Getting the most Return from your Customer Success Investment with Automation
It’s not a matter of whetherif you should invest in Customer Success, you’ve already done that. It’s not a small investment to hire a new team, build the right strategy and transform many of the processes that drove drive your business. But making sure that investment sees its highest return is not always easy. Having recently talked with several organizations I see a lot of reorganization with Customer Success being the pawn between groups. While Customer Success goals may be the same, each groups charter can influence how the team achieves those goals. Budgets can also be influenced and impact the effectiveness of the original investment. The one constant I have seen is that providing Customer Success teams the right tools, to automate tasks, provides the greatest ROI.
Let’s start by looking at how we would measure ROI for a Customer Success Team.
1. Reduce churn – You should be able to measure the number of customers the Customer Success team touches and a historical impact of those customers
2. Time to Value – The quicker a customer adopts your product or service, the faster they consume what they bought and the faster they need more
3. Expansion – Happy customers buy more, but more importantly, helping customers identify areas they can take advantage of your product or services leads to more sales
These are traditional revenue areas, renewals and upsell, that used to be driven from a sales organization. Customer Success compliments those efforts (or in some cases replaces them) and should be measured on its success in doing so. But just as you provide the right tools, such as CRM, to your sales team to drive revenue, automation is key for your Customer Success team. Let’s look at some metrics to prove that point.
Let’s assume that a CSM has 100 customers and that each customer has an ARR of $10,000. That’s a $1,000,000 ARR per CSM.
If you use a 40-hour work week, on average, you will have 24 minutes for each of your 100 customers. Without automation the majority of that time is spent doing research, finding data from multiple systems, typing up emails, determining next steps. You have no way to determine which of those steps impacted that customer or drove the results you were anticipating. It’s like asking for marketing team to set up campaigns by manually talking to each prospect and having no way to track what was successful.
Automation helps maximize that ROI:
• Identifies who needs attention the most and what actions to take
• Removes manual steps such as updating different systems, typing up the same email or scheduling follow-ups
