Round-up your all your customers in one place
Your customers are everywhere. In your CRM, your NPS tool, your ticketing system, your billing system and in your product.
Your product is the sole place where you can retrieve the essential information - such as a list - of your customers and end-users. Startups usually start building a back-office to provide more visibility to their team but very quickly fall into the “build or buy” conundrum - as technical teams don’t have the bandwidth to maintain the system, and even less time or expertise to build features that would allow you to act on this information.
In addition to an exhaustive list of your customers, it is most interesting interesting to gather in the same place all the customer data data, that is hosted in all your technical stack and everyday tools. In short, having in one place all the tickets, chat messages, emails, tasks, notifications, etc.
Segment and score customers
Your first goal at this step is to gain a better understanding of your customers.
Where do they come from, how do they use your product, what kind of issues are they facing when trying to use your product?
The very first scores you should implement are the following ones:
What make your customers “successful”, or in good health at each stage of your lifecycle?
Of course, you can adapt the Successeve stages to your bespoke customer lifecycle - but if you don’t know where to start, you can never go wrong with these template stages.
Regarding the segments, you can start with basic ones, such as:
• Per country
• Per plan
• Per % of active users (meaning top actives, least active)
• Per use case
Already, this will give you a pretty good overview of your customer base!
Learn from your scores and improve them
Now that you have identified the customers that are successful with your product and those who are not, it is very easy to understand your customer success patterns - surfacing what these accounts have in common, and how you can drive them to success.
Remember the following tables?
Now consider the following path:
What are the steps and milestones they must go through in order to reap the benefits of your solution?
What prevents them to go through each step smoothly?
These are the main topics your team need to address.
The final step will be to improve your scores and identify specific usage or behavior patterns that hide behind the blockers your customers are facing.
Want to go further? Here is the next step: How to build a World class retention.
