Scaling Customer Success: Building the Customer Success Center of Excellence

ISBN-13: 9781484291917 / Angielski

Chitra Madhwacharyula; Shreesha Ramdas

Opis

​Customer Success is a relatively a new discipline that focuses on maximizing customer business value and outcomes realization. Practitioners focus on customer adoption, customer experience and then positive correlation, organic growth and retention is achieved. This book will provide a practical guide for operationalizing the Customer Success function and methodologies. 

As we now step into the next phase of Customer Success, a phase of growth and standardization, it becomes important to start thinking about how to effectively scale this extremely important function. You'll see how to go from just offering a taste of Customer Success experience to your top customers, to offering it to all your customers, irrespective of their tier, spending, and current growth potential. As you expand the scope of Customer Success across all your customers, it becomes very important to understand how to operationalize Customer Success, how to convert the philosophies and ideas and best practices to usable operational models, and how to build a Customer Success Center of Excellence (CoE) focused on standardizing, scaling and expanding Customer Success practices and methodologies to optimize customer and company success and ROI. 

Scaling Customer Success will show you what kind of operational processes and workflows need to be put in place based on the stage of your company, products, customer engagement model and desired outcomes, what metrics are important to measure and how to capture those metrics. You'll also study what kinds of workflows to establish, how to effectively map and analyze results and most importantly, how to do Customer Success at scale effectively.

What You'll Learn

• Understand what a Customer Success Center of Excellence is

• Establish a blueprint for how to scale and automate a Customer Success practice

• Review information on key Customer Success metrics and workflows

Who This Book Is For

Company leaders and customer success managers

Spis treści

​Chapter 1: The Customer Success CoE 

• Problem Statement

• Mission and Goals of a CS CoE

• Desired Outcomes

• CS CoE Foundational Components

• From Theory to Practice

• Execution

• Where to Start

Quote ”Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it”

Chapter 2: Business and Operational Models

Quote: “Know what your customer wants most and what your company does best. Focus on where those two meet.” — Kevin Stirtz

• Common Business models

• Models based on Business Type

• SaaS

• PaaS/IaaS

• Traditional non SaaS

• Models based on customer size and tier

• Strategic

• Enterprise

• Others

• Models based on Company Maturity

• Early Stage Startup

• Mid/Late Stage Startup

• Enterprise and Above

• CS 2.0: The New Approach

• Customer Centricity

• Customer Led Growth

• The 5 Pillars of Customer Success

• Customer Success Maturity Model

• Where should Customer Success roll up to?

• Standard Operational Procedures (SOPs)

• Churn Hacking

• R&R (RACI models etc)

• Customer segmentation models

• For free verses for fee servicing models

Chapter 3: Key Customer Success Processes and Optimization

• Commonly asked questions

• When is a Customer/Account designated as ‘Post-Sales’?

• How are responsibilities distributed between Sales reps and Customer Success Managers once a customer is in the post sales phase?

• At what stage of the Sales cycle should Customer Success get involved?

• Key Processes

• Customer Journey

• Examples

• Playbooks templates

• Sample playbooks

• Customer Onboarding

• Sub section by Sri Ganesan, CEO Rocketlane

• Strategic Account Planning

• Optimization of Key Processes

• Optimizations per Customer Tier

• Optimizations per Company Maturity

• Optimizations per Business Type

• Cross functional partnerships

• Templatizing workflows

• How to define the CS Gameplan

• Choosing the right tech stack

Chapter 4: Key Metrics and Beyond: 

Quote: What you can’t measure, you can’t fix

• Setting the Stage

• Metrics vs KPIs

• Best Practices for Metrics Measurement

• Vanity Metrics vs Actionable Metrics

• The Central Themes

• How Do We Measure Customer Success Org Value?

• Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) and Churn Rate

• Customer Churn

• Customer Health Score

• Customer Loyalty (Net Promoter Score)

• Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

• Customer Success ROI

• Customer Success Guiding KPIs and Metrics

• Leading vs Lagging Health/Churn Indicators (section by Tom Lipscomb)

• Lagging Indicators

• Leading Indicators

• Process Performance Metrics

• Metrics based on company stage and CS maturity

• Metrics based on Customer Journey

• How to capture metrics

• Thinking beyond Quantitative Metrics - How to be Outcome driven

• Back to the Basics

• Outcomes driven qualitative metrics

• How will you collect these metrics? 

• Customer Perceived Value

• How to calculate Customer Perceived Value?

• How to use captured metrics?

