Customer Success Management: Delivering Value through Experiences

Customer Success is a relationship-focused business scenario methodology.

Advice and deliver value.

Customer Success aligns client and company goals and delivers mutually beneficial results. To do this, it has strategies that aim to offer the best experience to its consumers. It is a proactive strategy that encompasses several aspects and aims to teach customers to use the products and services of a company well so that they have a great experience and become loyal to the brand.

Customer success means that the customer has achieved the desired result. That is, she managed to get the most out of a company’s product or service. For this, the company must offer the appropriate experience, which is based on correct, focused and continuous interaction with the client.

For example, what does a physician expect when accessing Nimbo X? Review the health record of their patients easily and fast. This was the new role that Nimbo X wanted to introduce next to the team: A Customer Success Manager so that we could deliver a unique experience that made the physician love the EHR and grow their clinical practice. It’s an awesome challenge, you get to have conversations with Doctors that have very interesting points of view, a vision, and specific needs that they want to fulfill.

I postulated for this job opening they had. At the time I wasn’t sure of how I was going to do it, if I had the ability and knowledge to be up to the challenge. So for the next month or so I dedicated myself to become certified in Hubspot Academy inbound courses:

1. Content Marketing Certification: knowledge on strategic marketing and business processes that focus on creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content. The goal: to attract and retain an audience to drive profitable customer action.
2. Email Marketing Certification: knowledge on mobile optimized and mobile friendly campaigns, understanding of the significance of segmentation, using the power of personalization, and data-driven analysis and optimization of campaigns. The goal: Deliver relevant and actionable messages depending on the lifecycle of the customer.
3. Inbound Marketing Certification: Learning the inbound methodology, best practices and how to empower potential customers by giving value and drawing people to take action.
4. Inbound Sales Certification: The goal was to match the way people buy. Focus on the buyer, not the seller. Personalize the buyer’s experience based on how they are interacting with your business and their specific problem journey.
5. Growth-Driven Design Certification: Learning the smarter approach to processes and web design based on activities that have a bigger impact, processes to reduce the amount of money investment, to reduce the activities out of scope, and user understanding/learning from your users to develop.

I’m glad to say that after the evaluation process and a pool of participants, I landed the job. Phew. I was really glad that I could keep working on such a project and amazing challenges. Enjoyment.

Delivering Value through Experiences.

Delivering Value through Experiences

For the next 3 years Customer Success was going to become my muscle. My objective was to help physicians that came to Nimbo X find the tools they needed to execute their job, to advise them on how to improve their clinical practice management (this one was really though), and help them deliver a better experience and treatment for their patients. It was simple, but impactful.

My days used to look like this: open Intercom to review all our incoming chat conversations from users, identify the type of issues or questions they have, do some user support, use GitHub to document the issues, review the new sign ups of the previous day, make a contact attempt with every user that signed up, build some rapport and understand why are they planning on using Nimbo X, follow up on commitments I did with previous physicians that recently signed up, measure new sign ups usage levels on intercom, repeat.

These conversations I was having with the users were extremely valuable. At first I wasn’t sure what to ask or what to say, and anyone that works at sales or customer service knows how intimidating can be to have cold calls. So I opted to just call and have a friendly conversation with each physician: “Heyyyy, It’s Rodolfo from Nimbo X — I’m your customer success manager, that means Im here to help you navigate the tool and advice you on how you could use it. What’s up?”

It was kind of awkward but it got me going. With each call that I made I was beginning to understand why they were coming to us, what specialties were the most common, their must recurring pains and fears, and what they expected to obtain by using Nimbo X. So I started planning better for my calls, I started having more insightful conversations, and I was earning the physicians trust by giving them valuable advice. They naturally started to look for me when they needed help or even advice, either on the chat from the App or directly calling to my number.

Each new sign up had 30 days for a free trial. I was planning my reach outs based on these number of days, not to pushy but not giving them too much space so they wouldn’t wander off or lose engagement. When I could’t connect or communicate with a physician, I send them an in-app message with an article from ours “Do you know what your patients say about your practice?” or even an email focused on telling them the best next step based on their activity and objective.

