Customer Segmentation: designing for high touch and tech touch

A topic that affects many of our Customer Success Manager colleagues as their organisations grow is the need to scale. We picked this as our topic for the September meet-up and had some great exchanges. As always here a short summary of the evening with some great ideas from Customer Success (CS) peers here in Switzerland.

Don’t build for scale from the start

At the beginning, you want all the feedback and success you can get to support evolving the product and building initial success stories in the market. Invest the time and effort in Customer Success here at the beginning to be the glue between customer and product. CS gather valuable feedback and drive product development based on real life themes consistently coming up at customers. Deeper interaction with customers also helps the CS organisation build up their approach, understand the common success factors and challenges across customers, and the points where a more scalable approach will work.

Ok, but now we really need to scale. How do we decide where to segment?

There will always be the approach based on size, potential ARR (annual recurring revenue), if they are a market building name etcetera. This approach is helpful but it’s not everything. To decide how you split customers, start with the strategy. Who is your product aimed at and how will it evolve? Where are you looking for growth? What industries/geographies are you seeing success in?

Create profiles of your different customers: High touch, mid-touch and self-serve/tech touch based on the strategy and target customers. Use these segments to get feedback and buy in across the teams in your organisation. As a consequence of strategy based segmentation mixed with traditional criteria, the categories should be flexible as the strategy pivots.

Build out your mid-touch and self-serve approach

So you’ve got buy in and adapted your model (easier for companies who start with a data driven approach). Now you it’s time to build the customer journey from marketing funnel entry to “sticky” adoption of your service. Start by leveraging all that knowledge in your CS organisation – the patterns and commonalities in your customers’ challenges and success factors. What are the crucial points on that journey? Where are our customers most likely to fail? What differentiates the successful ones?

Adapt the materials your CSMs have built up with the high touch approach to be more self-explanatory and ready to use as a “Customer Success Kit” by the customer. Understand what training and tech support is needed then make it all open so customers can find it (your competitors have better things to do than steal your CS approach). From there, funnel your customers to those open places through marketing, events, community approaches, direct on-time calls and other methods. The mid-touch and low touch customers are also a great training ground for new CSMs so leverage this and everyone will learn.

Phew, I can scale now but how do I step away from the teeny tiny customer that is no longer high touch?

Being able to easily step back from a customer once they are well on their way to success ironically comes from the moment the CSM is introduced. From the go, position the CSM as an investment to support the customer as they get started. When you need to re-focus CSM resources, position this to the customer as a natural part of the cycle and build it into the way you engage. One example could be using success reviews with the customer to highlight that they have reached their goals. It’s good to boost them - they were successful and can continue to build their strategy. As a leader with your technology, the customer will be seen as a thought leader sharing their experience and ideas in your community or events. This will ease their transition to a lower touch and make them the hero. Nothing stops you coming back to the customer to deepen their use of your service in new ways as their usage evolves. Just remember to invest and trade CSM time where it will have most impact on your customers’ success (because that’s ultimately what CS is about).