For achieving both these goals, experts create new practices and techniques to improve the business performance effectively. When it comes to customer experience, one of such modern techniques are customer success playbooks. This customer experience management technique isn’t as popular and well-known as some other techniques, such as customer journey mapping or customer satisfaction management.
Nonetheless, the effectiveness of using customer success playbooks is clear for everyone who is acutely aware of this customer experience management practice, so we have decided to write a comprehensive guide on customer success playbooks to help you learn all you need to know about them.
So, what are customer success playbooks? How to create customer success playbooks? What are the measurable benefits of using the customer success playbooks? Is there any useful customer success playbook template?
Let’s discover the nature of customer success playbooks together.
What is customer success playbook?
Customer success playbook is a roadmap that includes a series of actions that are meant to be performed by customer-interacting employees to achieve the predetermined outcomes. In other words, a customer success playbook is a guideline that includes numerous different actions customer success managers can take to achieve different positive outcomes for the company, such as convincing customers to complete purchases, providing feedback, changing their opinion on something, making other decisions, and so on.
As you could guess, there is no single universally accepted customer success playbook that will fit all potential customer interactions. In other words, as everywhere else, the rule “one size fits all” doesn’t work here. Some businesses prefer to create different customer success playbooks to use them for dissimilar purposes and customer interactions, other businesses that have simpler customer journeys can handle all customer interactions with only a few customer success playbooks.
What do customer success playbooks consist of?
Even though customer success playbooks can look different depending on the purpose of their use and the type of customer interaction they are created for, they all have quite similar structure that always includes the following elements:
- Expected business outcomes - these are the results you want to achieve by following the rules included in customer success playbooks, and there can be either multiple or single business outcomes;
- Target audience - your customer success playbooks have to include the main characteristics of the targeted customers you want to focus on with these customer success playbooks;
- Team duties - customer success playbooks are about conducting different actions, so yes, customer success playbooks have to include the responsibilities of all team members who are going to use those documents in their everyday work;
- References - customer success playbooks have to include links and references to potentially useful resources of information, such as knowledge bases or call scripts that may be needed while servicing customers;
- Instructions - step-by-step instructions are needed to help employees, especially new hires, understand what are they required to do to achieve the pre-set business outcomes from customer success playbooks;
- Prioritization criterion - as there are many customers in your contact lists, there should be prioritization criteria to understand which customers should be serviced or contacted first. It is mostly related to outbound marketing campaigns;
- Customer success playbooks KPIs - when you are working on any task, you have to use precise KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) to measure the success of completing this task. Therefore, it is vital to include related KPIs and metrics to measure the success of using customer success playbooks.
Benefits of customer success playbooks
There would have been no reason to utilize customer success playbooks if they hadn’t been effective and beneficial, would there’ve been?
Achievement of long-term goals
Long-term goals are achieved by achieving success in short-term goals, that’s how simple it is. In other words, customer success playbooks help to achieve such vital business goals as reducing customer churn rates or improving key elements of customer experience by following steps provided by customer success playbooks. Customer success playbooks are a kind of call script from the world of customer success management, so each customer success manager playbook is a bundle of steps to make on the path to both customer success and company success.
Accuracy and elimination of human errors
Each customer success manager can have hundreds of customers that are of his responsibility, so it is essential to provide such specialists with all needed information and tools they require to help customers achieve success. Customer success playbooks are definitely one of the most important tools for this task - customer success managers will clearly understand the algorithm of the work, see the easiest solutions for all customer inquiries and issues, get comprehensive rules for measuring success and their own performance, and so on. In other words, customer success playbooks are the easiest way to make sure your customer success specialists will always service customers with the same quality, and you won’t lose any single client due to human errors.
Deep insights
Customer success playbooks are also a great way to gather some additional information about customer interactions, customer journeys, and potential issues your customers face during their journey. In other words, you can measure whether some customer success strategies are or are not effective for helping customers in achieving their success, and how you can change your customer success strategy to improve customer experience. You can create numerous customer success playbooks to compare their efficiency in real-life conditions and get much more data than you expect for further analysis. In fact, customer success playbooks are a great way to improve your data-driven experience and help you make thoughtful decisions.
Better sales rates
Unexpected benefit when it comes to customer success playbooks, isn’t it? But yes, customer success playbooks have a powerful impact on your sales rates. First of all, who has said that you can’t create a few customer success playbooks for up-sales or cross-sales? Secondly, there is a direct correlation between utilizing customer success playbooks and other similar tools and sales performance - by experimenting and using different customer success tactics and techniques, companies can improve their sales rates by 5%, McKinsey’s research states. Isn’t that a great addition to all the other benefits you get by operating customer success playbooks?
