Let’s talk about scale for a quick minute. Work at scale. Success at scale. Scale at scale. Am I right?

When it comes to customer success, “scale” can feel vague. At Catalyst, we define scale as providing the same (or greater) level of service to more people with non-correlated effort. That means doubling the number of customers you take on without doubling the hours you need to put in. 

How do you get to this magical future land of helping customers without spending some ungodly amount of extra time, you may ask? It involves a little bit of pre-empting concerns, a little bit of automation, and a time-saving trick. 

1. Pre-empt customer concerns with segments and playbooks

Don’t worry, we aren’t going to tell you to make yet-another FAQ document or self-serve page. 

We’re guessing you’ve already done that (high five ✋). We’re talking about two things that are a little more advanced. 

‍Segmentation: many challenges only apply—or only come into the picture—for specific customers. That’s where customer segmentation comes in. Look at things such as cohort (time they signed on), campaign source (for performance marketing), use case with your product, or customer size or revenues.

When you have different customer segments, you can better understand what problems someone might face. For example, let’s say your average onboarding time is 30 days. If you have someone in a cohort from 60 days ago who is still not fully onboarded, chances are they will have problems finding value in the platform. If you didn’t have segmentation, you might not know about a customer’s problem until you get an angry email wondering why the platform doesn’t work or something similar. Knowing ahead of time means you can reach out proactively to help solve the problem.

Customer journey playbooks: while every customer will have a unique path when using your product, they will also run through similar milestones or face common challenges. When those happen, playbooks help you respond proactively with a repeatable motion. 

Common playbooks we’ve seen in the industry are onboarding, key customer journey milestones, at-risk or low health score customers, spotting and taking advantage of upsell opportunities, or feature announcements. 

2. Leverage customer-centric email automation

Automation here is not about saving time; the real value is giving customers what they need when they need it, without more time from you. It’s about increasing service level with the same (or slightly lower) time commitment.

So we have a suggestion: invest your time in email automation that serves your customer. We don’t pretend email automation is new. Instead, what’s slightly different is hosting customer email automation within your customer success platform.

When you hold email automation within your CSP you gain control over customer messaging and can send emails based on segment, journey stage, or another trigger. This helps avoid the sometimes-issue where Marketing will send an email blast out to everyone on the list, including customers, with a new marketing campaign. While the campaign might be great for getting new leads, it likely will confuse customers who wonder why the call-to-actionCTA is to book a demo or something similar. 

Email automation at the right time is a huge way to scale out customer communications—Teachers Pay Teachers even saw a 16% increase in retention while scaling up their tech-touch operations.

3. Implement time-saving templates

Ok, now we’re just straight up saving you time. This will ensure you have the bandwidth to handle inevitable requests you can’t quite journey map or automate your way out of.

*Drum roll please* 

Use customer success templates. For every key action you have on your plate—customer outreach, getting feedback, leading QBRs, identifying upsell opportunities, sharing customer stories, and more.

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A free customer success template by Catalyst

Templates help you in a few critical ways. First, they ensure you collect all the right information at the right time. Second, templates keep data in a standardized format. That means you can more easily analyze and track information. Third, they make data recall and gap identification simpler, so you don’t have to spend extra time making sure you have data—you simply know it’s there.

Don’t sacrifice quality for scale

You can service hundreds or even thousands of customers at a time without sacrificing the quality of their experience; you just need the right processes and tools in place. It starts with strategically pre-empting customer concerns so you can keep them happier on their own and better serve them when they reach out. Then it extends to automation, ensuring you can scale up your base effort without additional time. Finally, apply direct time-saving techniques to give you a few extra moments back in your day.

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