“Customer success is driving value to customers. Digital customer success is driving value more efficiently using a software or service that allows companies to grow and deliver value without using excessive resources” – Chris Dishman, SVP Customer Success, Totango.
In a recent episode of The Digital Customer Success Podcast, Totango’s SVP of Customer Success, Chris Dishman had an insightful conversation with host Alex Turkovic about digital customer success (CS) hot topics, including health scoring best practices, combining human and digital motions, the importance of cross-functional alignment, virtual business reviews, and much more. Check out four highlights from the conversation, and listen to the podcast for more tips on how you can leverage digital CS to drive value to your customers and scale your business.
Health scoring: Don’t set it and forget it
Customer health scoring is the foundation of a good digital CS program. It’s important to spend time analyzing your data to understand why your customers are making certain choices and determine what elements of the health score are most important to retaining and growing your customer base. “When you start figuring out the different elements of a health score, then you can determine what factors are most important and weigh those to gain a true understanding of your customer,” Dishman said.
However, a customer’s health score is constantly shifting. Dishman notes that a common mistake people make is having a “set-it-and-forget-it” mentality around health scores. As your products or services evolve, as your customers change or grow, your health scores need to evolve as well—which means taking an active approach to testing, iterating and evolving the attributes that have the most influence on customer values.
Scaling with digital: Human-plus not humans-less
“Scaled CS isn’t all or nothing,” Dishman said. “You can have variations and flavors of human and machine intelligence working together.” Digital CS does not mean there is no need for human engagement.
At different points in their journey, your customers will need a customer success manager (CSM) to help facilitate the next step or solve an issue. The key is figuring out the critical moments in a customer’s journey when a CSM should step in with strategic advisory and how you can preempt or minimize those instances by creating and utilizing the right digital content and touchpoints. Looking at the customer journey holistically and using a combination of human and digital touches, you can efficiently scale business outcomes without sacrificing the value you’re providing to customers.
Cross-functional collaboration: customer outcomes
The ultimate goal of CS is to ensure that your customer finds value in using your product. To do this, Dishman recommends keeping focus across all of your touchpoint teams (CS, marketing, product, sales, etc.) on the aspects of your product that are most helpful to your customers and then doubling down on those. For instance, with your product team, figure out what product features are sticky and value-driving for customers and intentionally put effort behind those to continue to innovate and scale. With your marketing team, work with them to develop content that helps customers quickly understand and reinforces the value you’re providing.
“At the end of the day, it’s all about the customer outcomes,” Dishman said. “We have to continually keep that as our North Star and say, ‘the goal here is to make sure that the customer is successful using our product.’”
Business reviews: Lean into virtual advantages
Virtual business reviews (VBRs) are a great tool for supporting digital CS. By utilizing AI-enhanced VBR tools like those offered by Totango, you can eliminate the hours it would take to create personalized business reviews and drive customer outcomes. “I can take the data that I’m getting, aggregate that, and get some insights on it from an AI standpoint, and position that in such a way to my customer that lets them understand, okay, this is where you are, this is where you’re going, and, by the way, this is how you can improve,” Dishman said.
Rather than simply looking at the traditional elements of a business review, Dishman also recommends looking at value reviews. This requires first having a clear understanding of your customer’s key objectives and what they want to get out of your product. Then, you can plot a path to success for them through their journey using your tool. This allows you to deliver a status update in a very clear way to ensure customers continue to get the most value out of your products.
Digital touchpoints: Improve engagement and drive scaled efficiencies
The end game of scaled CS is to deliver the same success digitally as we provide in a high-value or 1:1 relationship. With the right partnerships and systems in place, digital CS can be an exceptional tool for helping enterprises improve customer engagement and scale efficiently.
Listen to Chris Dishman’s full episode of The Digital Customer Success Podcast to hear more of his leading insights on how companies effectively incorporate digital tools into their CS practices and learn more about the advantages Totango can provide in scaling and embracing digital touchpoints quickly.
