How to Scale Up your Customer Success

Receptive’s shining star of Customer Success, Aly Mahan, recently sat down and had a chat with Srajan Bhagat for her Churn It Up Podcast.

If you haven’t yet listened, then head over here.

Srajan was a CSM at Recruiterbox and currently has the same role at Sauce Labs. He spoke about his unique position of moving from a smaller CS team to a bigger one, and how customer success can be scaled up.

Many Hands Make Light Work

At Recruiterbox, Srajan often was solely in charge of dealing with a particular account. At Sauce Labs, however, there are often 3 or 4 people all attending to the same account.

The roles are split up so that you have the CSM, the Account Executive, and a couple of more technical people all on hand to help out.

Srajan believes this helps a lot as he can now lean on others for support, trusting his colleagues to help his customer as much as they can.

When it comes to scaling up, you could consider separating CS into different roles and tasks, and assigning people to each one.

Make It Personal

When you have so many people all working with one customer, there’s a lot of information which needs to be passed around.

Sales know what the customer is expecting from the product, and what they want to achieve. The more technical people know how the customer can best use the product. The CSM has to take all this information and use it to do their job.

Srajan advises that the key to this is to trust each other and maintain those all-important personal relationships. It’s almost impossible to automate this co-operation so you have to learn to rely on one another.

What’s Up, Docs?

Whenever Srajan speaks with a customer, he has a plethora of documents at his disposal. These range from one pagers on the benefits of Customer Success, to customizable training slide decks, to QBR outlines & goals.

This allows Srajan to better explain things to customers, and also provides evidence of the value that the product is providing to the customer. Both of those will help ensure the customer is happy.

While it can take a lot of time to set these documents up, it makes your life so much easier when it comes to scaling up your customer success efforts.

A Poor CSM Blames Their Tools

If you’re in a position to scale up your customer success, then you need to get your toolbox in order. The right tools can make everything ten times easier.

Srajan uses a lot of the staple tools such as Google Docs, Slack, and Salesforce. He also uses Wunderlist to measure progress with each customer account, and Trello to get an overview of where each customer is up to in their journey.

Sorting out your tools and workflow ahead of time means that when you start scaling you’ll have an efficient process in place and ready to go.

Be Proactive

Once upon a time, Srajan was on the Customer Support team. There, he would be reactive, responding to any support messages as and when they came in.

When he first embarked on his CS quest, he made the mistake of keeping that reactive mindset. He soon learned that switching to being proactive made the world of difference to his customers.

Rather than simply replying to customer queries, take the initiative and instigate the conversations. It’s far more effective for you to take charge of the relationship with your customers.

If you’re looking to scale up your customer success efforts, then you can’t get much better than Srajan’s advice.

To listen to the episode in full (which we absolutely recommend), then head over to this link.

Thanks for reading, and best of luck with your scaling!