Ben Lee is Catalyst's very first CX Program Manager. He is responsible for building out various Digital Customer Success programs to help supplement our amazing CS team while providing efficient and meaningful self-serve resources to our customers at scale.

In this article, I’ll be focusing on content creation for Digital CS programs. If you recall from my previous article, I briefly mentioned that sending support articles isn’t ideal if you’re hoping to change product behavior. I’m not saying this type of content isn’t helpful at all, but if your goal is to effectively sell someone on doing something (e.g. adopt a feature), you should include context — and most support articles typically focus on the technical how-to rather than the reason why they should do it in the first place.‍

Digital CS Content ‍

So, if not support articles, what sort of content should you use in your Digital CS programs? To answer this question, you’ll need to have done your discovery beforehand (covered in my previous article) so you are crystal clear on the major pain points and core outcomes your customers care most about. Also, think about the repetitive topics CSMs have to constantly address, and use that to influence your Digital CS content as well so you can help them be more efficient and intentional with their limited time while enabling customers at scale. 

Once you have these insights, you can plan backwards and craft content that speaks directly about the pain points your customers are hoping to solve and outcomes they’re hoping to achieve with your product.‍

Examples of Digital CS content:

• Product enablement videos. It can be extremely effective to create videos that walk users through real-world examples to help them connect the dots between their roles and responsibilities and the features you want them to adopt. So in essence, you are still selling them on features but coming from an angle that focuses on things they actually care about: saving time, enhancing team performance, getting that next promotion/raise, etc.
• Operational enablement resources. Product enablement is helpful, but if your customers don’t have streamlined operational processes related to your features/product, it’ll be harder for them to realize value. So on top of creating content to enable users around your product, consider operational enablement as well. For example, at Catalyst, we have a resource that outlines how our very own CSMs manage the entire EBR (Executive Business Review) motion, which includes strategic & tactical guidance, a slide deck template, and email copy users can repurpose or use as inspiration for their own customer interactions. 
• Validated templates. I’ve found that customers are always curious about what other customers are doing. Analyze your most successful users and how they are building and using things within your product and then translate those learnings and turn them into templates you can share with your other customers for inspiration. If your product doesn’t support downloadable templates (such as Notion or Miro), you can provide visual examples supplemented by a quick video walkthrough. ‍
• Resource library. Once you’ve created all your various types of content, you’ll need to be able to house those somewhere and share them with customers. This could be something as simple as a video folder link or a more robust library that is housed inside something like your online customer community platform, for example.
  

Note: If you’re wondering what tools can help support your Digital CS content, feel free to reference my tech stack, which I outlined in my previous article.  

Change management is hard. So to increase your likelihood of success, always contextualize whatever it is you’re promoting, around the outcomes your customers actually care about within their respective roles.   ‍

Stay tuned for the next article in this series where I’ll focus on data infrastructure and hygiene and why it’s important to have a strong foundation in place before engaging your customers.