One of the most important aspects was to plan the onboarding of a new user based on their journey to fulfill a problem or need and to understand what motivation was behind their actions. The Job to be Done as it is called. I read a couple of intercom books on Jobs to be Done, Product management and Onboarding. I was starting to build a more structured process. So I planned for a 30 day Onboarding experience:

1. Started to classify users on buckets based on: their job to be done, their readiness to explore and level of usage of the product, the lifecycle in which they were, and how much hand-holding they would require to see value.
2. Based on the buckets, I designed specific if-then paths of work so that the experience they were having matched their expectations and what they needed to advance in their journey.
3. I distributed strategically my contacts: phone calls where to obtain information and gain commitment, email and in-app became my channels for delivering value through content, and started to have meetings to follow up on those commitments.
4. Before each reach out to a user I started to review they’re usage and engagement metrics. This gave me an idea of how the conversation could go, what they needed to move on to a next step, if they were going to bounce or on their way to engagement, and what tactics to use so that I could either boost their experience or improve their engagement. Definitely hubspot CRM helped me with the hundreds of follow up tasks and intercom & mixpanel for the usage and engagement metrics.

By the end of this initial Customer Success structure:

1. We understood the happy path of users to become engage, when in the free trial they could drop, and what was the functionalities that they really needed once they started using Nimbo X
2. We understood the ideal onboarding time and number of interactions for them to become engaged
3. We understood the health metrics that mattered for engagement
4. We now had a full picture of their journey: why they were coming, the Jobs to be done, the specialties, how to interact with them, what type of content they like, what messages resonate with their goals, and which channels of communication were working

We reached an important milestone. We also discovered that support and the attention of a customer success representative did improve new sign ups that converted into paid subscriptions. We solved the questions we initially had. What was next?

This book has excellent findings, insights and strategies that you can use.

Less days, more subscriptions

Decreasing the days between sign up to paid account, and increasing the frequency of new paid accounts weekly. So we had the signals, we understood the journey, we know how to use our communication channels, and we had the content and messages. As a person I have a limited capacity of time, resources and tasks that I can cover. By this time I had 3 big jobs:

1. Customer support: chat & email conversations, phone conversations, site visits, and solving this issues (with the help of Product and Development, who always delivered a wow solution).
2. Product & Development: create a data base of input & feedback from users for valuable insights on functionality, usability & interfase design, documenting issues and new requirements from users directly on GitHub & Airtable, assessing & testing new functionality with the users, creating a feedback loop with product and development through research & experimentation with beta groups.
3. Customer Success Manager: onboarding of new users, tracking & measuring success, post churn follow up & customer retention initiatives, customer care.

How might we engage a high volume number of sign ups? It took me some time and some learning to find the answer: automation paired with customer signals. For this I used Intercom as my main tool to create Smart Campaigns. What these Smart Campaigns enabled me to do was to create a set of rules and paths for all the users based on the metrics that I choose so that we can trigger an in-app message or an email. The objective of this first campaign was to test the idea of: how many users can we automatically help reach engagement and end their trial as a paid account?

What I did was plan a set of messages for the first 2 weeks after they’ve created their account. The next to weeks would be focused on me making a personal outreach to help them transition. So the way that users engaged with the campaign became another important signal of their progress. This campaign along with the engagement metrics helped me identify which users would be potential paid accounts. With iteration of different messages, different content, and different distribution of the messages I started to understand how to make users:

1. Unbounce and come back.
2. Ready to convert.
3. Resonate with the content we provided.
4. Take the steps that made them see and feel the value of Nimbo X.

Strategies and tactics to accelerate growth.

Weekly I was having a meeting with the Nimbo X management team and the CEO of Ecaresoft so that we could understand why were users becoming successful or not when arriving to Nimbo X. We created an initial scorecard with the health and engagement metrics that we knew helped us increase user engagement and paid accounts. Week by week we started to see the numbers go up, Nimbo X became the fastest product to grow from Ecaresoft- in functionality, new users, and revenue being generated. We were on the right track.

We were growing at a fast rate and keeping up with users for support and customer success increasingly became more challenging. We noticed that some paid accounts would churn after some time after their first payment, and we started to have customers that were bigger (and thus required a specialized onboarding and implementation process). These are happy problems, as we called it. But we needed to step it up or risk loosing what we had built.

The next big decisiones that were made was to introduce the inside sales representative role into Customer Success, build an independent sales team dedicated to look for clinics and physician networks, introduce the key account management role into customer success.

You can read what’s the next stage here: Inside Sales & Account Management: Managing a growing SaaS.