How Startups Boost Customer Success With Every New Release
The path to customer success starts before they see the product
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Customer success is an often misused term.
For your company, the goal of customer success is increased customer engagement and retention. For your customer, the goal is better learning and an ever-improving experience.
Regardless of your definition, customer success begins before the customer ever sees the product or any of its features. And the path to that success starts with release management.
In my last post on release management, I dove into how your release management process should inform elements of engagement and retention throughout your release delivery chain, from engineering to end customer. In this follow-up, I’ll talk about how to deliver the information everyone needs to enable an ever-improving experience.
What Your Delivery Chain Should Know
Every product release delivery chain is different and unique, but they all run through three high-level groupings:
Internal constituents are the teams that feed customer success, namely, operations, B2B and B2C customer care, partner and customer success, and your internal training teams. They need to know how to provide the learning around the improving experience, working directly with the customer to transfer that knowledge.
Customer touch points are those with a more tangential link to customers. This can include sales, marketing, finance, human resources and any other internal team that needs to be an expert on your product and business model. They need to know how your product improves experience, engagement and retention, and how that improvement impacts the sales pipeline, market expansion, revenue and P&L and even hiring.
And then your customers, which I recommend breaking into four subgroups:
- Engaged customers.
- Existing customers.
- Interested prospects.
- New prospects.
They all need to be made successful, but this will happen in different ways for each subgroup.
