No big deal…
Customer Success’s only job is making customers happy and successful
As a Customer Success professional, your job is easy to quantify. You just need to onboard the customers and keep them from ever leaving. No problem! Actually, if you have Customer Education, it’s a lot easier.
Of course, the statement above is sarcastic. Customer Success is an all-encompassing position. According to Rick Adams, CEO of Practical CSM, there are three stages of Customer Success engagement. Each one requires skill and dedication:
- Initial Stage: Researching the new customer, getting to know the stakeholders, and reaching agreements about how the CSM team can help the customer be successful.
- User Readiness Stage: Onboarding stakeholders and training users for full-scale adoption.
- Ongoing Stage: Ensuring that the customer has realized initial and ongoing value. Evaluation of the first two stages, and how to maintain and build the relationship into the future to ensure ongoing customer satisfaction and success.
Customer Education to Scale Customer Success
A formal Customer Education strategy and training professional can help you scale your Customer Success efforts by taking over many of the tasks in Stage 2 – User Readiness.
- Onboarding: Stakeholders and customer project managers can take public classes to learn about the system and end-user functionality. This helps them be far more effective partners throughout the implementation process. These classes can be offered as:
- Instructor-Led public classes (in-person or virtual)
- eLearning, self-paced classes
- Adoption Planning: You work with stakeholders to maximize end-user adoption and success. This may involve a Change Management plan, where you map out the key steps required to ensure your groups embrace new processes to improve overall performance. These steps include developing plans for leadership involvement, communication, training administrators and end-users, assessing product use, and adoption post-roll-out.
- Adoption Implementation & Training: Implementing your communication strategies, and training plans, you get users and administrators into training activities and using their live platforms.
Adding a training strategy will help customers gain a holistic overview of the product, giving your Customer Success team the time and bandwidth it needs to focus on client relationships, implementation of the platform, and overall oversight of the customer lifecycle.
Are you ready to scale with Customer Education? Schedule a meeting to discuss your Customer Education strategy.
