Send a follow-up email to the customer? The playbook consists of the proactive play that you would use to move your customer along the path of success. Features and SDKs you can integrate into your apps. However, you need to be careful while adopting out-of-the-box playbook templates by taking the time to ensure that they are oriented towards achieving the business objectives that you have set for yourself. Common examples include sales, support, and product teams. This would mean you may want to have a stratified approach for Super-star customers versus Point-solution customers. Employee success drives customer success. Resources and insights straight to your inbox. The business objectives can be varied for every end customer depending on their business niche. The dictionary defines the term Playbook as a book containing a sports teams strategies and maneuvers. In any case, make sure that the playbook is fun to read. Lastly, having clarity on why these KPIs are used to measure performance enables your team to stay focused on their goals. Aligning playbooks to achieving your business objectives. Optimize product usage by monitoring in-depth user data and receiving actionable insights.
integrity Having this section k allows you to save a lot of time that youd otherwise spend answering the same questions over and over again. audible Ultimately, the CSM approach also must make viable economic sense and hence the depth of the customer success engagement must be corelated with the size of the business opportunity with a customer. The. Improve decision making and actions for enhanced outcomes. Understanding your teams purpose and their impact on clients helps keep them motivated. Provide a detailed description of all the processes that are critical to your teams success. While assessing these factors, a very high premium should be placed on the ability to have mechanisms which are consistent (repeatable), efficient (no wasted interactions) and scalable (can be adopted across the board for a large number of customers without additional overheads). Then comes the call itself. Make the playbook a document that your team members would want to read! Doing so creates an atmosphere of fairness and transparency, which is especially important when these KPIs have a direct impact on the team members salaries and bonuses. But what do they really mean and how do we go about defining playbooks that make sense for our businesses. Hence it is unlikely that a templatized approach to playbooks would be very effective. Creating a playbook for your customer success team allows you to have a single source of truth for the most common questions that both new and experienced team members ask. A good starting point would be listing all the teams CS needs to work with on a regular basis. If there are certain reports that CSMs should be reviewing on a regular basis (e.g., their progress towards their retention targets), add the links to such reports in this section. Although it may be obvious to you as the manager, it may not be the case for your new hires. Before describing your teams processes, goals, metrics, KPIs, and more, spend some time reflecting on your teams purpose and how they make your clients lives easier. 26. Then explain where the field of responsibility of one team ends and another one begins. So your job here is to gather all of these questions, exclude the ones that are too specific (or keep them, if youd like), and add them to the playbook. In his prior role as head of healthcare practice for a high growth US healthcare tech organization, he built a centralized knowledge house to drive customer-centric delivery. Its also important to share how each metric or KPI is calculated. And it will also contain reactive approaches that tells your actions while intervening when a customer went off the path. For example, I added a collection of productivity tips for CSMs that proved to be incredibly efficient when I was a CSM. Certain steps are usually performed before the call, such as reviewing the clients history, analyzing usage metrics, etc. Proactively uncover key insights and receive data-driven recommendations for your team. Scenario:Suppose we are designing the playbooks for a SaaS company Akme Inc that has customer churn in excess of 10% which they want to bring down to a industry norm of 8-10% by addressing the problem of low product adoption. Create surveys to get timely feedback from your customers. Describe how these metrics are connected to the companys global ones. 
There are a few things that need to be kept in mind while constructing a playbook. Having touched upon the factors that influence playbook design, lets look at an example of how we can use this information to create playbooks that are tuned to our requirements. Drive adoption, upsell and cross-sell using extensive product data. Bring efficiency, add scale, and connect user behavior to personalized actions. Get status updates, warnings, and extensive reports at the right time so you can make effective decisions. We arent just any Customer Success platform. Explain the main metrics based on which the results of the team and each individual are evaluated. Published 16 Apr 2020, Updated 6 Jan 2021. To see how SmartKarrot helps B2B companies streamline and scale customer success. Even though the customers might have procured your product to achieve the same business objective. In our example, customer churn could be caused by several contributory factors some of which are: In this scenario, we have information that the customers often are unable to adopt the full feature set of the product thereby resulting in low perceived value and consequently less than optimal renewals and higher than normal churn. In this article, Ill share my list of recommendations on what you should include in your CS playbook and why. document.getElementById( "ak_js_2" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); ROI of Customer Education: How to Calculate the Value Effectively? Youre a Product ManagerHow to Find Your North Star? What needs to be done? Deliver consistent customer experiences and repeatable success. This section would also be a good place to highlight who to escalate questions/issues to and whose approval would be required in different situations. Dont miss an episode of the Customer Success Intelligence Podcast. Instead, provide a brief description of potential use cases, what CSMs should be paying attention to (and what they shouldnt), and your teams best practices. The SaaS world has long moved on to a very iterative mode of developing products and services to stay current with the challenges that their customers face, so why should the approach of the customer success managers who handle such accounts as customers be any different. Ritesh has over 20 years of experience collaborating with customers and adding value to their organizations. And never assume that the team should already know something and skip over it. Simply put, Playbooks provide a guided path towards handling repeated/recurring business interaction situations in the customer success management world. Head of Global Customer Engagement @Wrike, Building a 1st Year Developer Relations Program, Why Big data Analysis is Important For Product Manag, 3rd in the Series: Foresight over Failing Fast, Data Management and Analytics for Product Mana, Product Manager interview guide for Leaders.
