The Building Blocks to Scale-Up a Customer Success Organization

Allyson White | June 25, 2019| 1 min. read

“Rome wasn’t built in a day.” You can’t build a durable customer success team in a day either. However, you can lay a brick a day. Insight’s Building Blocks for Customer Success Framework helps teams prioritize which bricks to lay as they scale-up customer success.

We believe customer success teams should focus on 6 critical capabilities. Leaders should define a clear approach to the following 6 items:

Adoption Programs: What should your customer be able to in the first XX-days of using your product? Adoption is the cornerstone of customer success. If customers do not use your product, they won’t renew or expand.
Health scoring: How can you systematically track both the hot spots and opportunity spots in your customer base? Health scores allow teams to effectively prioritize time to respond proactively to issues as well as capture expansion opportunities.
Standardized plays: What are the specific steps to renew, expand or troubleshoot with customers?Less mature Customer Success organizations have ad-hoc processes. Creative, motivated Customer Success Managers have often developed a personal playbook. Combining those ad-hoc approaches into standardized playbooks is a key to scale. Playbooks ensure that you deliver a consistent customer experience and can successfully ramp new customer success managers as your team grows.
Whitespace Identification: Where are the expansion opportunities in the customer base? In collaboration with sales, customer success leaders understand the expansion opportunity and devise quarterly strategies to drive expansion leads and revenue.
Data and Triggered Actions: How can data allow teams to be more productive and able to react in real-time?Data such as usage patterns, news releases or support requests can help customer success teams reach out to customer with the right message at the right time. Data-driven customer success also help teams A-B test their tactics.
Business Impact: How can you quantify, maximize and expand the impact your product has on your customer’s business? Advanced customer success teams can reliably quantify the impact their products have on a client’s business and push clients to innovate and co-create.

All of the capabilities are supported by a strong foundation including a segmentation model, customer data and technology stack. To learn more, watch this video as Allyson White, Principal and Head of our Customer Success Center of Excellence, explains our Building Blocks framework.

Want to know where you and your team stack up on the critical capabilities? Based on these criteria, Insight Partners has an online diagnostic that can help you determine how to prioritize the critical capabilities.

Take our online diagnostic to receive targeted insights.