What is a Customer Success Plan and How to Create it?

Your business’ success depends on the success of your customers. If you help your customers achieve their goals with your product, you’ll also help your business grow and increase revenue. 

The core of customer success is a great customer relationship. To make it happen, you’ll need a certain customer success roadmap with proven strategies that proactively manage and improve relationships with your customers. This is where the customer success plan comes into the spotlight.

If you wish to learn what a customer success plan is, how to create it, and how to find your ideal customers, stay with us.  

What is a Customer Success Plan?

Customer success planning includes and outlines the processes and actions that customer success teams should take to focus on customer goals, needs and challenges, with the main aim of guiding them towards success. 

The key components of customer success plans include: 

• Customer success objectives
  • The first step is to clearly define the objectives that customers wish to achieve with your product. 
• Customer journey mapping 
  • Include detailed mapping of the customer journey, with all the key interactions and touchpoints. 
• Customer success metrics
  • Define key customer success metrics and KPIs to assess progress and measure success. 
• Communication and engagement strategies
  • Include tactics for proactive customer engagement and communication to ensure that one of the main pillars of customer success, which is establishing strong customer relationships, is set. 
• Risk management
  • Identify potential risks, and make concrete plans for their mitigation. 
• Customer success budget and customer support 
  • Assign tools, resources, and support needed for customers to succeed. 
• Defined milestones and timelines
  • The list of certain milestones to track progress and celebrate success. 
• Feedback
  • The list of methods and mechanisms for feedback collection with the aim of continuous customer success plan improvement. 

How to Create a Customer Success Plan?

Now that you understand what a customer success framework consists of, let’s see how to create it. 

Define the Goals of Your CS Team

As a part of a comprehensive customer success implementation plan, making sure that the clear goals for your CS team are set and defined is essential. It is crucial that these goals are aligned with the overall goals of your business, like customer satisfaction, improved customer experience, retention, and growth. 

Improving customer experience and satisfaction is the key to preserving great customer relationships, which is one of the main responsibilities of a customer success manager. To understand how your customers perceive and feel about your product or company, you should gather customer feedback, and to ensure that their satisfaction levels are high, you must address their issues promptly and make improvements based on customer feedback. 

Minimizing the number of churned customers is a goal of every company. One of the ways to try to do that is to identify at-risk customers through regular check-ins, customer health scores, and by offering them personalized customer service and support. 

In order to drive product adoption and usage, you must make sure that the customers understand how to appropriately use the product and benefit from it. The main step towards ensuring rapid product adoption and frequent usage is by creating a clear customer onboarding process with the necessary educational resources and training needed to understand key functionalities and features. 

Turning satisfied long-term customers into advocates is one of the crucial customer success concepts that your business can greatly benefit from. To make it happen, you should encourage positive reviews. case studies, and testimonials, and develop referral programs to motivate customers to participate in community forums. 

To improve effectiveness and consistency, you should standardize and optimize as many customer success processes as possible. There are various customer success templates that you can implement, from customer onboarding and customer feedback to customer health scores and quarterly business reviews. Make sure to select the best practices that align with your objectives, and most importantly, leverage technology to automate everyday routine tasks. With customer success platforms like Akita, you can streamline all your customer data into a single hub, you can perform customer segmentation to understand your customers to the core, assess their crucial CS metrics and KPIs, and share the relevant data with the entire team. 

Find Your Ideal Customer

By understanding who your ideal customer is, you can create customer success strategies that fit their unique needs and ensure their success with your product. Now, here are a few of the most effective ways to find your ideal customers:

The first step towards finding new customers is understanding why the current ones are happy. Look for those customers who have the highest satisfaction scores and longest retention periods, and identify the core common traits that these successful customers share, like industry, location, company size, etc. 

Develop detailed customer personas based on the common traits they share, like job roles, challenges, goals, product usage, etc. 

Collect data by conducting surveys and interviews with your long-term customers to understand their needs and challenges. Then, map the customer journey to identify essential touchpoints where your product adds the most value. 

Customer health scores can help you identify customers who struggle with your product and those who have the greatest benefits from using it. Also, use usage and engagement metrics and data to understand how your top customers use your product, which features are the most used and why. 

Performing customer segmentation as it is one of the most important things you can do. Segment your customer based on criteria like use case, product usage, engagement levels, and others, and then create personalized strategies that fit each segment’s preferences and needs. Don’t forget that you can always implement a customer success plan template for customer segmentation that categorizes customers into different segments to tailor engagement strategies more efficiently. 

Define Metrics to Measure

To understand the success of the CS initiatives, assessing and tracking the right customer success metrics is essential. 

• Customer Satisfaction Score
  • CSAT measures the level of satisfaction customers experience with your product. 
• Net Promoter Score
  • NPS measures the likelihood of customers recommending your service, product, or company to others. 
• Churn Rate
  • Churn Rate shows the percentage of customers who stopped using your services. 
• Renewal Rate
  • Renewal Rate shows the percentage of customers who renew their subscriptions at the end of the subscription period. 
• Product Usage Rate 
  • Product Usage Rate measures how frequently customers use the product. 
• Feature Adoption Rate
  • Feature Adoption Rate measures the usage rate of a certain feature within your product. 
• Customer Health Score
  • It assesses the overall health of a customer account based on factors like support tickets, usage, satisfaction, etc.
• Customer Lifetime Value 
  • CLV shows the total revenue you can expect to get from a single customer over their entire relationship with your company. 
• Monthly Recurring Revenue
  • MRR shows the total predictable revenue generated by all active subscriptions. 

 Brainstorm messaging and ways to engage with customers

Nurturing customer relationships and staying in touch with them through their entire journey is one of the essential roles of a customer success manager. Still, it is crucial that messaging and engagement are both personalized so that customers feel valued and appreciated. Besides the welcome email and onboarding guide, you can always make personalized onboarding calls and create onboarding webinars. 

It is important to have regular check-ins with customers to make sure that they are on the right track. You can share valuable educational content with customers who need it, offer customer support and assistance if you notice there is a struggle, and regularly collect customer feedback to see how they feel about your service and product. 

Benefits of Having a Customer Success Plan

Some of the most valuable benefits of having a customer success plan include:

Improved customer retention as the goal of the customer success plan is to focus on proactive engagement with customers, this approach reduces customer churn and improves customer retention rates. When customers feel supported and can see the value of your product clearly, there is a greater chance they will stick to it longer.

Improved customer experience as long as you stay engaged with customers, and offer them timely support and great resources, they will most likely have a positive experience with your product. Satisfied customers will then promote your business through word-of-mouth and good reviews. 

Increased Customer Lifetime Value if you manage to retain customers for longer, that directly improves their lifetime value. 

Better risk management as a customer success plan includes monitoring customer health scores and identifying at-risk customers in the early stages. When you manage to address the potential issues before they arise or escalate, you can prevent churn and maintain a stable customer base. 

Increased revenue if you have successful upsells, high retention rates, and great satisfaction scores. it means your customers perceive your product as valuable and will most likely invest in additional services or features. 

Conclusion

Having a well-structured customer success plan is essential for fostering long-term customer relationships and ensuring their ongoing satisfaction and success with your product. If you make sure to implement all the crucial aspects of the CS plan, like a powerful customer onboarding process, ongoing engagement, and proactive risk management, you are on the right path to improving customer retention and satisfaction. 

With the right customer success software, tools, vision, and motivated team by your side, customer success can become an utterly delightful endeavor that both customers and your company can greatly benefit from.