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hi i'm rob walling today i'm going to be talking about the top five activities of a great customer success manager so i want to talk a little bit about customer success and why it is so important to a sas company and the reason is retention because the death of sass is churn sas has this golden ticket this cheat code of recurring revenue but it's achilles heel or it's kryptonite i'm getting into a lot a whole bunch of metaphors here it's achilles kryptonite is churn and if you can't keep customers paying you month after month year after year your sas company will not grow and more likely it will fail and so retention is super super important in sas companies and that's what customer success focuses on realize customer success is not customer service customer service or customer support is reactive you get an email you get an incoming phone call you get a live chat and customer support service reacts to that and helps the customer customer success in general is proactive they are reaching out to customers they are monitoring in-app behavior and looking at where people are getting hung up they're helping with onboarding it's a much more proactive role and it's a role that really wasn't even a thing 10 years ago because sas it still is relatively new obviously there were sas companies back then but this evolved out of kind of this need for for customers to have more help with concierge onboarding and for customers to start getting value from your product but then also have you know receive that value over time as well so they don't churn so let's dive in seven of these top five the first three are customer facing and the last two are more on the technical side i call it um it's things that aren't that the customers may not see up front and then i actually have a bonus sixth item that that great customer success managers focus on so the first is one-on-one onboarding and whether that customer success manager is doing it themselves in the early days or if they're now training and managing a team to do this one-on-one onboarding assuming that the manager is managing people that's something here too to say right is you can have a customer success manager who is managing customer success itself and is doing direct uh you know customer interactions and not managing people or you can have someone who is running a team and so with this first one one-on-one onboarding including concierge migration services where you're going to go into the the customer's prior app and you're going to import their subscribers import their contacts you're gonna move over their workflows you know whatever it is that they have in that that prior app this is super important because if customers don't get onboarded then they don't stick around and you have churn you don't have retention right and that will kill sas companies so this is onboarding is perhaps one of the most important items that customer success focuses on point number two is assisting your most important customers with technical issues and this may sound a bit like customer support customer service and it is the difference is this is reserved for your high paying customers or your most important customers sometimes you have vip customers who you know are the logo on your home page you know they're someone who um you know can get you additional customers and they may not be paying you a ton of money but it's your most important your most valuable customers and the reason customer success handles this is because if someone's paying you a thousand dollars five thousand dollars a month it probably isn't workable for them to send an email to sit in a support queue and wait 24 hours for them to get a response they're going to want a higher level of service and support than that and customer success is that white glove that concierge level of support now realistically this is should not be the focus of customer success but it is just one of many responsibilities and hopefully it's not something that's taking up a ton of your customer success team's time because this actually makes them very reactive instead of proactive and as we've already talked about success should be more proactive than not the third activity of great customer success managers is regular outreach to your most important customers even if those customers are not reaching out asking for help the customer success team and customer success manager should be monitoring logins and usage of the app and if you have a high paying customer or an important customer who has stopped using it or has stopped logging in that's when you start reaching out and figuring out hey do you need help do you need help migrating you know more more data in do you whatever what is it what is it that you need in order to continue using the app because again customer success being proactive they reach out in advance and they're trying to prevent churn which of course customers will churn if they stop using their app if they become inactive then they're much more likely to churn the next chance they get so those are the three customer facing customer success activities the fourth and fifth are more on the technical side before i dive into that if you enjoy these videos i'd love it if you hit the like button below subscribe to the channel we have a ton of new videos coming out whether there are live stream interviews we have talks from our in-person events and then the educational videos like this one covering all range of topics around startups and sas and number four is monitoring metrics around onboarding and retention and i would say in-app usage as well metrics around onboarding include things like has the customer imported their data have they started using it are they logging in metrics around usage and retention is are they using it on a regular basis even having things like the in-app recorder where you can see what your customer is doing in the app and you know you don't want to get creepy with it but you can at least see where customers are stumbling where perhaps you know there are issues in the app with them using it or again if customers just aren't using the app a lot you know getting in there and knowing that they're not and then being proactive and reaching out is is a really good way to increase retention and decrease churn which as i've said many times is the goal of customer success the fifth is improving onboarding through automated walkthroughs emails in-app messages etc onboarding is such a sticking point for so many customers and a lot of people get into an app they want to use it but either they get confused or they just don't carve out the time they don't think it's important they don't put it to the top of their priority list and so having in-app walk-throughs to help folks get through onboarding but also proactive outreach of usually it's automated emails the many great automated email systems that can reach out and say if the customer hasn't done this after this many days reach out in-app messages hey are you having trouble getting set up you know again trying to get people whether they're if they're maybe lower paying customers then maybe they get the automated version of it and if they're higher paying they have the ability to just reach out to a customer success person so the sixth and bonus activity is ensuring the entire company is focused on customer success the success of a sas company hinges on its ability to retain customers so it is every team member's job to be thinking about how to make your customers lives easier from product to development to support to sales everyone the company wins when your customers do and customer success is at the front lines of that customer success and support are both but customer success should be thinking about how can we get every department including marketing you know even just everybody involved into thinking about how we can make our customers successful because when they succeed so do we so that's it for top five activities of a great sas customer success manager thank you so much for joining me i'll see you in the next video