What is the right way to provide support for your expanding customer base? This is a question every software company will have to consider as they grow. There are certainly a variety of options – an assigned Customer Success Manager, customer support line, email, chat, video tutorials, forums, communities, etc. How do you decide the right mix of options for your customers?
Many companies now apply tier-based support, but how are the customer tiers defined? Defining tiers based solely on annual recurring revenue (ARR) overlooks several important considerations, including growth opportunities, the strategic value of certain customers, expectations set by your sales team, and competitive dynamics. That is why we strongly advocate establishing “listening posts” to collect feedback at various touch points to continually assess your customers’ needs and expectations. In other words, don’t make these important decisions in a vacuum – take customer input into account when formulating your multi-tier Customer Success strategy.
Here are four voice-of-the-customer programs I recommend your company rely on when designing its multi-tier strategy:
Relationship or Net Promoter Score® Surveys: Inconsistent experiences based on how customers are “tiered” can create confusion and result in higher churn rates for your organization. Properly designed surveys can be a valuable tool in helping you isolate trends and identify recurring themes in your customer-touch model. Relationship surveys, typically fielded twice a year, offer customers the opportunity to commend or critique your customer success model. The comments shared in response to open-ended questions can also be particularly illuminating.
Support Surveys: Support surveys are typically very short inquiries (often by email, phone or SMS) following a support experience. While Net Promoter is a useful methodology for establishing customer loyalty in a relationship survey, Customer Effort Score can reveal the difficulty your customers experience when they need support from your company. Long hold times, unhelpful support staff or poor follow-through are examples of frustrations often shared in support surveys – all of which can addressed by refining your customer success strategy.
Customer Churn Analysis: Insights from former customers reveal actionable information your company can use to improve. Pain-points that lead to churn can often be rooted out before they occur, but only if you understand the source of your problems. Phone interviews with recently lost customers will undoubtedly uncover issues that could have been prevented with a more thoughtful approach to Customer Success. Learn from mistakes and allow feedback from lost customers to influence your multi-tier strategy.
Customer Advisory Board: A Customer Advisory Board (CAB) usually takes the form of in-person meetings with members of your leadership team and a small (often 12-15) group of key customers. Conducted twice a year, the CAB is a forum for engaging in strategic discussions with those making decisions about whether to continue, expand or end their relationships with your company. This is a terrific venue for evaluating your support strategy and receiving input on how it could evolve. For example, do your customers expect “high-touch” support and, if they do, what’s the right pricing model? These topics (and many others) can be explored in great detail, giving you the confidence needed to make changes customers will value and appreciate.
As your software solution evolves and your company becomes more complex, it’s important to recognize that you can’t ‘optimize the level of service’ without knowing exactly what your customers want, expect, and were promised. To truly be successful, your company needs to measure how well you are meeting customer expectations. That’s why I believe the best approach involves the use customer feedback when determining your multi-tier Customer Success strategy.
®Net Promoter, Net Promoter Score and NPS are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., Satmetrix Systems, Inc., and Fred Reichheld