What the heck is CS Operations?

And how do I get my hands on it????

In today's post I'd like to cover what I believe should be a company's secret weapon:

Customer Success Operations

Some companies may have never even heard of this function. Couldn't Sales Ops just take this over? If you think this then your business may be at risk of underperformance.

Also, if your sales team treats CS like this..

Then it’s probably time to take a different tact.

So…

What is CS Operations?

Customer Success Operations impacts three core Customer Success metrics: customer lifetime value (CLV), cost to acquire customers (CAC), and cost to retain customers (CRC). Many businesses unfortunately underinvest in this arena. Sales Operations may find themselves providing air cover, but more than likely CS leaders are themselves taking on the role of operations. Having a Customer Success Operations department yields many benefits including increased CLV, decreased CAC, and reduced CRC resulting in higher net revenue retention.

Typical daily activities of CS Operations include:

• Handling Customer Success platforms

• Analyzing data from marketing tools

• Handling CS team training and onboarding

• Getting buy-in from departments and decision-makers for Customer Success initiatives

• Monitoring a company’s CRM and customer system

• Encouraging team support across departments

Responsibilities and Collaboration

Everything related to the customer experience, CX, falls under the remit of the CXOps team. Otherwise, referred to as CXOps. This department will often have to work cross functionally with Sales, Marketing, and Revenue Operations. Some examples of collaborative work that CXOps may participate in include:

• Customer data analysis

• Vendor selection

• Developing strategies for customer communications

CXOps makes heavy use of data analytics. Especially with the rise of using product usage metrics to predict churn, it's become useful to have a data engineering component within the CXOps organization. One key to success is to take responsibility for driving valuable insights and measuring the most meaningful key performance indicators (KPIs). Executive teams then use these metrics to support company operations, suggest and develop effective strategies, create new programs, and diagnose existing issues.

What does success look like?

What does success look like?

An effective CXOps department will be responsible for a range of tasks related to increasing customer satisfaction, driving value via adoption/engagement, and extending customers’ lifetime value. Tasks related to these goals can take the form of:

• Creating adoption and Save playbooks

• Executing Customer Success initiatives for the company

• Assessing risk management

• Renewal and upsell forecasting

• Examining existing processes to look for or upsell opportunities

• Conducting customer churn analysis

The CXOps team will also be responsible for tracking key performance indicators related to Customer Success that provide insights that lead to proactive strategies. Examples of processes CXOps manage include customer health scores and historical trends. With these metrics in place a member of the CS team can take action before a customer churns.

High Touch vs Low Touch Models

The low-touch vs high-touch customer success engagement is normally defined as dedicated human interaction contrasted with automated bots. Instead, the distinction should be better presented as a choice between one-on-one customer assistance versus self-serve solutions.

High-touch

This strategy involves regular, one-on-one assistance from a dedicated Customer Success Manager for whom this might be their only account. Strategic or high-value customers may have a high touch support offering. High-touch CS offers a personal guide for the customer. The CS manager becomes a highly visual part of the customer experience and an integral part of product deployment beyond the initial period of onboarding. Such an effort will take up a greater amount of a CS employee’s resources than a low-touch/tech-touch model.

Low-touch

The low touch strategy involves automation or technology to greatly increase the number of customers a CSM can serve. It is frequently used for volume customers that generally have a low recurring revenue and/or uncomplicated rollout. Here the emphasis is on delivering the right message at the right time at scale. You are educating your customer on how they can better use your product’s features and functionalities on their own—and how to find help when they need it.

Renewal Process