It's Not Your Fault, But It’s Your Problem
Most hurdles preventing your customers from being successful are not directly related to your product, let alone how you service your customers. Here’s how proactive customer success can address these challenges effectively.
Recognize and Address External Factors
Example Scenarios:
Internet Connectivity Issues: If your product requires a stable internet connection with specific bandwidth requirements, success is unattainable until this is fixed. Engage with the customer’s infrastructure department.
Disorganized Data: If your product needs a certain data structure but your customer’s data is disorganized, success is out of reach. Collaborate with the customer’s data team.
Outdated Hardware: If your product needs laptops with certain specs but the customer has outdated machines, you won’t succeed. Connect with the customer’s hardware team.
Don’t let your champion tackle these problems alone—they’re facing them for the first time, while you’ve navigated them hundreds of times. You’re the expert. Good CSMs recognize these issues and guide customers through them. Good CS leaders empower their teams to address the full scope of these challenges.
What Are Impact Drivers?
Impact Drivers are the key actions or behaviors that lead to successful outcomes with your product. These are the critical activities that, when implemented effectively, ensure that your customers realize the full value of your offering. Identifying and communicating these Impact Drivers is a fundamental part of any effective customer success method.
Impact Drivers will differ for every business based on their specific products and customer needs. However, we have compiled an Impact Driver Library that includes the most common Impact Drivers in SaaS. [Placeholder for Impact Driver Library link]
Adding External Factors as Impact Drivers
To truly embrace a proactive customer success strategy, it's crucial to recognize that Impact Drivers are not limited to direct interactions with your product. External factors can significantly influence your customer's ability to succeed. These should be included as Impact Drivers and addressed systematically.
For instance, ensuring your customer's internet infrastructure meets necessary standards or helping them organize their data correctly can be just as vital as product training. By integrating these external factors into your Impact Driver framework, you provide a more comprehensive support system for your customers.
How This Works in Practice:
Be Clear About Impact Drivers: To achieve success, you need to identify and communicate the key actions (Impact Drivers) that will lead to success with your product. These will depend on your product and business, but if you can't sum them up, you need to identify them ASAP.
Here are some examples of Impact Drivers:
Onboarding Training Completion: Every user needs to complete the onboarding training.
Utilization in Meetings: The reports our tool provides should be used in team meetings and 1-on-1s.
Product Integration: You need to integrate our product with product XYZ.
Workflow Creation: You need to create a workflow in tool X based on a trigger our tool provides.
Embedding in Frontend: Our tool needs to be embedded in the frontend of your website.
External Factors: Ensure necessary internet infrastructure, data organization, and hardware specifications are met.
Once you identify these Impact Drivers, you need to track their implementation for every customer. Everything else—customer goals achieved, adoption, NPS, CSQLs, NRR, and expansion—will be outcomes of these actions.
The Foundation of Proactive Customer Success
It all starts with showing your customer what it takes to be successful. By clearly defining and tracking these Impact Drivers, including external factors, you can guide your customers to realize the full value of your product. This proactive customer success approach ensures that customers not only adopt your product but also integrate it deeply into their workflows, leading to long-term satisfaction and reduced churn.
