CEOs, do you want your customers to stick around?

It’s not just about them continuing to pay you—though that's obviously critical—but about them continuing to get value from your platform.

If you want that to happen (the value and the retention), you need to embed a culture of customer success throughout the whole organization. It’s not enough to leave it with the CS team and hope for the best. Everyone needs to align around your true revenue growth engine: customers.

(Yan Krukau / pexels)

Not only will this lead to higher customer retention but also more expansion opportunities, lower costs to serve customers, and even higher employee engagement.

But how does a company start developing a customer success culture? It’s going to be unique for every company in the end—but all companies will need to flow through these eight steps in their own way.

1. Champion customer success as a mindset, not a single job

Customers have varying needs that could involve any department or multiple departments. Those needs get filtered through the CS department, with CSMs orchestrating the cycle of discovery and fulfillment. As a result, every department within the company must be on board to support customer success efforts.

While expressing the importance of everyone’s part and responsibility in caring for the customers in written and verbal communications is critical, it’s not enough to say, “Let’s go make happy customers!” Encourage interdepartmental communication on customer-centered issues by designating a CS department. This department should be free to interact with other departments to influence changes and coordinate data collection and sharing.

2. Give CS leadership a seat at the executive table

The CS department is as worthy of a Vice President as other departments are. Establishing a VP of Customer Success will further drive home its importance to others within the company.

The VP’s job is to focus on the long-term and overarching goal: upselling and retention metrics. This employee must be able to collaborate with all other departments. To do so effectively, they’ll need an understanding of the organizational structure and who reports to whom to optimize inter-organizational communications.

Other department VPs must understand that the VP of CS has the authority to make changes that put the entire organization in better standing with their target customers. They’ll be applying pressure to different departments across the organization to make changes and collect data for the customer's (and the business’s) welfare.

3. Use compensation as a tool

Compensation must reflect priorities. One effective way to compensate for customer success and drive home its importance is by tying bonus packages to upsells and renewals. Consider rewarding the entire organization when they achieve improved customer success metrics together.

Source: Catalyst CS Compensation Report

This is especially critical when it comes to unifying the Sales and Customer Success teams into one powerhouse revenue team. If you’re not compensating both teams fairly—and in a way that doesn’t put them in direct competition with one another—you set yourself up for failure. Why? Because people do what they are incentivized to do. Know this and act accordingly.

4. Encourage data collection from everyone

Customer success relies on data to determine many angles of the customer and business, such as customer needs, satisfaction ratings, and process assessments. Building a success culture comes more naturally when many employees are responsible for collecting customer data.

Anyone who interacts with a client, from an employee in Product Development to the CEO, should document their interactions and gut feelings from their communications to get a pulse check on clients. Have employees gauge and record customer feelings and temperatures after speaking with them. When all employees are involved in assessing client satisfaction, it encourages constant consideration from the customer’s perspective and provides the CS team with valuable information.

PS—all this can be documented in a customer success platform like Catalyst.

5. Perfect your Sales-to-CS handoff

Customer journeys begin in sales. These employees handle initial interactions with customers. Experienced salesforce can give a reasonable estimate of how likely a newly signed customer will achieve success or struggle. Trust the Sales team’s intuitions and base your customer touches on these.

But most importantly, document it. This is a critical part of the Sales-to-CS handoff process and sets the stage for quantifying your expansion process.

6. Collect feedback

Understanding your customer requires listening to them in different ways. When it comes to collecting feedback, try a multi-line approach:

• Direct asks: Things like NPS or CSAT scores should be automatically sent out (on a periodic basis, for instance every 6 months or after every customer support ticket).
• Passive feedback: Usage statistics are a key source ofinsight—it’s your customers “telling” you how they use your product on aregular basis.
• Social listening: The overall economy, news about the organization, and even executive social media posts can give you insight into customer challenges that you might be able to solve.

If you’re collecting direct feedback, follow up with whatever might be necessary such as a call or training video. If you’re collecting passive feedback or social listening insights, you might need a softer approach that begins with a check-in to confirm your understanding.

7. Celebrate CS successes

A pat on the back for a job well-done is a tremendous mental boost and motivator. Praise employees for increasing customer success scores. High survey scores, improved onboarding procedures, increased renewals, and an upturn in upsells and lifecycle stage advancements deserve a shout-out, round of applause or special recognition. Consistent, genuine appreciation goes a long way.

Recognition has a business impact as well: A Deloitte study found employees at companies with recognition programs are 14% more productive and engaged than those at companies without any program in place.

8. Use the right tools

Customer success requires sufficient training and equipment for the CS team to develop emotional customer connections. These necessary supplies aren’t hard to come by, state-of-the-art technologies that only the most prominent companies can afford. Basics, like quality internet access, emails, phones and spreadsheets, are familiar tools required for CSM duties. Training material for getting started is easily accessible, but the most critical aspect to remember is that there isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach to customer success. Listening to customers and sharing that information across all departments will be the best instruction.

A customer success management platform is a highly recommended tool to make CS responsibilities scalable and easier to keep up with. This specially designed software caters to CS duties, simplifying communication and documentation processes to customers and about customers. It ensures smoother interconnectivity among various departments because customer-related information is in one easily-accessible place and not siloed. Choosing the right customer success platform for your business could be an article of its own. (And luckily, it already is!)

Infographic

To retain your customers, it's crucial to instill a culture of customer success throughout theentire organization. Merely entrusting the responsibility to the CS team and expecting positive outcomes isn't sufficient. Everyone should focus on their primary revenue source, which is their customers, and work towards a common goal. Discover the eight pillars of a thriving customer success culture in this infographic.

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