Customer Success as a Service Archives

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Fundamentals: Basic Leading and Lagging Indicators in Customer Success

Leading and lagging indicators provide useful ways to look at the cause and effect relationship among various KPIs. It can get a bit complicated the deeper you dive. To keep things simple, think about breaking things down to an ACTIONS=RESULT equation, where leading indicators represent the action and lagging indicators the result. To apply this, […]

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Strategies for Making High-Touch and Tech-Touch Friends, Not Enemies.

Today’s customers expect (and sometimes demand) a never-ending wheel of attraction, engagement, and retention after purchasing both the simplest and most complex of SaaS offerings. So, when the volume of customers creeps up, and we’re focused on deploying a tech-touch heavy approach, how do we stay engaged with the personal element of our customers? And […]

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Fundamentals: Focus on Retaining your Mid-tier Customers

Here we are in the midst of “the dog days of summer.” That time when productivity ebbs and new customer acquisition slows down. It seems people are more focused on vacations with the family and road trips to the beach than they are on actual business. Who can blame you for soaking up those last […]

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So, What’s an Acceptable Churn Rate?

From customer satisfaction to revenue, SaaS companies have many factors to worry about when it comes to keeping their business not only afloat, but also thriving. One such factor: What is your churn rate, and what can you do to decrease it? Reality check: these are critical questions, but they don’t have such a straightforward […]

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How Customer Success Data Can Impact Strategy Company-Wide

Your Customer Success efforts generate a lot of data, from product usage to customer behavior to adoption and renewal rates. But how are you supposed to use all that data? Think of the data as the raw ingredients you can buy from the grocery store. You can buy the highest quality ingredients or you can […]

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Outsource – A Dirty Word?

As a function of my role as Business Development Manager at ESG, I spend a lot of time talking with Customer Success leaders. And from those conversations, I’ve found that many of them very much dislike the idea of outsourcing any part of their business. In fact, I recently spoke with a gentleman who boldly […]

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The Customer Birth Certificate (CBC)

When you think of the milestones in life, you may think of graduating college, your first corporate job, marriage, parenthood, retirement, and building a legacy. And, some of these life events don’t even happen in sequential order (or at all). More often, they come in a “non-traditional” order and one is not a prerequisite to […]

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Understanding the Connection Between Customer Success and Renewals

According to Harvard Business Review, acquiring a new customer is somewhere between five and 25 times more expensive than keeping a customer you already have, depending on what line of work you’re in. Think about all the time, energy, and money you spend on attracting new visitors, pursuing new leads, and closing new sales — […]

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Diamonds in the Rough: Finding Growth Opportunities in Your SMB Customers

As of 2018, there were slightly over 30 million small businesses in the United States. The number of businesses with more than 500 employees? Only 120,000. What this means is that small businesses are an enormous opportunity for any B2B software as a service (SaaS) business. If you can get in on the ground floor […]

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Who Owns Your Customer Communication? Marketing or Customer Success?

Fact: keeping customers is more cost effective than adding new ones. The numbers vary depending on industry, time scale, and who you ask, but the consensus is that it’s five to ten times more expensive to acquire a new customer than it is to retain an existing one. Furthermore, existing customers are more likely to […]