• Read Time 4 min
Four essential questions to help you design your digital customer success strategy
Share
Designing a digital customer success strategy is one of the most important and impactful tasks a CS leader faces. In 2024, digital CS is more than a bandwagon or buzzword; it’s the best practice for tackling, iterating, and scaling customer success to deliver the best outcomes for your customers and your business alike.
It can also feel like jumping into the deep end of digital overload. Perhaps you’re finding too much to sift through: messy or incomplete data, a disparate set of tools and systems that aren’t talking to one another, or worst of all, a strategy absent of any interactions. Shiny new email campaigns with barely any click-throughs. An empty online community.
Let’s find the productive middle ground here. Your digital customer success strategy does not have to be perfect, but it should have some foundational elements. To help you know what to look for, we’ve provided four essential questions, covering planning, data and segmentation, customer experience, and automation, to guide you as you design your digital customer success strategy.
1: What’s our plan, our process, and our list of players?
To begin, there are two big sub-questions questions your team must ask:
- Question 1: How do your customers get value from your products/solution, and how can you continue to help them achieve their goals?
- Question 2: Who the heck is going to organize, implement, and manage this strategy, for your customers and your business?
The first question should be a recurring one for CS teams and beyond. It’s a solid reminder of your strengths across product, customer experience, and company culture. Use that as a guidepost for your digital cs strategy.
The second question is more practical, but no less lofty. Do you have executive buy-in for the strategy, as well as a project manager and supporting staff for the rollout? After all, you’ll require operations, enablement, and a plan for any changes to your CSM roles.
2: What data sources will fuel our digital CS strategy?
As any solid business blog or internet productivity guru would tell you, don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Any interactions between your customers and your products/business will be useful here.
So, let’s not belabor the point – here’s a great list of customer data sources to start pulling from:
- Customer relationship management (CRM) systems
- Product support or helpdesk ticketing
- Product usage
- Email or calendar invitations
- Customer chat logs
- Engagements with finance or accounting
- Customer surveys such as the Net Promoter Score
- Learning management systems (LMS)
- Online customer community
Similar to customer data, the prospect of segmentation can seem daunting – but again, it doesn’t have to be. Keep things simple and flexible. We recommend starting with a three-phase approach: Growth, Scale, and Optimize.
If you’re just diving into segments (or trying to reorganize), start with contract size. If you’re ready to get fancier, play around with combinations such as contract size plus employee count or product type. And always keep in mind the moments for catchall messaging. For example, there’s no need to segment a really great welcome video at the start of your onboarding campaign; everyone can receive that.
3: What should our customer journey look like?
Now that you have a project plan and a bucket of freshly segmented data, what are you going to do with it all?
It’s time to draw up a customer journey map, keeping things simple to start with. Write out a typical experience your customer will have with your company and products, from the first meeting, call, or email to the interactions that keep them engaged over time. This also will help give you a visual on which tools you’re using now, what you’d like to add or get rid of, and how you can automate the experience.
Two groups will be pivotal to helping you illustrate this customer journey:
- Your customers: If you know what your customers are currently doing (or not doing), you’ll have a clearer picture of how to improve. Check for steady feedback loops, and add them accordingly to start collecting that data.
- Your other departments/teams: For the same reasons your CSMs succeed when they collaborate, this initiative will thrive with the right feedback from other teams. Can your product team share usage data? What does your marketing team have in the pipeline for content development, and what can you use that’s already created? Your sales team will have a pulse on things like product searches and feature requests
Pro tip: Feeling overwhelmed? Start with what every customer starts with: the onboarding process. How is it currently set up, and how can you streamline it?
Useful resources to dig deeper:
- 5 ways to simplify your customer journey from ChurnZero’s CCO
- Onboarding success at scale (Q&A with Donna Weber)
4: What can we automate and build into our digital CS strategy?
Congratulations: you have evaluated your customer journey, collected and segmented some great customer data, and created a group of customer success stakeholders to keep the project on track. Now it’s time for the really fun part: automating and launching.
There is no big red button to press where everything shifts at once. Instead, keep your customer journey map and segments handy, and start going through your current touchpoints, digital and analog:
- What can go digital?
- Examples: newsletters, support requests, how-to videos, product documentation
- What can be automated?
- Examples: triggered workflows and reminders (e.g. customer completes X task in system, so Y email prompts them to continue)
- How can we generate additional digital resources?
- Examples: live customer conversations as content for general email outreach or invites to Q&A sessions
- Think beyond the email campaign to automate!
- Examples: In-app communications and walk-throughs, chatbots, online customer communities, knowledgebase, videos, webinars
Bonus question: which of the above can shift from a one-to-one to a one-to-many touchpoint?
What’s next for your new or improved digital CS strategy?
Ready to refine, scale, and design your digital CS strategy further? Check out our on-demand webinar, Scaling Customer Success, with Lynn Tsoflias of CustomerGuru, below.