Team performance
Obviously, customer success playbooks are a tool for improving team performance and productivity, and that’s exactly what they do. Imagine you are hiring new customer success managers who are additionally newbies in your business niche and know nothing about the qualitative service your customers are expecting to get. What is the easiest way to save money and time on theoretical training and make sure that there will be no troubles if you let those new hires work with real customers? Such a win-win solution is using customer success playbooks, as you can hardly damage something if you follow precise instructions. The same goes for experienced employees - it is always easier to complete repetitive tasks with a clear plan in front of you than trying to get it out of your head.
Types of customer success playbooks
There are also different types of customer success playbooks, and even though we are going to provide you with a list of the most common types of customer success playbooks, the fact is this list is endless. To put it simply, each customer service playbook template created for each possible customer interaction or situation can be called a separate type of customer success playbook template.
But let’s come back to the most common ones:
Low engagement customer success playbook template - is used to communicate proactively with customers or prospective customers who show low engagement rates or even stop communication with the company in order to bring their engagement back;
Feedback collection customer success playbook template - is utilized to help your customer service reps collect constructive feedback from customers with increased response rates;
Сross-sales customer success playbook template - is operated in cases when there is a possibility of selling additional “suitable” goods or services for a customer who has already completed a purchase or is extremely likely to complete it in the near future;
Up-sales customer success playbook template - is used when there is a chance to sell the good of the same type with better quality or characteristics, and of a higher price to a customer who is highly likely to approve such an offer;
Customer onboarding customer success playbook template - is used when the customer is purchasing complicated products that can’t be used without proper training or onboarding, like in SaaS industry;
Conflict resolution customer success playbook template - is used when there is a high probability of conflict with a customer or the conflict has already occured.
As you can see, there are customer success playbooks for all possible situations that can occur between the brand and a customer. Your goal is to create customer success playbooks that will help your business in situations that occur with your customers, but how to do it?
How to create a customer success playbook?
There are two ways - either to download a free customer success playbook sample or to create it on your own, but the first option isn’t really valuable. Why? Well, as we have already discussed, customer success playbooks are different for each possible customer interaction, so who can guarantee that the one that works for one business will work for the other business? No warranty for that, and that’s why you should deal with such an important task personally.
1. Map the customer journey
To provide solutions to customers, you have to understand the problems they are facing. This is where customer journey mapping comes into play - by mapping the customer path, you see not only touchpoints between brand and customer but also pain points, challenges, and problems that harm customer experience and may cause negative consequences. When you identify these problem areas, you can start finding the solutions, but these problems and challenges are your must-have starting point for creating customer success playbooks.
We have to also point out that the better you organize your customer journey mapping, the better your customer success playbooks will work.
2. Define your business goals and customer goals
When it comes to defining goals, it is not enough to say you have to define just “final goals”. There are different final goals for your business and for customers themselves, so both of them have to be clearly defined. For customer, the final goal is to resolve the issue determined by customer success playbook or just to become satisfied with the purchase (in the case of customer success playbooks that are focused on sales), and the business has to get more revenue than it was expected (in case of up-selling or cross-selling), receive one loyal customer with increased customer lifetime value, or just to make the customer become advertiser of a brand - the varieties of positive outcomes are almost endless, but the goal is to define them so you will be able to measure progress.
3. Segment target audiences
Different target audiences are different in many ways, for instance, some targeted audiences use their own preferred contact channels, while others prefer different communication styles. This also relates to the way some audiences consume advertising and marketing content. Segmentation of target audiences helps to segment issues and your business goals, which leads to a more tailored approach to servicing customers. In this way, you will improve customer experience and learn how to service each segment of your customers effectively and productively.
4. Choose references
References are half of success in the case of customer success playbooks, as they are the source of knowledge for customer success managers or customer service agents when it comes to direct utilization of customer success playbook samples. These references have to include knowledge bases, call scripts, email templates, and so on, so employees will be able to achieve the predetermined goals from the customer success playbooks efficiently and quickly.
Conclusion
Customer success playbooks are a new, but already efficient and recognized customer success management tool that is used by leading companies all over the world. Nonetheless, you have to know some vital tips about using customer success playbooks, such as rules for their creation, must-have elements for each CSM playbook, and so on. All of these tips are described higher.
