Best Practices in Customer Success Management

Attracting and retaining customers is the most important thing a business does. Given this, it is essential that all business to help their customers to derive the greatest possible value out of their products and services. Today, many companies have created customer success programs that enable them to better serve their customers. In the process, there organizations have increased customer satisfaction, reduced customer, turnover, and created stronger, more predictable revenue streams.

The role of the Customer Success Managers (CSMs) is to help create the best customer experience. They do this by prioritizing the needs of the customer and working with them throughout their journey with the company. An important component of this is in monitoring the customer and their achievement of value so that they can revise their approach accordingly.

Best Practices in Customer Success Management

Given its importance to the company, it is helpful to review the best practices reported by those organizations that have built effective customer success management programs. Some of these best practices include:

Know What Success Means to Your Customer

Building an effective customer success management program demands that you understand the customer is trying to accomplish. You gain this knowledge through effective and ongoing communication. In-depth discussions, surveys, and interviews with industry thought leaders can all provide valuable information in this regard.

Share Customer Data Across the Organization

In order for your program to be effective, it is critical for everyone in your organization to understand that the success of the customer is everyone’s responsibility. CSMs should play a lead role in ensuring that every interaction with the customer is documented and shared across the company in one accessible location.

Create Logical Segments for Your Customers

You might find it helpful to divide your customer base into logical groups. Many companies benefit from some level of segmentation as it allows them to define different levels of success for different types of customers. Depending on your offerings, you could (for example) segment your customers into personal and business use cases. And within the business segment, you could further divide those customers based on size.

Track Important Customer Analytics

Your customer success management team should have the critical customer data available to them for proper analysis. License usage, feature value, and product use cases are examples of potentially important data points to track. Of course, it is important to consider the customer’s unique goals when determining the most important data to track.

eLearning-Based Training for Customer Success Management

In recent years, customer training (particularly in the form of online learning, or “eLearning”) has emerged as a critical component of a customer success management program. Some of the specific benefits that companies can expect from the implementation of a customer training program can include:

• Increased customer satisfaction

• Enhanced opportunities for upselling

• Faster customer onboarding and increased customer retention

• Decreased customer support team costs

eLearning refers to the use of electronic technologies (the Internet, in particular) to support any type of online training, including customer training programs. eLearning offers several advantages over more traditional, classroom-based training in that it is much more cost-effective, flexible, and convenient for your customers.

The core technology to drive and support eLearning-based customer training programs is a Learning Management System, or “LMS”. An LMS is the application that is used to build, deliver, and track your eLearning program and it is offered with several options for delivery and architecture. Most companies, today, tend to opt for a cloud-based LMS, as opposed to “standing up” their own application. A cloud-based LMS, offered by a third-party vendor, eliminates the need to a large, up-front investment and allows you to get started quickly with your customer training program.

A more recent innovation in LMS technology is in multitenancy. A multi-tenant LMS (unlike a single tenant system) allows you to “spin up” new, customized instances of the LMS on-demand. Many customer success management organizations leverage this architecture to create a private eLearning environment for each of their customers in order to add value and enhance the customer relationship.

LMS Portals for Customer Training and Customer Success Management

LMS Portals offers a cloud-based, multi-tenant learning management system that allows our clients and partners to build and manage multiple, private eLearning environments (portals) to support their customer training and customer success management programs. Using LMS Portals, you can “spin up” new instances of the application on-demand. And each portal you launch can have its own unique branding, user onboarding, messaging tools, analytics engine, and more.

Visit our Partner Program pages to learn more or contact us today to get started

for free!