Scalable Structure Ideas

Leigh-Ann Mosca

Good afternoon Success Community! 

Thank you for having such an amazing forum for us!  I am new around here and I would love some expert advice.  

In 2018, I created a Success Department from scratch.  My department has grown from 1 - 13 including Tech Support as well as Live Chat. I have reinvented the customer journey 3 times along the way with constant tweaks based on the needs of our customers. However, we have grown tremendously in the last two years and can not keep up with the amount of customer's coming in. 

Our product serves financial advisors with marketing content, automations, email series, etc. Our product is not where it needs to be for the type of customer we have. I would love some recommendations from anyone who found success setting up an organizational structure for a  hybrid success department. I manage different divisions: Live Chat, Call Center, Onboarding, Engineers, Operations.

Please let me know if anyone can share some great resources or examples that have worked for your hyper growth organization. 

Thank you in advance!

Jay Nathan

Hi Leigh-Ann, two of the first two areas to carve off are generally implementation/onboarding and support. When you're small, it can be difficult to specialize, and team members might have to flex and help one another. Once those two functions are solid, I'd consider layering in a customer success manager (or two) who engage post-onboarding and make sure that customers are using the product appropriately, meeting their objectives, and capturing feedback to aid product development.

I'd also start to think about how you could group customers into different buckets (aka segmentation) based on their size, growth potential, and spend, and assign customer success resources appropriately. 

In my experience, the sooner you can create a solid, focused support function the better. Then CSMs can be really successful because they aren't doing support. 

This is very general feedback for you, but if you can provide more detail we can provide some additional ideas. Here are some additional questions: 

• What's your average contract value per customer?
• Do you have annual/multi-year agreements or do customers buy month to month?
• What does implementation look like? Is it complex?
• Do customers get stuck anywhere? e.g. do all of them make it through onboarding successfully?
• Do you have product data that can inform you when a customer isn't utilizing the product or getting the value from it they expect? 

Others may have additional questions for you.. 

Jay

Leigh-Ann Mosca

Thank you @Jay Nathan! I so appreciate your time and advice. I would love to work with someone regularly. Suggestions? 

Here are more details: 

• Contract size:
  Base membership - 200 MRR 
  Adboost Membership  - 1200 MRR 
  
  
• Only Annual Agreements at this point
• Implementation is partially complex due to the type of customer we serve: Importing contacts lists and Adding DNS Records are the most difficult areas of implementation.
• Customers get stuck in the Profile set-up (DNS and Contact uploads) and secondly with "what"  to launch and when to launch marketing campaigns.  We offer "how to" videos. Live workshops. Partnership Kick off's to start them on their digital hybrid onboarding since our product is not is not at a price point for the high touch model for all customers.  
  
  
• We use Planhat that helps with product data and I have created Health scores based on usage and value added with associated tasks. 

Leigh-Ann Mosca

I appreciate this @Andreas Knoefel!

I have to check this out!