(A) The company has just created stage (0-5 employees)
At this stage, customer service and support issues is not your focus, it should not become a problem for you, you need the most attention at this stage is to find products and market match.
The customer is essential that you look for in products and markets to match the process because you need them to provide feedback to you, everyone on the team should go to answer customer questions face to face with customers, and think about how to build energy products to meet market demand.
What to do at this stage?
(1) establish a simple workflow to manage customer issues, a dedicated customer service, including customer service email, arrangements for each team member to be responsible.
(2) periodic review and summary of some of the sort common customer questions, and timely repair of those common problems.
(3) so that all team members are involved in the work to solve customer problems in the past.
(4) At this stage, as a major customer service can make your product better learning tool, carefully listening to customer feedback, especially those involved is relatively high, relatively strong customer demand.
What can not be done at this stage?
1) Do not optimize efficiency. Your goal is to succeed, you need to do those early things we can not expand. Do not dwell on queries such indicators.
(B) an early stage (5-20 employees)
Then you need to recruit the first specialized customer service to do the work of the staff, but this man is not a "chief customer officer" or "customer success manager." This person needs to own 100% of the time and effort goes into helping customers to reduce the workload of the customer service team of others.
Remember, the early stages of the customer service staff with the later stages of the customer service staff is not the same.
In the late development of the company, all you need is those who know how to achieve economies of scale through expansion processes, systems and training of people. In the early stages, all you need is a really very concerned about the people who help customers.
This work is very hard, and very boring. Company founder need special authorization to this person, let him have the right to supervise engineers to solve the problem of product availability and product bug is recurring, also authorized him to ask the sales will not continue to sell products to customers that do not fit at the same time also allows marketers to discuss with him how to better express products.
What to do at this stage?
(1) allow feedback channels can be controlled. Your customers will feedback the problem from different channels: directly to the founder of the call, send email to R & D engineers, also, or send text messages. For customers to specify a link to your official channels (such as email).
After (2) tracking NPS (Net Promoter Score) after interaction with customer support, so you can know be "solved" in a customer's question, whether the customer is still not satisfied. You need to start tracking the number and quality of customer issues, as well as income-related metrics (such as total turnover, etc.), create some basic e-mail templates to answer the most common customer questions.
(3) so that customers can start thinking about self-service. Write some tutorials posted, teach customers how to solve some common problems themselves, tutorials posted as: "How to complete our APP in XXX?" Or "How to Set characteristic X?" And so on. These tutorials posted should also be welcomed by the company's sales staff.
What can not be done at this stage?
Let unimportant things can not be distracted. Your focus is on growth. At this stage of the company's growth is driven by the sales, not a success by the customer or renewal driven. In the early stages, if not pay attention to the following three aspects, will easily lead to the success of your work in the customer's problems.
Improve (1) the route of the problem, the problem classification, automatic replies and other processes appear to be reasonable, but at this stage do not do it. Because at this stage, the company's business model is constantly changing to adjust, when flexibility is more valuable than efficiency and cost savings.
(2) complex models to predict customer churn looks very tempting, but before you hire data scientists or arrangement expensive machine learning software, and 15 to the customer face to face.
(3) those more problems, more customer feedback often feel collapse, and the cost of providing services to these customers is very high. Despite the loss of customers is not a sinful thing, but it must be careful to treat those customers who complain to you more and more. If you can get these complaints were satisfied, so that they succeed, they will become your product the most powerful advocates, promoters and supporters.
(Iii) the development of the mid-stage (20-100 employees)
At this stage, you increase the number of customers, customer service workload also increased. Customer service staff from the very beginning of a person becomes two people. At this stage, more cautious before your customer service work needs to be done than that. At this stage, you need to lay the foundation for customer service in the coming period, and to have a destination to do work in this area.
Pattern formed in this critical stage of growth as the company will grow, and it will decide: so you reach the growth phase, the model will help you grow faster or hinder your growth.
What to do at this stage?
(1) measure a number of indicators have a purpose. In terms of customer support, the question classification and response time / time to solve indicators also wrote customer service aspects of the summary report. Start by tracking customer life cycle stages (such as new customer acquisition, the successful installation, see the value of bringing products) to quantify the effect of customer success work.
(2) started building a knowledge base. When a customer number reached about 1000, you can probably know the common problems encountered what are the customers. Then you need to have a person dedicated to customer service to build the knowledge base to support education customers.
(3) careful selection of official channels of communication. Now a single mailbox channel has been unable to meet customer service demands, and you start thinking about adding other official channels of communication, such as telephone, forums and instant messaging number. Remember, than add a channel cut a channel much easier, because if you add a contact channel and then closed the channel, it is very easy to annoy customers. So when you add a new official channels of communication must be considered.
(4) In doing customer service work breakdown, we must seriously consider. In the customer service team size of more than 6 people, you begin to think about how to work subdivided. If you start now doing customer service work breakdown, you should focus on customer life cycle at different stages (such as product installation, customer support) to do the subdivision arrangements. To avoid work breakdown according to customer type (such as SaaS, electricity providers, finance) or type of problem. Because this phase continues to change your marketing strategy, you need to continue to optimize flexibility.
What can not be done at this stage?
(1) Do not let this issue divide the cost center. Outsourcing, recruitment of staff, and other low-cost strategy to reduce costs for those who are more sensitive to the financial tempting. This stage your team size is not big enough, so can not really get a real return from these seemingly can reduce the cost of initiatives. At this stage you want to focus on is revenue growth, rather than the gross margin.
