I find that saying the term “digital customer success” in our industry almost always garners one of two responses from CS professionals. And that response is immediately visible in their eyes; either their eyes roll (yikes!) or their eyes light up.
No surprise, the eyes lighting up is the response I’m hoping for – mostly because that’s how talking about it makes me feel. On the other hand, if this term makes you feel like rolling your eyes, I often find that’s the case for folks who have a rather narrow view of what “digital CS” actually means – for those who really just hear it as “customer marketing.” Now, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with customer marketing, but that’s just a tiny portion of what we’re really talking about here.
In part one of our getting started guide, I covered the foundations to have in place before you start building your digital customer success program, including the key questions you should ask yourself, and how to accurately understand the current state of your customers’ experience and your CSMs’ daily activities.
Assuming you have the key foundational elements in place, this is where the fun really begins! Building an executable digital CS strategy has three key components: a digital roadmap, an automation plan, and a touchpoint map. What the heck do those mean? Read on!
1: Your digital customer success strategy’s digital roadmap.
On average, it takes between two and three years to build and optimize a fully mature digital customer success program.
While I don’t have empirical data available to back up that statement, that’s what I have personally observed with dozens of tech companies over the years. So, if the road ahead is that long, having a map to ensure you end up where you want to go is really important. With competing priorities and constantly evolving technology, it can be easy to get sidetracked without one.
When building your digital roadmap, I like to start at each end: today’s current state on one end, and your ultimate vision for a fully developed digital CS program at the other. Then start working forward from here and backward from there, until you’ve created the entire path. Here’s an example.
Current state (raise your hand if this sounds familiar):
- Some automated messaging is being sent to customers today, but all ad-hoc with little strategy behind it and being sent from many different systems and by different departments. I like to call this “random acts of marketing.”
- CSMs are spending over a quarter of their time scheduling calls, creating decks, and copy/pasting the same email to every one of their accounts when important things come up.
- Marketing and sales are both occasionally running campaigns to current customers, that customer success usually finds out about after the fact. Your company-wide communication inventory is a whole lot bigger than you expected!
- Executive Business Reviews (EBRs) are done for enterprise accounts only, and often present a challenge in garnering customer attendance and attention.
- A Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey gets sent every year, and your scores are good. But no other surveys are sent to customers on a regular basis.
- Marketing runs an online community, support runs a knowledge base, and product handles product update notifications. CS is not deeply involved in any of these.
Future vision (this is what you’re working towards!)
- Customer success has visibility into all messages being sent to current customers and owns a majority of it. Whenever campaigns are run to current customers by another department, CS is notified at least one week in advance.
- Email is being used to automate the following things. This saves 15% of CSMs’ time.
- Repetitive CSM communication like scheduling calls and reminders
- Customer newsletter(s)
- Product announcements for new releases and updates
- Product and feature highlights and best practices
- Industry trends
- Onboarding and implementation
- Utilization reports
- Renewal preparation
- EBRs and regular utilization reports are conducted for all customers through automated EBR technology. They require very little time spend from CSMs.
- Voice of the Customer (VoC) surveys are utilized to gather regular customer feedback in an actionable manner. They include NPS, Customer Effort Score (CES), Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), churn reasons, as well as product-based and other open-ended feedback.
- CS plays an active and important role in both your customer community and your knowledge base. CS hosts regular virtual roundtables, webinars, podcasts, and office hours sessions, and has a library of pre-recorded videos and assets available to customers.
- In-app notifications are used to automate the following things. This enables you to reach 50% more customers than by communicating through email alone.
- Guided onboarding
- New/key feature guides
- Adoption guides
- “Welcome back” guides
- Interactive chatbot
- Cancellation workflows
Quite the difference between these two scenarios, isn’t there?
Now you may understand why two to three years is a reasonable amount of time to get from one to the other and why drawing out a roadmap is so critical. Be sure to include the “how” in your roadmap in addition to the “what.” Add things like new technologies you’ll need to purchase and new roles you’ll need to hire in order to get there.
Bonus: It can also be helpful to draft a charter for your digital customer success program at this point. While you’re drawing up your ideal future state, you may also want to document its core purpose in that charter.
2: Your digital customer success strategy’s internal automation plan.
Remember that analysis of your CSMs’ time I talked about in part one of this series? Once you’ve completed that, it’s time to put it to work. Use all that data you gathered from your CSMs about how they’re currently spending their time to determine which activities, tasks, and messages to take off their plate by automating.
Now, this list will be long, so it’s not going to be an overnight shift. Create a thoughtful and deliberate plan to craft the necessary messages and build the necessary triggers, while simultaneously taking your CSMs through the change management process in order to let go of what they’re used to.
The component of change involved in moving some interactions from human to digital can often be one of the most challenging parts of this entire process. So, do your best to think through making that transition smooth. Keep your CSMs in the loop through the planning and building processes, and incorporate opportunities for them to provide input and feedback where possible. Automating these repetitive tasks for them will also free up a portion of their time, allowing them to shift their focus to things like deeper dives into specific customer use cases, or even a larger book of accounts.
This internal automation plan may look more like a checklist, whereas your digital roadmap looks like, well, an actual map. That’s okay! The manner in which these things are documented is really up to you and your team – whatever format resonates with you and is going to help keep you focused and on track is really the best format.
3: Your digital customer success strategy’s touchpoint map.
A touchpoint map is probably the most obvious of the three components I’ve covered here. It’s a document that outlines every message being sent to your customers throughout their journey with your company.
It should document each message’s purpose, audience, channel/delivery method, internal owner, internal system, and trigger. I recommend using your customer journey map (remember that from part one of this series?!) as a starting point. Use it to identify which interactions should be led by a human and which should be digital.
One of the tricky parts about a touchpoint map is that you may have multiple versions (for various segments, products, geographies, or personas), and they’re constantly evolving. Digital CS is not a “set it and forget it” kind of thing – it requires constant iteration to be the best it can be.
Another challenge can come when you think about how to visualize your touchpoint map. There are a lot of options available and a myriad of tools you can use. Some are very (I repeat, very) hard to look at and decipher. Others are simple. Like I’ve said before, do what works for you and your team and don’t worry about what it “should” look like, just worry about how effective it is for you.
So, there you have it – part two of my getting started guide for digital customer success. It’s not easy, and it’s not simple either. It’s nuanced and ever-changing. But it’s necessary, now more so than ever. And, if you ask me, it’s fascinating.
Looking for part one of Marley’s digital customer success strategy guide? Find it here.
Marley Wagner is a freelance Digital Customer Success Consultant and Fractional Chief Marketing Officer. She’s a marketer that gets customer success and a post-sale digital expert with a focus on revenue. Her work centers on helping B2B tech companies increase revenue and accelerate growth with both prospective and existing clients through organic channels that emphasize brand reputation and trust.
