Guide to Build an Effective Customer Success Workflow - SmartKarrot Blog

Guide to Build an Effective Customer Success Workflow

A well-built customer success workflow can help you simplify, systematize and support the overall work processes. Here are some guidelines to keep in mind.

Customer-Success-Workflow

To stay abreast of each of your customers’ engagements could be more than just a task. Nonetheless, transparency, easy accessibility, and free communication can pave the way to a seamless customer experience. Better yet, redeem yourself with an effective customer success workflow that puts the troubles at bay.

A customer success workflow simplifies, systematizes, and supports the efforts of a customer success team. It takes care of the deliverability that in a way speaks for your reputation. Therefore, it is prudent to optimize your steps in an efficient workflow. This will address specific customer expectations and rule out undesired outcomes.

The demand for a customer is ever-changing. So, you need to imbue the agility to walk with the quick changes and respond to the situational needs. Here we have some pre-set guidelines that help you build an effective customer success workflow:

  • United and Unified CS Team
  • Put up an SOP
  • Define a roadmap for success
  • Tools and Technology 
  • Metrics and Data
  • Emulate with Feedback 
Customer Success Workflow
Source: Unsplash

Step 1: United and Unified CS Team

It is just about right to invest in an excellent customer success team. To reach your desired goals, you should find the right people having a unified objective.

Without this, your clients might see your services more like suggestions and not a trusted source of success. To find the requisite team, look out for members who have a strong knowledge of your niche and product.

If they have substantial experience in dealing with the client issues that is a plus point too. Find the ones who are totally geared up for achieving the common vision of the company.

They should be dedicated enough and see the prospect’s pain points from their perspective. And getting a strong customer success team is going to give you the leverage to crack your first milestone instantly.

Step 2: Put up an SOP

SOP or standard operating procedure is a must for any given workflow. This is a key facet that decides the scalability of customer success. Both the customer success manager and his team need a point of reference to look up to.

And that is when a pertinent customer success playbook comes into force. Some of the crucial chapters you can include are: best onboarding practices, adoption strategies, churn revival policies, and account management as well.

Step 3: Define a roadmap for success

The next step asks you to define and streamline your customer’s journey. Delve deeper into the challenges that a customer might face in each phase of this journey. Think of the following: How would a client benefit from you? At which phase, is your product leading to the highest churn? And at what phase, could your competitions influence your customers?

While pondering over these answers, you will want to determine the actions that your team takes to ensure the best of customer success at each of these phases. One thing that is common in all of these phases is effective communication.

You must talk to your clients and ascertain how they are finding things at their end. And if there is something bothering them or you can see a trigger to churn rate, render them help right away.

Step 4: Tools and Technology 

Source: Unsplash

After you have implanted a planned SOP and roadmap, it is now time to actually take it to action. For that, you will need the help of the right tools and technology.

Proven technology coupled with a leading customer success software makes it even convenient for your team to access results. Automated CS programs manage your efforts and ensure to pack a punch.

Not only that, the automatic tools offer you individual customer status reports, and alerts too if they find a customer veering into withdrawal. On top of that, you can fully keep track of a client’s progress and know how they are performing.

Step 5: Metrics and Data

Now, it is time for important decisions to make. Accurate data is primitive for ascertaining the health of your customers. Which is where it is needed to measure it via the help of metrics.

Well, if you wish to analyze the financial impact of the company, then some of the metrics that you can put to use are CAC (customer acquisition cost), MRR (monthly recurring revenue), ARR (annual recurring revenue), CLV (customer lifetime value).

Similarly, if you want to measure the impact of customer satisfaction you can go for CSAT (customer satisfaction), NPS (net promoter score), churn rate, etc. When you combine data from both the given metrics, you will have a clear idea about how your clients are doing. This will let you know whether both of you are being mutually benefitted from the same or not.

Step 6: Emulate with Feedback 

One of the best ways to revamp your customer success workflow is to gather customer feedback. There is always room for improvement. Therefore, run a couple of programs and initiate measures to collect feedback from your clients and take it up seriously.

Constantly working on your workflow shows your customers that you care about them. Give your customers a voice and let them vent out, be it in a positive or negative light. Just doing that is enough to show them you are there for them. Further, this way to get to emulate yourselves too, for the better.

That’s a Wrap

A customer success workflow is the normative set of acts that a CS team does to bring in more sustainability and proven value to its customers. These acts must be executed in a certain sequence leading to deliver and sustain in a customer lifecycle journey.

A good workflow is said to be one that can maintain the dexterity to shape the procedures with the changing customer’s desires and demands.

And in that, a customer success manager plays a pivotal role too, in identifying the systems and finding resolutions for the users. Following the aforementioned steps can help you maintain proactive communication and progress you to ultimate customer satisfaction and success.

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