When it comes to customer success maturity, there’s a clear sliding scale that defines your maturity level in terms of operation, tooling, and customer engagement levels. As Customer Success Managers (CSMs), the model gives you a clear picture of where your organization fits, and the amount of effort needed in tooling and scaling customer experience operations. Your organization’s customer success maturity may fall into the following levels:
Figuring out the basics
Your organization is just getting into shape, and you have the basics, from a website to basic product support and even a product lead who handles all support requests. You may also have prepared concise product documentation that can be used by the team to handle any support queries and forward to the product development team for troubleshooting. It’s safe to say your customer success structure is fairly simple since you’ve got a few clients who get more personal support.
Learning to crawl
The customers have started coming in, which means more support queries. You have figured out that you need a structured support process to help the already expanding team of customer support agents. You use ticketing on different platforms and tools to make the process more efficient. Internally, you have a system built around your product knowledge that the customer support reps can follow to handle queries. A CRM may also be in the works.
Already running
Your customer list is overwhelming, and the support team is feeling the pinch trying to keep up with the numerous requests. Your support team has increased, but one agent handles many clients to manage the workflow. Efficiency is your key priority, and quality support is now an integral part. Your company is considering a proactive approach that’s more methodical and less intense for everyone.
Planning for customer success is now a key feature of your process, and your company has set up features like self-service support, in-product support, and a more detailed onboarding process to get clients up to speed and reduce support requests. Your company may also be monitoring detailed metrics and Key Performance Indicators like NPS and Customer Health Scores (Churn Scores) and using the insights to plan the next steps.
A full marathon
A comprehensive CRM system is now a big part of the picture, and a streamlined customer success process is already implemented. Your company has also implemented self-service support systems for your customers built into the product, and paired with efficient onboarding, your users can confidently handle support queries through self-service.
Your customer success team is now focused on perfecting the impact of your support tools on the product and the business. A customer success tool may already be developed on integration with a third-party tool may be in place. Your customer success numbers are impressive at this point, and the retention levels are much higher.
So, how does your SaaS company stack up in the levels, and how far along is your process, tech, and talent? Customer Success maturity is a gradual process that matures as your business scales. Each maturity level exposes opportunities and challenges that help your business and product evolve and deliver customer success.
