7 Lessons from 90 Days in Customer Success

Before we hired our first customer success role at Mailshake, I wanted to do the job myself for a few months to better understand what’s realistically possible for any person I’d want to hire.

I spent 90 days putting some success measures in place, getting a few quick wins, and knocking out some of the low-hanging fruit that helped me justify the role. If you’re looking to fill a similar position, use the lessons below to cut your own customer success learning curve.

1. Get Your Tools Right

Here’s what we use at Mailshake:

• Standard email. This one’s kind of obvious, but we use email all the time to find people and reach out to them. Sometimes we just email all of our customers to get them to engage.
• Drift for email automation. We use Drift to send out usage-based information – for example, communications like, “Hey, you haven’t used the product yet.”
• Uberconference to do live campaign reviews with customers and Loom to record screencasts when we can’t make the timezones work.
• Google Spreadsheets to gather customer feedback and churn data, and to track who we’ve contacted and what our efforts are.

2. Watch the Right KPIs

Customer success, in my opinion, has four main KPIs:

1. Activation rates
2. Reduce churn
3. Net promoter score
4. Referrals

Invest in customer success and your time to value should decrease, which should speed up activation rates and reduce churn correspondingly – not to mention make your customers happier overall. We measure this using net promoter score (NPS), a 0-to-10 scale of how likely someone is to recommend you to a friend or colleague.

The last thing is word of mouth. If you do a good job with customer success, you should get more people recommending you simply because they’re happier customers, and because there are more of them.

3. Track Revenue and Lifetime Value Alongside Product Feedback

Whenever a customer recommends a product change, an improvement or a feature request, I’ll ask two questions:

1. How many users do they have at Mailshake?
2. How long have they been with us?

If they have a feature request, and they’ve been there for one month, that’s going to be weighted differently than someone who has 50 users on their account and who’s been there a year and a half.

Looking at the overall lifetime value (LTV) of the customer helps me prioritize the features and functionalities I should work on, since I can define them in terms of their potential monetary value.

You can see the exact spreadsheet I use to do this here.

4. Be Proactive

In my time in customer service, I noticed a funny thing. Just offering to help while proactively engaging customers can actually improve retention and customer happiness. Now, notice that I didn’t actually say “solve their problems.” Simply offering to help can be enough.

Don’t wait until you have some huge disaster. Go out and get in front of your customers. That way, if they have a problem, they aren’t going to churn when they know how to find you and get help.

There are lots of ways to do this. Offer to help in:

• Your onboarding emails
• The app itself
• On your blog
• A webinar

With Mailshake, we put a little button at the very top of the product that said, “Need help with keyword research? Get in touch.” Maybe two people in three months clicked it, so we offered it in the first email we send out instead. Then, we tested it in the fifth email and in a bunch of different places inside the app.

All of them had mixed results, but if you combined all of them together, we were able to get 40% or so of our customers to engage, and raise their hand saying, “Hey, I actually do need help.” Knowing that let us optimize it even more.

Don’t just give up saying, “Oh, my customers won’t engage.” They will. You just haven’t tried hard enough.

5. Look for Roadblocks and Problems Outside Your Product

When I started talking to customers, one of the first things I wanted to learn was what their days are like. What are they doing in their workflow outside of Mailshake? That’s actually more of a problem than what they’re doing when they’re inside. No one uses your product for 24 hours a day. So what are they doing the rest of the time?

It turns out, our customers’ biggest problem was email copywriting. So when we started engaging them, we started offering help with that. That’s not anything to do with Mailshake itself, but it influences how our customers use the tool. By helping them with email copy, they get smarter and they get better results – which, again, improves the LTV for Mailshake.

6. Measure Everything

Repeat after me: measure and track all the different tests you’re doing on different cohorts of users. It’s so easy to forget this step, but it’s the only quantitative way to measure the impact of your customer success activities.

Measure the things you do. Document the people they affect. And recognize that if you’re measuring LTV, it’s going to take a while. It may be 6-12 months before you see the true impact on churn, customer happiness and the other metrics I mentioned earlier.

7. Talk to Your Customers

Ultimately, customer success isn’t rocket science. Talk to your customers. They’re going to give you feedback, and tell you things you don’t know. It’s the best way to actually grow your business that exists today.

Now, I want to hear from you. Are you treating customer success like part of marketing? If so, share any other lessons you’ve learned by leaving me a note below:

Image: Pixabay