Getting Started with Digital Customer Success

Building a digital-first customer success program isn’t just about automating high-frequency human tasks. Early versions of tech touch and digital automation were mainstream in prior years. An evolved Digital Success program builds across an omnichannel platform based on business outcomes and customer pain points.

Level up your digital customer success program

A mature Digital Success program spans digital, human, and hybrid 1. Many experiences across all spend tiers. No longer does tech touch need to be limited to low-spend. Stepping back and assessing the responsibilities of high-touch Covered CSMs will demonstrate quick wins to support a deeper relationship with while-glove customers and an opportunity to minimize the daily load of CSM tasks and alerts.

Don’t just produce campaigns build an omnichannel Digital Customer Success platform!

With that said, where does one start? Do you launch an onboarding email, a technical demo webinar, a community? Traditional marketing channels transcend into this world of digital customer success creating a strong synergy with customer marketing and growth marketing efforts. Having said that, a strong start often involves understanding the problem space with three simple steps.

1. Diagnosing the customer, product, and internal organization experience. Breaking down the current state of the organization into a hypothesis and then aligning assertions on problem scenarios will help leaders step back and look at the big picture. For example, if your Digital Success outcomes are retention or expansion, you may start with a hypothesis that your current customer base has an opportunity to renew at a higher rate. From there, you can start diving into the various factors that may contribute to lower retention. Over time, you will identify factors that may yield a few different problems.
2. Measuring risk and impact: Assigning cohorts to the problem areas to assess risk and ROI will then make the problems a lot more real. Allocating dollars lost or customer churn metrics to some of these problems will further support the business case for Digital Customer Success resourcing and create the true north for the first stage of establishing the digital engine.
3. Lastly, prioritizing the top 3–4 high impact problems and taking an omnichannel approach to building a stellar digital experience will go a long way. Instead of landing 50+ email campaigns with an average 15% open rate, landing a few core messages that cut across campaigns, webinars, communities, and in-product channels are a lot more effective in solving the problem.

A few common categories of problems that most SaaS solutions will run into are,

Product Adoption & Engagement:

1. Customers fail to launch the core use case and to get the job done.
2. Customers abandon the product without exploring advanced use cases.
3. Lack of consistent engagement of active users month-over-month.

License utilization:

1. Failure to utilize all the services available in the purchased license.
2. Failure to maximize license reach across the organization with seats and users.
3. Failure to achieve a consistent pace of license consumption after an initial burst of activity.

Product expansion:

1. Repurposing features instead of purchasing add-ons: Some customers may not know everything they have available to them in their license. What’s worse is that some customers may repurpose the product for a use case that is better served by another service. E.g. Azure backup and storage have completely different use cases but can both be used for data storage. A missed cross-sell opportunity means not just exposing product innovations but also understanding user patterns.
2. New features launch every week and are a huge opportunity to cross-sell and upsell functionality. Lagging feature updates result in customers who fail to keep up with your product roadmap and will often leave users in legacy mode.

CSM Tasks

1. Repetitive, low-value tasks that create CSM overhead. E.g. sending an email to customers for different marketing messages, copying over welcome email templates to core customer stakeholders, API migration, or feature update messages are some examples.
2. Overhead in checking indicators for usage, health and account dashboards, and reacting to alerts and reminders.
3. Time spent monitoring and reaching customer contacts in reaction to stakeholder changes, billing contact changes, and change of champions on an account.
4. Admin time to schedule, plan and deliver on QBRs with often similar case studies, frameworks, and learning assets.

Product Usage (different from adoption)

1. Failure to consistently use the product. Here we want to consistently monitor the utilization of features beyond the early adoption phases. While adoption is all about the first use scenarios, usage behaviors map to the frequency of logins, utilization of key features, and pilot testing preview features.
2. Failure to successfully cover the ‘golden path’ or ‘core land and expand’ features. Customers may be unlocking the first set of features quickly but left to deal with the complexity of product features with minimal learning resources. Often recommending the ‘next feature’ to try and running ‘admin training’ will help disseminate feature information at the technical level.

Bring the Data together

1. Beyond a solid product, a strong digital success platform can only be as good as the data underneath. Silo’d sources of data span organizations such as product, engineering, marketing, customer success. E.g. license data may be held with the Finance team database but, product usage sits in the bowels of the actual product databases. Demographic, contact, and communication data that captures customer activity and history of CSM contact may sit in a CRM. Mapping the varying tiers of data to create a cohesive 360 view is often the first problem that most Digital Customer Success leaders face.
2. Keeping data fresh — Experience data or dynamic data sets involve insights coming from customer NPS or feedback surveys, active usage behaviors, and feedback to CSMs. Keeping this data fresh and well maintained to map to actionable insights is important.

Building the Digital Success platform and infrastructure

1. Right platform tools for the right job: Building the digital success platform is much like building a product. Lack of data and tools will lead to a poor customer experience. You will need tools and systems, processes and workflows that intermingle between data and the actual people working on it. Tools such as Amplitude provide product insights while Totango converts those insights to actionable email campaigns that can be viewed by every single Digital or Covered CSM. Outreach is a stellar solution for CSMs to self-serve and harness the power of 1. Many campaigns while maintaining robust connectivity to CRM tools such as Salesforce and powering forecasting.
2. Scalable data tier: Tooling isn’t all. The infrastructure for a digital success system will require a backend platform that sits on top of product data and customer CRM systems. A dynamic mechanism to trigger emails based on usage or customer engagement needs a robust data tier.
3. Lack of personalization is another area that sits with the infrastructure as much as with the customer-facing messages. Building time-based campaigns is easy, maintaining and running them based on triggers and expanding to variants such as geography, spend tiers, client tenure, product SKUs, language needs a robust backend strategy.
4. Lack of self-serve channels such as help pages, in-product messaging, communities, forums, self-service hubs will create a congested and noisy webinar or email channel. Targeting the 1. Many messaging across various channels and seamlessly integrating the experience in and out of product yields to an effective comms strategy.

Here’s a sample customer experience. Start with a thought-leadership campaign to engage personas that matter. Next, lead them to a technical product webinar that makes the value prop real. Then, send them to meet like-minded people at a persona-based community focused on customers in a specific industry. Following up on the webinar with a value-add email campaign and a phone call from a Digital CSM will complete the experience with a much-needed human touch. Finally, leaving the customer in a self-serve learning platform for future support and letting them know where to go for product vs. support help will keep them active and learning more.

For a strong start with digital customer success, lead with diagnosing the problem space across products, people, and processes. Build on the highest impact problems first and create end-to-end cohesive experiences that span multiple channels.