In December of last year, I was asked to participate in an expert panel on customer success team performance. The invite came from Darren Noy, Chief Science Officer of Kannetic, a start up that is building solutions that tap into the power of collective intelligence to help build high performing teams and organizations.

Using a process similar to the Delphi-method, Darren asked myself and 14 other participants to answer three surveys (one 10-minute, one 20-minute, and one 30-minute survey) where each survey built on the responses from the previous ones.

Here’s some of the people that were on the panel:

• Dan Steinman – Chief Customer Officer, Gainsight
• Ed Powers – Principal Consultant, Service Excellence Partners
• Emilia D’Anzica – Vice President Customer Engagement, WalkMe
• Grace Boyle – Director of Customer Success, FullContact
• Ian Golding, CCXP – Global Customer Experience Specialist, Customer Experience Consultancy Ltd
• Lynn Hunsaker – Customer Experience Transformation Strategist, ClearActionCX

The aim of the survey was to identify a number of best practices for building high performing customer success teams.

The results of the survey were recently published. Here are the top 8 practices that emerged from the panel and aim to help engender the better understanding and engagement of customers and build a high performing customer success team:

1. Develop different onboarding approaches appropriate for different customer segments/personas
2. Ensure Customer Success Managers (CSMs) understand business context for the impact the product makes (not just how to use it)
3. Use risk behaviour and customer health monitors to trigger notifications to CSMs, so that they can address the customer before the customer comes to them
4. Reach out to customers when there has been a change in key contacts or decision makers – such as sponsors moving into other roles or leaving the company
5. Ensure that regular customer conversations about goals and objectives include questions about obstacles and challenges
6. Develop “Success Plans” in every customer kick-off or as part of the sales closing. Customers set goals, which you constantly return to when checking-in with customers
7. Map together three layers of your customer journey to ensure they are aligned:
   1. the actual process or experience of your customer as they use your product or service;
   2. your technology process; and
   3. your business process
8. Segment customers not only by their current account size, but also by potential value (e.g., How much they are paying you vs. how much they could be paying you)

On the back of the survey, Kannetic has developed a Customer Success Builder application that aims to help customer success teams:

• Identify the biggest opportunities to improve customer engagement, customer understanding, data capabilities, and cross-functional collaboration; and
• Collaboratively plan and track practical actions to drive performance improvement.

You can find out more here: www.kannetic.com/customer-success-builder

Thanks to Pixabay for the image.