Understanding the Customer Success Manager role is not so easy as it sounds from the word itself. This blog tries to focus on the fundamental concept of it and make it simpler for a marketer to understand.
The definition clearly states as “ A Person who shares the responsibility of your business KRA and achieves it with help of domain expertise along with marketing technological skills”. But let’s dive deep into the aspects that make this role the most wanted one for a Marketer.
The problem background so far and the need for a Customer Success Manager
Lets see a small Success Story to get the real picture.
Mr Thomas used to spend a lot of time and energy towards attending multiple marketing enhancement programs and tools a few months ago for his new venture on organic products.
So during his conversations with other peers, he came to know about the term Customer Success based consulting.
He knew that he had an urgent requirement for someone scaling up an online business. He was new to the Digital marketing world, which made him feel the need for getting an expert hand to hold and guide.
The Search Begins
The next thing he started off, was his frantic research on finding the right consultancy partner to get the desired expertise. He had a lot of ideas to implement, but wasn’t aware of the strategy and technology to get the same. This kind of specialisation resides generally with a Marketing Technologist.
Meets the Success Designer
He immediately connected with his Digital Strategy Platform provider to check for assistance, which was the turning point. He was introduced to Clara, who was a sound Marketing Technologist working in the Ecommerce domain for the last 6 years and had a firm grip on the trends and technology regarding the same.
She was aligned as a Customer Success Manager to the account, which meant that she was very much in sync with the Customers Success KRA’s.
The Positive Impact it had on business
The Results after the first 3 months are pretty thought provoking. The Website bounce rates decreased by a hopping 23%, Hard bounces on email went down to 0.2% from earlier 4%.
The average stay time increased along with open and click rates on most of the leading channels. The click rate increase of Approx. 40% resulted in subsequent 15% business generating event online.
Mr Thomas had found out the recipe for Marketing Success with expert help from Ms Clara. Now they started to look for more opportunities that were lost behind to convert them into a Success.
What made this happen
All of this wasn’t overnight magic. It took a well researched planning and strategy, understanding of Mr Johns current challenges, source of data traffic, user behaviour, the IP infra for email marketing, the opt-in strategy for customers and a lot more stuff. She slowly started with micro steps to do a lot of trial and error to gauge the customer pulse, which helped them to profile their audience more accurately.
Attention to Details
They extensively used hyper segmentations to reduce unwanted engagements and thus bringing down the unsubscription rate. This meant they had a lot to do in enhancing the database quality with multiple attributes, which was easily done by Clara’ experience, as she had been solving this for multiple clients over the years.
Also a Campaign calendar was designed to run a seamless engagement between the brand and its audiences.
Like this, many processes were put into action like Advance Analysis on daily/weekly basis, Sunset Policy on certain disengaged audiences, Content Marketing optimization, etc. to name a few.
Is there a thought process or a strategy for the same?
What Mr Thomas achieved with this association of his brand with a Customer Success Manager is not the first and only story so far. There are many CEO/CMO who have turned the tides to their advantage with this kind of approach.
So how do these CSM’s define your success story? Lets understand the structure they engineer to achieve this kind of impact.
The Six Eye(I)’s
There are 6 ‘I’s which a Customer Success Engineer brings as a procedure in achieving a solution. They are
- Ideation
- Inception
- Incubation
- Improvisation
- Implementation
- Iteration
Ideation:
It all starts with an idea that can help the brand to achieve its goal of Engagement & Retention. Defining a numerical target and designing the path to achieve it in the decided timeline. An Idea gets born to achieve the desired target.
Inception:
Making your plans take off is the most important phase, once you are done with fulfilment of all the requirements. Arranging data connectivity, breaking deadlocks, sorting logical challenges and many others to name a few, are part of this phase.
The process gets initiated as intended and is alive till it achieves the goal of implementation. This kick off is called Inception.
Incubation:
At times the workflow or engagement strategy could be more complex to break down than it seems. It becomes very important to analyse every microstep with respect to its impact, efficiency and time consumed.
For a few hours or days there needs to be continuous monitoring by the Customer Success Manager with a testing environment to get the confidence of applying the same method on a larger scale. This is called the incubation phase.
Improvisation:
Once the process completes a few incubation cycles, you get more and more ideas to improvise its speed, performance and efficiency. This creates a far better and more refined strategy than what it was during ideation and inception phase.
Implementation:
Finally the Customer Success Manager (Engineer) is ready with his plan to go live with a larger actual audience. He activates the triggers to start seeing what they desired as the business objective (KRA) target, is now being met successfully.
Iteration:
Success repeats Success. The complete process from Ideation to Implementation, takes a rebirth for a new cause, a new business objective to expand the growth indicator further to the next level.
Now Doesn’t this all sound like a logical and systematic approach? For a success striving marketer, the answer is YES. But the path needs guidance and support, which needs an engineering approach.
Conclusion-
Big targets, Big growth stories won’t happen overnight. You certainly need a Customer Success Manager’s plan at your hand to fight out the battle of low retention, higher input cost and fragmented engagements.
Then why wait? Get in touch with your Customer Success buddy to start a well marked growth trajectory!
Also Read- How to Find Best Email Service Provider and Consultant in 2024
Amit Bhateja is the co-founder of enrcloud and helping brands and Unicorns from the last 15+ years and overachieve their Engagement and Retention goals. He is passionate about solving customer problems with modern technology, new age solutions, and consultancy approach. Besides Building ENR, He enjoys reading books, spending time with his family and Teammates, traveling, meeting new people, learning new things, and love to close the business deals.
