CUSTOMER SUCCESS

Retain and Grow Your Customers

Churn Management:  In a SaaS business, the contract renewals process starts the day the customer signs up.  Customers require ongoing, proactive monitoring and nurturing to ensure retention.  I work with Customer Success teams to define the phases of a customer life-cycle and the “risk signals” of an unhealthy customer in each phase.  We then create playbooks to address each risk signal, and design a method to objectively measure customer health.  Lastly, we implement a “health desk” framework where the CS managers discusses customer health and ask for help from cross-functional leaders (e.g. Product, Sales, Engineering, Legal) on a regular cadence.

Customer Growth: Being able to reliably grow customer ARR is the key to a thriving SaaS business.  An effective customer growth strategy requires defining what a “best customer” looks like, designing service offerings that will drive customers to that outcome, and lastly creating the right roles and org design to deliver those services.  All of this must be supported by the right process and technology to remove operational friction and reduce overhead. I work with Customer Success teams to put in place this approach to drive sustainable and rapid customer growth.

Customer Success Management:  Customer Success Management as a discipline is relatively new, and the competencies to do it well are frequently underdeveloped in an organization.  CSMs often confuse a happy customer with a successful customer, and don’t have the account visibility and control to retain and grow accounts.  I work with Customer Success teams to define what exactly is expected of a CSM, create methods to measure required activity and results, and then train their teams in the methodology.