(2) can not be customer service team as a buffer between a company and its customers. Note isolation between the inner Customer Service team and other teams in the office place, Slack mail and other aspects of such indications that customer service is no longer the work of everyone concerned.
(Iv) growth phase (100-250 employees)
At this stage, the basic realization of your company and products to match market demand. The company is rapidly expanding smoothly, congratulations!
After the growth phase, your job will be converted to realize the economic benefits of the company. Then the key question you need to answer is: Can we get at least 3 times the unit from the customers who get economic benefits in return? Your team and investors will attach great importance to the lifetime value of the customer, then the customer success is to do good customer retention.
Until now, you do customer service team is still passive customer support, you need to continue to do so. At the same time, you also need to set up a customer success team responsible for doing something more proactive work to improve customer retention.
Then you need a different type of manager, the man should not only be able to manage existing customer service team, customers should be able to build a successful team. Recruitment is essential in this role, you need a proper customer success VP or chief customer officer, that person needs to have a strong operational capacity, there is a strong empathy, good communication and collaboration engineering teams , and can leverage customer success into the growth of our business. If you do not train a person to have such capabilities in-house, and do not compromise or reduce employment standards, can assure your investors, the board of directors, and even search for help, ask them to help you hire a proper expertise in this area.
What to do at this stage?
(1) to a customer service team responsible for man-and revenue-related goals. The two most common goal is to net revenue and turnover. It is important that the customer service team have a way with the way the company CFO and investors are more concerned about the value of their contact with the company's business together.
(2) To establish a model, not just the index. You have to establish a model for forecasting the amount of data required. To answer the question by analytical thinking:?? "When do we need new tactics to a customer service staff will allow customers to use up the product in comparison with access to new customer contracts which is more valuable which simple strategies we can use to help us increase revenue?
(3) to invest in permanent systems and tools. In the early development of the company, sales is more important than the system. And to this stage, you have to understand the market you are in, your products, and how to better serve our ideal customer service. Now comes the choice to use those tools can be matched with your service channels, such as when a workflow
What can not be done at this stage?
Ignore cultural customer service team. Customer service team who are not satisfied with the handling of customer issues and a steady stream of customers' needs, often need to withstand the impact of a failure due to problems of product and marketing teams brought. This is a difficult task, it will inevitably affect the health of the team. At this stage, there are two things that can not be ignored:
(1) Do not ignore the cynical team members present in cynicism emotions, particular attention to those who work in the company's relatively long time if there are such negative emotions. If found, do not delay, to solve the problem as soon as possible, because the mood is contagious.
(2) Do not put the process on people. Customer Success Team members usually pay attention to the process, the process itself is not a bad thing, but if the process will make people feel too much like a small gear on a large machine can not be changed. Your team needs customers have been authorized to solve customer problems.
(E) the expansion phase (250 + employees)
At this stage, you have found a growth lever, and now you want to see this leverage can be achieved in accordance with the scale of the expansion.
This stage, the company will be under pressure in terms of operational efficiencies from the board of directors, and this pressure will naturally go to the client team body. Remember, customer success is the work of a big growth engine of our business. You need to reduce costs, but not to reduce investment in the customer's expense.
At this stage how to do?
This phase of work in customer service, or to provide predictability, or cost savings. You need to improve predictability in the following three aspects:
(1) team growth: you need to improve your model accurately predicted workload based on customer demand, and the completion of work necessary to predict how many people need to recruit, but also based on the operations of the team to make some key assumptions. In addition, you also need to accurately predict the needs of different customer groups.
(2) Management expansion: With the expansion team size from a few people to dozens of people, you will need to manage a large scale. For professional customer success teams, the proportion of the general staff and team managers about 8: 1, for specialization is not so strong team, this ratio can be 15: 1 or even 20: 1. Team leader can to help you through a lot of guidance, training and other ways to further expand the scale of management personnel
Follow-up evaluation 3) single individual performance: If the number is relatively small team, then we usually ego-driven self-management, with the increasing scale of the team, you need to measure the performance assessment of each individual, including the question of the request amount, up sales and other indicators. This work has some difficulties, but it must be done, because if you do not do it, there is a big difference will lead to different members of the team performance, this time in order to achieve predictable expansion becomes very difficult.
What can not be done at this stage?
(1) Do not be a "analysis paralysis" of the victim. You tracked health indicators include customer renewal rates, and customer support interaction. However, your customer service team needs is a Polaris index, rather than the collection of dozens of indicators. You want to simplify measurable goals, do not let too much analysis drowned them, that they lost their focus.
(2) Do not ignore the problem any experience for customers. For problems before customers, your team has provided temporary solutions, such as allow customers to send e-mail to the specified mailbox, such as file upload .csv format. At this stage, it is time to consider further enhance the customer experience, and then to consider permanently solve the engineering and technical aspects of these issues.
(3) Do not ignore the voice of the customer. So that customers have the opportunity to communicate with non-customer service staff; regularly collect major pain points customers; ensure that the management team every month to communicate with at least one customer.
There is also need to be reminded that it is important: If you are still using only passive customer support model, customers do not actively solve the problem, then you are incompetent.
In some companies, customer support only to keep up with the pace of development of the company, but large-scale expansion and growth is the need to rely on your customers' ability to retain the predictably. So you need a dedicated customer success teams. In this regard must not delay
Epilogue
Most SaaS company only after suffered a fatal crisis began to churn customer success seriously about it. A typical process is as follows: severe heart began to panic causes of the loss of → → → analysis of this problem of recruiting staff members customers. This is a very extensive practice
