How Can You Scale Customer Success in a High-Touch World?

We're all talking about scaling CS across the long-tail or scaled segment (whatever you call this in your world) within a Customer Success business, but we're probably not talking enough about scaling within higher-touch CS teams. 

A higher-touch Customer Success team to me is a team with fewer accounts, usually higher spend, where they’re more hands-on with their customers. 

Traditionally, we’ve not thought about scaling within these teams because we’ve been rich with resources and time in Customer Success, and probably poorer in terms of technology and capability for scale. So it’s made sense to only really focus on a high-touch and human-centric CS model.

But in this market and economy, if you're not thinking about scaling within every CS team, you're likely going to get caught off guard.

Now when I talk about scaling in these teams, I'm not talking about "use AI to write your follow-ups".

But a few other things that come to mind to help scale for ANY CSM/Customer Success team:

👉 Connect to all of your customers on LinkedIn and regularly share best practice - an easy way to get key messages out to your audience.

👉 Consider how you scale WITHIN your customer - leverage cadences to automatically target power users and get success stories. Then turn these into cadence content that goes out to all inactive users within your customer, to share wins that help drive adoption and value.

👉 Add your key operational stakeholders and product champions to a regular cadence that goes out every couple of weeks and shares new product updates and resources such as webinars or on-demand content. It might take you a minute to write the email but you can distribute it across every stakeholder in your book really efficiently.

👉 Define a foundational experience that you want every customer to get. Maybe it's a content cadence. Maybe it's a QBR each quarter. Maybe it's a monthly sync. Maybe it's all three. Then take the busy work out of scheduling meetings by just setting the expectation with your customer that you'll send a recurring meeting invite. They know exactly what you expect from you and when. Simple! Then, leverage data to tell you 1) when to deviate from your foundational experience e.g. customer is at risk and 2) exactly what to focus on.

👉  Go wild and set up a digital customer success journey that works across your high-tough customers too. Data-driven cadences that automatically send when a customer dips in a certain metric or reduces their integrations can be very valuable. 

Some of you might be reading this and thinking immediately of objections from your CSMs. Or maybe you’re a Customer Success Manager reading this and thinking "okay but my customer wants a high-touch process, they won't like me doing this.

But I’m not saying that this is the only thing you do with your customer. These scaled activities free up time for the more impactful work. And it's all about how you frame it. 

Here's an example:

"Customer X, from time to time I'm going to automate sending some content to you, but only high value stuff that I want to be on your radar that you might want to share with your team. I'm also going to occasionally direct you to on-demand resources if I think they'll be useful to you. All of this is so that the limited time I do get with you is spent on higher value conversations that will be more likely to drive value for you. How does that sound?" 

So let’s start thinking about how we can scale customer success across every CS tier, not just the long tail.