboarding to expansion, you can ensure that your customers spend more of their time interacting with your product rather than with your support team. Your CSMs can then meet the customers where they are, leveraging the product as the primary channel to drive adoption.
Scalability is the watchword here: Instead of relying on resource-intensive human interactions for basic, frequently repeated customer interactions, get your product to do that work for you and empower your CSMs to spend their time delivering more customer value while working in effective, sustainable ways.
Based on a digital CS foundation, for instance, you can build out scalable, one-to-many CS add-ons such as office hours and webinars, where users can learn best practices or receive guidance in unlocking your product’s more advanced or use-case-specific features.
Online communities can also deliver a powerful boost to product value and stickiness. Help your customers to help each other—and to provide and receive feedback—and you can make key aspects of your CS function self-sustaining.
Harness your product data.
Freed from the burden of onboarding customers, your CS team can now intervene later in the process to elevate the customer experience. Instead of plugging minor gaps in the product, the CS team can engage customers later in their lifecycle to drive lasting value, maximize retention and upsell opportunities and deliver more strategic value for your business.
Critically, your PLG-led CS function also becomes a trove of powerful user insights. Based on user actions, product data and signals from the community, build customer health scores and prioritize which customers require attention. If a customer’s usage statistics are dipping or a customer is struggling to achieve a required outcome, your CS team can step in with strategic interventions to remedy pain points or help get a customer back on track to improve retention over time.
This mirrors, in many ways, the growth of self-service support in the B2C space. Your CSMs are available when needed, but their role isn’t to hand-hold individual users as they tiptoe into a relationship with your product. Instead, it’s to orchestrate the entire user journey by leveraging the product itself and to jump in only when there’s a real need for expert assistance.
Aim higher.
It’s time for companies to aim higher when it comes to customer success. Guiding new customers as they take their first tentative steps with your product and then setting them loose to sink or swim is no longer good enough. We need to streamline and augment CS and start driving results in more scalable and data-driven ways across the entire customer lifecycle, delivering meaningful ROI for enterprise buyers and a stellar experience for end users.
In SaaS B2B, catering to the buyer alone is no longer an option; it’s vital to empower and support end-users, too, and to deliver a seamless consumer-grade experience from start to finish. That’s the only way to promote advocacy and opt-in product usage over time, ensuring widespread adoption across organizations.
To achieve that, you need alignment between your product and your CS function. That means leveraging product intelligence and tailored interactions to streamline the early-stage user experience and generate actionable data and using well-judged later-stage human interactions to elevate the product experience and unlock new use cases for mature users.
By fusing product-led digital CS with a more empowered and ambitious human CS function, it’s possible to turn your customer success function into a far more effective and powerful driver of value—both for your customers and for your business.
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