What we learned about the customer success function during the past year can help any company enhance the way they strategically support both customer outcomes and organizational growth.

By early 2019, MedBridge reached a point where we needed to redesign our customer success function from the ground up. Our company was growing quickly and we knew we needed to scale our customer success efforts, but simply adding to the headcount wasn’t sustainable.

Customer success is an essential function for any organization that is committed to delivering optimal value and building loyal, trusted, long-term relationships with its clients. For us, it was especially important to our company’s continued growth. What we learned about the customer success function during the past year can help any company enhance the way they strategically support both customer outcomes and organizational growth.

 

1. Identify high-value and low-value activities

Over the years, our customer success team had evolved into a holistic function that touched our clients across the entire customer life-cycle, from implementation to ongoing support to renewal. As a result, they had many workstreams that distracted the team from being able to provide excellent consultative services to our customers and drive value.

Rather than looking for new ways to drive efficiency within the old way of doing things, we took a step back and asked a fundamental question: “What do we really want our customer success managers to be doing? And what don’t we want them to do any more?”

When we looked at where the customer success team could have the greatest impact on outcomes, the most valuable activities supported retention and client satisfaction, including stakeholder engagement, communicating new features and products, and conducting strategic business reviews to recognize and convey ROI to the client throughout the year.

Conversely, we determined that activities focused on implementation, administrative support and billing were not the best use of the team’s time and skills in managing relationships, thinking strategically, and identifying opportunities to further grow within a client. With those priorities in mind, we looked at ways to refocus the team on the areas that mattered most.

Rather than looking for new ways to drive efficiency within the old way of doing things, we took a step back and asked fundamental questions.

2. Delegate and automate to increase team bandwidth

We started opening up more time for our customer success team members by creating three new teams and delegating competing workstreams to these new roles. The implementation team took over responsibility for setting up client accounts, while a dedicated client services team handled support tickets and SMB accounts. A new member was added to the finance team to manage customer renewal, growth invoicing and follow-up.

However, we didn’t want to unintentionally create bottlenecks across the other teams, so in addition to redistributing tasks, we continue to examine where we can automate. Account setup, support and renewals, for example, are areas we can continue to leverage technology to gain efficiencies. We use Zendesk to manage support issues and we are implementing a new billing system that will automate a lot of the renewal process.

3. Set new KPIs to redefine the expectation

Our customer success function needed to scale, but we also wanted it to take a more active role in achieving our growth goals. To that end, we put new KPIs in place for the customer success managers that are based on net retention, client satisfaction and opportunity creation.

The new KPIs ensure that the team stays focused on the areas where they can deliver the greatest value. They are now driven to prioritize understanding our clients’ business needs and communicating those needs across all teams including products and sales.

To take a more active role in achieving our growth goals, we put new KPIs in place based on net retention, client satisfaction and opportunity creation.

4. Let the dust settle, then re-evaluate and refine

Rolling out our plans for customer success took the better part of a year. As we move into year two, we’ll be monitoring how the new system actually works and addressing situations that our original plan didn’t account for. Not everything that looks good on the whiteboard translates into reality. When you fundamentally redefine roles, it’s impossible to fully define all the swim lanes in advance. In the year ahead, we’ll focus on addressing new challenges and making the system stronger, better defined and more resilient.

As part of this evolution, we will provide additional training to ensure our customer success team has the skills they need to succeed in their maturing roles. We need to support them in becoming trusted, client-centric advisors.

Early days and quick wins

Our new customer success process has been in place for less than a year and we see an increase in our team’s ability to engage with clients and gain visibility into their needs. They now have time to reach out to clients and stakeholders more frequently, and they are able to gain more insight into their core business goals. With that knowledge, we can better influence their business success and ROI. Early results indicate that we have significantly increased the number of strategic business reviews we are able to do, and are already seeing an increase in new opportunities to grow our partnerships.

Here’s the bottom line.

As a company grows, being willing to revisit and fundamentally reimagine a team’s core purpose is a really helpful exercise. It’s especially critical for a customer success function, which is core to the company’s ability to retain customers, build loyalty and grow value. Ask yourself, “What did we hire that team to do? What are they doing every day? What do we really want them to be doing?” And don’t be afraid to let the answers reshape roles, processes and systems. It will help you scale by ensuring that the team isn’t just able to do more, but are doing more of the things that help your company and your customers succeed.