Does a CSM need to log the summary of the call somewhere in your CRM? Playbook has become a significant buzzword in the customer success management circles in the last couple of years. Its likely that many of these questions are repetitive and you already have them documented in emails, communication platforms, and other sources. Lets take a customer call as an example. Finally, describe what needs to happen after the call. Automate your actions, alerts, surveys, and more. Reach out to groups of customers when you need to. After publishing my previous article on this topic, I received many practical questions on writing a playbook and tailoring it to the teams needs.
Describe it! For example, at Wrike we use objectives and key results (OKRs). Every step of the process that you, as a manager, consider important needs to be described properly. Customer success, support and client management posts written by wrikers. Understand your customers interactions with your product and make informed product success decisions. You may also want to rewrite the answers to be more concise and universal. There is no dearth of information available on playbooks.
List action items such as asking discovery questions, checking the clients progress toward the goals they set for your product, showcasing new releases, discussing adoption, scheduling a follow-up call in the end, and more. Playbooks help you align your teams, and help make on-boarding of new CSMs easy. In our example, we found that inadequate user onboarding was the underlying factor that needed the most work and therefore needed to have a playbook defined to drive consistent and predictable results. How to Overcome Customer Data Silos with SmartKarrot, What Is a Customer Success Specialist? The purpose of aplaybookis to build scalable processes for yourcustomer successteam. It can sometimes lead to an insight that, with the teams growth and development, your current processes are no longer accurate and need to be updated. anthony 
Get a complete view of your customer and all their moving parts. This section shouldnt be a compilation of 100+ page instructions on CRMs, reporting solutions, and more. Lets start by understanding what a playbook is. Customer success specialists are the first step in the hierarchy of th document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); See how SmartKarrot can help you deliverwinning customer outcomes at scale. Prepare descriptions of the tools/solutions the customer success team use. Create, monitor, and automate comprehensive Playbooks for every scenario. One of the most important sections to have in the playbook is the FAQs. Lets look at how to design your Customer Success playbook. 
The number of variables here are varied. For details please visit our, SmartKarrot Inc. Therefore, you must consider the following aspects as you embark on your journey of defining appropriate playbooks: Even if there was congruity in the all the above-mentioned variables, there is the size of the customer opportunity to contend with. Another important topic thats worth covering in the playbook is how and when the customer success team needs to collaborate with other teams. The first step is to understand scenarios that we might need playbooks for. Check whether additional seats have been allocated? Dont be afraid that your description will contain too much detail its better than forgetting to add critical points that could lead to problems later on. In addition, understanding why the processes are built this way and not the other can help your team accept and follow them. But what do they really mean and how do we go about defining playbooks that make sense for our businesses. It always helps to take an iterative approach to deploying playbooks and testing these for efficacy and making incremental adjustments. Manage, analyze, and optimize your customer interactions. For example, how to open a clients profile in the CRM before the CSMs scheduled call with them, what data points to look at, and how to log the call summary. flip A critical analysis might show some of the following factors as being responsible for the low adoption: Once we have identified the underlying factors, it is imperative to do a systemic analysis towards assessing how each of these factors the Customer Success Management team handles. Whatever else you choose to add to the playbook depends on your teams needs and what you consider important. scripts nicole jones lead customer call distribute joining tonight wanted notes team Add jokes, interesting examples, and personal experience. And not become yet another checklist that will in fact, impede the speed of execution? So every CSM has a clear understanding of how their personal goals connect to the global goals. Lets look at how to design your Customer Success playbook. Again, wherever possible, provide detailed instructions ideally in a checklist format. Create the right scoring system for your organization. We have the insights, imagination, and technology that others dont. The overall map of the analysis looked something like this. How getting into a Product team helped me become a better Marketer. Resources for new and seasoned Customer Success teams.