• Lagging indicators

• Leading indicators

• Metrics based on company stage and CS maturity

Chapter 5: Results, Results AND Results

• The Dashboard for Customer Success

• What are your desired outcomes

• How to map the metrics to desired outcomes

• Customer 360 - View and Perspective

• Customer Health Indicators

• Company wide KPIs

• Customer Success KPIs

• KPIs for All

• Key Features of a C360 System

• Unify Customer Data

• Integrate Data Sources

• Automate Customer Workflows

• Advanced Segmentation

• Streamlined Reporting

• Customer Communication

• Sample Dashboards

• Executive Dashboards

• Manager dashboards

• CS dashboards

Chapter 6: Designing for Scale

• CS Ops from Reactive to Proactive

• Extending Customer Success to all your customers

• How to build Customer Success for Scale

• Data Modeling for Standardization

• Customer Account Data Modeling

• How to build an Action Plan

• Picking the right tools - The CS tech stack

• Automations

• Why Automate

• Which processes are best candidates for automations

• How to Automate

• Automation Examples

Chapter 7: How to set up your Customer Success Operations function

• What is a Customer Success Operations function?

• ROI of CS Ops

• How can a dedicated CS Ops lead/team transform the fortunes of a CS team, or organization

• What can happen to a CS team that tries to scale without investing in CS Ops? 

• What are some blockers that can prevent CS Ops from maximizing ROI from their role?

• How to maximize the impact of CS Ops in an organization? 

• Key projects that can be driven by CS Ops team

• CS Ops Organizational Structure

• Roles

• Hierarchy

• Career Trajectory

• Resourcing

• Sample JDs

•

• CS Team Velocity

Chapter 8: Customer Success 2.0: The Next Chapter in Customer Success

• Customer Success Predictions For A 'New' World

• CS in C-Suite

• Increase in size and scope of CS

• NRR is the new ARR

• …etc

• The evolution of the CCO

• Is the CCO role in conflict with a CRO?

• From CCO to CEO

• The era of organic growth and creating life long customers

• The Evolution of “Project” Economy

• Role of CS in Company Boards

• How you should prepare for CS 2.0

O autorze

​Chitra Madhwacharyula is a self-directed and driven technology and business leader with comprehensive accomplishments leading post-sale customer and partner strategy, technical advisory, onboarding, adoption, retention, service monetization, and global cross-functional teams to maximize business goals. She has 20 years of global professional experience combined with innovative thinking and execution with strong hi-tech, finance, insurance, retail, manufacturing, and health care industry acumen. She has demonstrated success in developing and executing programs in complex, fast-paced organizations.

She has a highly organized, creative problem-solver who excels at leading teams through challenging projects and translating complicated technology into easy-to-understand concepts and have proven expertise in retaining and growing multimillion-dollar contracts, budgets, products, and advising C-level executives.

Chitra hold a Masters in Computer Science from National University of Singapore and a Masters in Information Management from University of California at Berkeley. Herprofessional experiences includes working for companies like TIBCO, LinkedIn, Motorola, Ayla Networks, Couchbase and HPE. She is currently the head of Worldwide Customer Success Center of Excellence at HPE and responsible for enabling and supporting our 10+ worldwide geographies (geos) and all the Customer Success Managers (CSMs).

Shreesha Ramdas is SVP and GM at Medallia-Strikedeck.  Previously he was the CEO and Co-founder of Strikedeck, customer success automation company. Before Strikedeck, Shreesha was the GM of the Marketing Cloud at CallidusCloud, Co-founder at LeadFormix (acquired by CallidusCloud) & OuterJoin, and General Manager at Yodlee. Prior to that, Shreesha led teams in Sales and Marketing at Catalytic Software, MW2 Consulting, and Tata. Shreesha is also active in the startup community as an advisor/investor- Workato, Enact, RevvSales, Elastica (Symantec), DX Continuum (ServiceNow), EmpInfo, Fullcast, ObeoHealth. 

Blurb

Customer Success is a relatively a new discipline that focuses on maximizing customer business value and outcomes realization. Practitioners focus on customer adoption, customer experience and then positive correlation, organic growth and retention is achieved. This book will provide a practical guide for operationalizing the Customer Success function and methodologies. 

As we now step into the next phase of Customer Success, a phase of growth and standardization, it becomes important to start thinking about how to effectively scale this extremely important function. You'll see how to go from just offering a taste of Customer Success experience to your top customers, to offering it to all your customers, irrespective of their tier, spending, and current growth potential. As you expand the scope of Customer Success across all your customers, it becomes very important to understand how to operationalize Customer Success, how to convert the philosophies and ideas and best practices to usable operational models, and how to build a Customer Success Center of Excellence (CoE) focused on standardizing, scaling and expanding Customer Success practices and methodologies to optimize customer and company success and ROI. 

Scaling Customer Success will show you what kind of operational processes and workflows need to be put in place based on the stage of your company, products, customer engagement model and desired outcomes, what metrics are important to measure and how to capture those metrics. You'll also study what kinds of workflows to establish, how to effectively map and analyze results and most importantly, how to do Customer Success at scale effectively.