As high-growth companies scale, they expect Customer Success teams to do more with less—without sacrificing the customer experience.

It kind of makes sense, but then it very much doesn’t.

Regardless of how much sense this ask makes (or doesn’t make), a good customer success leader will  have to do more with the same (or even less). That is, they have to scale up the customer success department to require less human intervention. But how can you do this without losing the personal touch—and without burning out your customer success manager team?

In short, scaling Customer Success requires increasing self-service account management within the customer experience ecosystem. This way, customers get high-touch when they need it but can solve a lot of their own problems without aggressive intervention. Balancing this gives you scale without sacrificing the 1:1 dynamic that builds strong customer relationships and positively impacts customer retention. Keep reading for all the details.

Growing pains: Preventing common Customer Success issues

While scaling CS is the goal for fast-growth startups, leaders often underestimate the collateral damage it has on Customer Success. When you can spot these issues early, you can come up with solutions that mitigate churn.

1. Recapture important 1:1 communication with an automated trigger to start

Automated messages that feel impersonal create distance between you and your customer base. To scale communication, intentionally choose when customers receive personalized touches versus messages you can automate.

‍Solution: A perfect scenario for an automated message that still packs a powerful punch is a triggered email scheduled to go out when there’s a negative change in a customer’s health or you receive negative customer feedback. A triggered email seems like it was sent directly from the CSM and its goal is to simply start a conversation with the customer. 

Automation ensures you start the conversation at the right time, which drives deeper human connection and customer loyalty.

2. Transition away from named CSMs with automated education-based emails

As you grow and set aggressive goals, you’ll begin identifying segments of customers that aren’t bringing in enough revenue to justify high levels of individualized care. Eventually, you'll have to move to a floating CS team model where any CSM can respond to any customer request for this segment of customers. This transition is where automation helps you scale your operations and maintain your long tail customer base.

‍Solution: To make this a smooth transition in your customer success org structure, use automated touch points to proactively acknowledge and validate your customer’s possible reactions to the change. Use the event as an opportunity to explain what’s going on behind the scenes and ensure that they’ll still be receiving support from the customer success team—just in a different format. 

Be sure to emphasize how these changes will positively impact them (i.e. more efficiency and faster response times when anyone on the team can respond versus waiting for “your” success manager to respond).

3. Maintain your long-tail customer base with self-serve features

While freeing up your customer success team to focus on the highest priorities is critical to scale, you can’t forget about the value that comes from your long tail customer base. They’re still worth investing the resources in, just in a one-to-many customer success model versus solely a 1:1 model.

‍Solution: Creating a self-service help center that includes resources such as FAQ pages, community forums, and product tutorials can be a highly effective way to free up space in your CS team‘s schedule. It also means issues can be resolved quickly and with less effort (for your customer and your team), helping improve customer satisfaction and product adoption.

The four pillars of Customer Success at scale

A company that truly cares about customers will often say so in their vision. But in terms of action this means building teams, policies, and processes that incentivize people to fulfill the vision. Making sure that your mission statement aligns with your hiring profile is a perfect example of this. If “customer obsession” is a core value, every engineer, sales, product, and design team member must rank high in this area during their interview.

‍Rosie Roca, Chief Customer Officer at Hopin, explained it as taking a moment to look at all current roles and responsibilities. Then, “evaluate what tools, mechanisms, and organizational measures you can put in place to help customers achieve their goals and get you closer to your ideal vision.”

This ideal vision can be broken down into four pillars:

‍1. People: Your company’s success (especially during periods of growth) will depend on hiring and retaining top-performers. Know your team’s strengths and weaknesses, and then fill in the gaps–align hiring profiles with your business model.

‍2. Purpose: Understand the why. Clarify your CS organization's purpose to your CEO, leadership, engineering, product, and sales teams.

‍3. Process: When the CS organization and CSMs are in place, and you’ve clearly defined your purpose, it's time to build out the process. Data plays a crucial role in the process yet often gets overlooked. In any process (especially reporting), the first step is to have clean data.

‍4. Platform: One of the most classic mistakes of any CS organization is attempting to bring on a platform first and then focusing on people, purpose, and process second. Business outcomes that are better defined before a CS platform purchase result in better product outcomes after purchase.

You can scale customer success with a human touch

Scaling your Customer Success organization begins with identifying the pitfalls that could impact customer happiness. Issues like 1:1 communication and maintaining your long-tail customer base are helped by automation tools when implemented correctly, not harmed.

You can successfully scale your CS organization by keeping people, purpose, process, and platform in mind to put Customer Success at the center of your organization.

‍PS: To learn more about how tools and automation can free up CS time and focus, check out Catalyst.