The Cycle of Customer Success: A Blueprint for Customer Success Teams

Defining and refining the customer journey has taken a greater prominence in recent years within Customer Success teams. It’s more than just improving the customer experience. It’s about determining the right customer interactions that will deliver the customer’s desired outcome and ultimately drive the right financial results for your company.

The “People” section includes the following components:

• Determine the right CS team structure based on the customer journey.
• Properly define the roles and responsibilities of each CS team within your Customer Success function to support this structure.
• Creating a standardized hiring process for your Customer Success team. 
• Creating a standardized onboarding process for new team members that are metrics-driven.
• Compensation.
• Ensuring your team receives ongoing training and enablement.
• Creating formal career paths in and outside of Customer Success and performance management.

This is the time to build out and standardize the processes that your team will use to execute on the customer journey. It will include how you coordinate the various transitions within the Customer Success team but also outlines how CS interlocks with the other functions such as Sales on complex upsells or Marketing on customer communications. 

Technology can sometimes appear to be that mirage on the horizon when you feel like you’ve been wandering in the desert for days. Don’t go drinking from that water before you pass go! What I mean is that there are no quick fixes. Don’t invest your precious CS budget on any major technology solutions until you’ve gone through the components of the Cycle for Customer Success.

You should have metrics established for each and every stage and be constantly reviewing them. For example, when we created the mission statement at Bluecore, I grounded ourselves on the Net Promoter Score as I felt I could influence that metric within 6 months based on our direct actions while renewal rates may have longer cycles.