Creating a Scaled Organization?

ron.jonesy

Hi all,

My org has traditionally only operated CS in a 1:1 relationship model. However, we only had about 20% of our customers on a CSM portfolio. The Account Managers were asked to act in a hybrid model for the other 80%, not the ideal scenario.

With that being the case I'm working with two members on my team to stand up a Scaled model for the population that is not a CSM portfolio.

Anyone else here go through a similar situation? I'd love to pick your brain, get some lessons learned, potential pitfalls, ect...

Thanks in advance

Rachel Provan

Hi Ron,

Scaling is definitely possible even with a high touch model. The main things you need to do are:

1) Identify what works to get your customers to renew and expand

2) Do regression analysis of the data to confirm your experience of this.

3) Create playbooks and automate them through a tool.

Jay Nathan

@ron.jonesy great question, here are my recommendations:

1. FIgure out what the biggest needs are for the "80%" customers. Review/analyze support case data. Poll those account managers to see what types of questions customers come to them with. If you have a customer community, review the recent discussions to try and understand the zeitgeist of the customer base in general.
2. Have the two folks you've identified to run scaled program develop programs that they can stand up to cater to those needs. We typically recommend starting with an Office Hours style Zoom call that you can invite customers to. Pick a topic (see #1) and advertise the calls as a value-add. Have your team members facilitate the call, and perhaps pick a customer to co-faclitiate. Here's a guide that we use for CS Leadership Office Hours that may be useful: https://gaingrowretain.com/kb/articles/30-ggr-office-hours-host-facilitation-guide
3. Identify other, more specific programs you can stand up. @Erica Akroyd at Pendo, stood up a New User Onboarding webinar that happens on a regular cadence and helps offload 1:1 new user onboarding calls that were taking up their time. That allowed them to be much more proactive in using their time to set up additional programs that addressed other needs. Here's a podcast we recorded with her that may be helpful for you and your team to listen to: https://podcast.gaingrowretain.com/e/spotlight-on-pendo-s-scaled-sc-program/
4. If you don't have a customer community, consider putting one in place. This becomes the central place where customers get access to people and content. It's also helpful in gathering feedback on what to do next to scale.

This is an exciting transformation. We see many companies focusing on this right now given the pressure on our CS teams to take on more and drive gross retention improvements for the business.

EdPorter

What the others have said is great. I'd also first look at onboarding to see how customers are onboarded and validate usage. From there, see how utilization is done from customers and validate the benefits they are seeing with your solution. From there, the community, case analysis, etc and try to use automation and outreach to present reports, usage, insights, ad recommendations. The biggest problems I see in scaled CS is not generating enough user driven content during the first year of usage. Not marketing content, but content based off of other users (ie users like you are also doing this and seeing X value). 

Community is great to keep engagement and monitor participation. Then you create signals for outreach when engagement is low or utilization is low 

DbradyScaledCS

@EdPorter - I've stood up a few of these teams and am about to do it again. Happy to share what I know with you. Feel free to reach out DM me here to connect.