As someone who has always been driven to achieve, I can tell you that a success plan is essential to reaching your goals. Without a plan, it’s easy to get sidetracked or discouraged. But what is a success plan? Here’s everything you need to know in order to create a successful customer success plan.
I remember when I was first starting out in my career, I had no idea what a success plan was or how to create one. Thankfully, I had a mentor who showed me the ropes and taught me the importance of having a road map for where you want to go.
If you’re not sure where to start with creating your own success plan, don’t worry – we’ve got you covered! In this blog post, we’ll share the do’s and don’ts of account planning so that you can set yourself up for achieving any goal imaginable.
What Is a Success Plan?
What is a success plan? A success plan is a road map that helps you achieve your desired outcomes. It includes specific steps, milestones, and actions that you need to take in order to reach your goals.
A success plan also holds you accountable and keeps you on track.
How to Create an Effective Customer Success Plan
So you’re ready to create a Customer Success Plan for your clients, but where do you start? Here are 7 steps to get you started.
Happy and satisfied customers can help increase your business’s revenues by strengthening the brand, providing valuable feedback, and referring others.
These tips will help you acquire more customers, making the process of selling to them easier.
1. Identify your client’s end goal
To effectively create a successful customer service strategy, you have to understand your customers’ goals.
A well-defined sales cycle is essential to understand a prospect’s goals and how your solutions can help them. Doing this before they become a customer will help you avoid misaligned expectations.
By avoiding any misaligned expectations, you can ensure your solution is a good fit for your prospective customer.
Once a prospect becomes a paying customer, the goals you establish for them can be handed over to the Customer Success Team. These become the foundation of your CS Plan.
2. Mapping processes to aha! moments
Your software has at least one (or several) ah-ha! moment(s).
These are the moments in which your customer says “A-ha!”
Now I understand the value of this solution to my company. These are crucial moments when a product goes from being a “nice to have” to an essential tool.
When your customers “finally get it”, they are more likely to become loyal to you and much less likely to be tempted to switch to a competitor.
Create a process for your clients to follow that helps them hit those important benchmarks.
3. Determine your CS metrics
Measuring activity-based metrics such as daily, weekly, or monthly usage can help you evaluate the health of your account.
Depending on your product, you can evaluate the health of customers by using one or more of these types of data. You can additionally create customized measurements that align to your customer’s goals and progress towards aha! Moments.
Doing so can help you understand whether your customers are getting the most value out of your product or service.
This metric can be used to analyze the health of your entire client base, or it can be applied to specific groups of clients, such as your top-paying ones.
4 Build a Great CS Team
The make-up of your team will depend on the type of product or service you offer, and on whether or not you choose a high touch, low touch or hybrid model.
Your Customer Success Team may need to have different levels of technical knowledge, depending on the type of product you sell.
1. Customer Success Managers should be passionate about helping your customers.2. Your CSMs should be likable and relatable.3. Your CS team should be dedicated to constant improvement.4. Your CSMs should fit in with your corporate culture.
It is important to get input and feedback from all different departments that play a part in a customer’s journey. This should include sales and marketing, as well as the product and engineering teams. By including everyone, you can create a well rounded and committed team of people committed to the success and satisfaction of customers.
5 Align Product and Customer Teams
Product management and customer support teams work together across many different software products to achieve the business goals.
However, in some companies the product mangers are skeptical of the feedback that they get from sales people.
Customer-facing employees have direct interactions with customers and believe they know exactly what customers want, but have a hard time convincing the product team that their idea is worth implementing.
While both teams are well-intentioned, the disconnection between them makes keeping the customer successful and satisfied much more difficult.
There are many things you can do to keep both your product and your customer success team on the same page. Some effective ways to do so are to share common goals and use a tool set that both departments use.
It’s also important to emphasize frequent communication between the two teams. By following these suggestions, you can help ensure your customers are happy and successful.
6. Choose the perfect tools for Customer Success
There are a variety of tools out there to help you manage your customers. But it’s important to choose the ones that will help you achieve your goals.
Some solutions are used by many different departments. Make sure that all involved parties are committed to using the solution.
The best tool in the world is worthless if your team doesn’t use it.
7 Collect customer feedbacks
Once you’ve got your customer service plan up and running, you’ll need to measure its success. Customer satisfaction surveys, such as Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), can help you understand whether your customers are happy or not.
But these metrics are too general and vague to tell you which part of your sales cycle is working well and which part isn’t.
In app customer feedback gives you a much better understanding of how your customers feel about your product. By focusing on specific areas of the user experience, such as how intuitive your app is, you can gain a much deeper understanding of what needs to be improved.
You can target in app surveys to specific groups of users, such as new or high-valued ones.
Conclusion
So, what is a success plan? A success plan is a road map that helps you achieve your desired outcomes. It includes specific steps, milestones, and actions that you need to take in order to reach your goals.
If you’re looking to achieve success in any area of your life, it’s important to have a plan in place. By following this guide, you can set yourself up for achieving any goal imaginable. So what are you waiting for? Get started on creating your own success plan today!
