Early-stage SaaS businesses tend to put most of their focus on acquiring net new customers. For a little while, customer retention is a manageable task with existing staff. When you have only a handful of customers, your sales team, product team, customer support team—and even executives—can join forces to keep them happy. However, this isn’t scalable. As you grow your customer base, you must also dedicate resources to Customer Success. A successful subscription model depends on retention. One key to keeping customers is keeping them engaged. What is customer engagement? Customer engagement i ..read more

The Customer Success industry is constantly evolving and developing new strategies for driving customer-led growth. With the emergence of new technologies, market trends, and CS practices, the industry is abuzz with debate and discussion. To explore some of the most controversial topics in CS today and hear what those on either side of the debate have to say, we asked four industry experts to weigh in. This debate took place at ChurnZero’s annual conference, BIG RYG, and included panelists Stephanie Berner, global head of customer success at LinkedIn; Andrew Fink, head of customer success at ..read more

This is a guest article by Kristen Hayer, the founder and CEO of The Success League. During a difficult time, like an economic downturn or a financial insecurity, companies start to take a closer look at every department. They need to make sure they are operating as efficiently as possible to be ready for any kind of financial hit that the business might take. Lately, many customer success (CS) teams have been downsized or eliminated because of global economic uncertainty. There are many reasons this is happening, but one major reason is that many CS groups haven’t set up their program with t ..read more

If you want to keep the peace at the dinner table, three things should never be discussed: religion, politics and who owns customer renewals and expansions. Yet at the business table, it is an important question to ask. We put these two questions to respondents in our most recent 2022 Customer Success Leadership Study published late last year. The study is based on an annual survey we conducted in collaboration with ESG and sponsored by Higher Logic Vanilla and involve.ai.  Who owns customer renewals? We defined customer renewals as measured by gross revenue retention (GRR).  GRR ex ..read more

Losing a customer champion is the single biggest leading predictor of customer churn. “It’s good news and it’s bad news,” says Ali Cudby, founder and CEO of Alignmint Growth Strategies. “It’s good news because it’s a line in the sand. You know when it happens and can get ahead of it. But it’s bad news because it’s risky.” An unmanaged key contact change has a 51% chance of churn in 12 months, according to research from Sturdy, a customer intelligence platform. They also found that, on average, 65% of accounts with an “executive change” churn within 12 months. That means having a playbook for ..read more

This is a guest article by Peter Armaly, vice president of Customer Success at ESG, which delivers Customer Success as a Service® (CSaaS). For years, Customer Success (CS) professionals, and especially CS leaders, have battled the demons of doubt, those forces within their own companies aligned against them. The forces that slow the full understanding and appreciation for the CS business function and contribute to an environment in which the C-level executive team fails to take CS as seriously as it should. At least, that’s the strong narrative playing on a loop on LinkedIn. If you spend any ..read more

Are you interested in using AI to make your Customer Success job easier? If so, this article is for you! We’ll walk through how to write prompts to help you better serve your customers, with examples you can add to your CS toolkit. Top tips include how to consider the customer perspective, use consistent language and formatting, and the best structure for efficient, effective results. We’ll also throw in some advice on optimizing and testing prompts for accuracy (to ultimately automate and save you time). By the end of this post, you’ll have the confidence and knowledge to create effective CS ..read more

Any business function that wants to scale its capabilities needs two things: process and technology. Indeed, these are the top two priorities for Customer Success teams, according to a recent survey of Customer Success leaders.  Good leaders can often implement best practices on their own initiative – but tools require budget. The survey found less than half of Customer Success teams have access to purpose-built technology to help them do their job.  When the survey asked, “What does your tech stack look like?” nearly 1,000 respondents answered as follows:  83% said customer r ..read more

Long-standing wisdom in business says when the economy looks shaky, or worse turns south, savvy companies redouble their focus on existing customers. There are two primary reasons why: First, you need to retain customers to simply “keep the lights on” so to speak. Second, growth during times of uncertainty is most likely to come from cross-selling and upselling. In other words, it’s far easier to convince someone who already knows, likes and trusts you to buy more—than it is to reach, educate and convert new customers—in a time when most budgets are under scrutiny. Further, additional sales w ..read more

As a CSM, you think about customers—their wants, needs, feelings, and concerns—all day long. But constantly serving others can take a toll if you don’t take time to check in with yourself and recharge. I speak from personal experience, having spent nearly a decade in CSM and account management roles before leading a team of CSMs. I’ve felt the isolating weight of unmanaged stress and seen the damage it can do to others. Through years of trial and error, and the sage counsel of veteran leaders, I’ve developed healthy ways to cope with stress. Recently, I sat down with Aspireship founder and CE ..read more