Hi, I'm Tim

If you are a SaaS business today, you need to consider your investment at delivering customer outcomes at scale. Changing customer preferences require a new approach to retaining customers who prefer to self-serve. This is especially true if you have a growing SMB customer segment - the high quantity of customer and low ARR make it impossible to hire CSMs to scale with it. This has been my focus at Bazaarvoice for the last 18 months.

• Why Digital Success?
• Four Areas of Consideration
• Measuring Success
• What's Next?
  

Why?

Your customer base likely follows the Pareto Principle. This states that 80% of your revenue comes from 20% of your customers. This means you have very high ARR enterprise customers driving most of your revenue. As your ARR decreases, there's a nonlinear relationship with the quantity of your customers. So you end up with a high quantity of customers with low ARR on the other end:

There are too many customers paying too little ARR to warrant low or high touch treatment models. This is where Customer Success Automation and Marketing Automation come in.

This isn't just a function of unit economics. This is customer preference. We know that customers prefer to self-serve over talking with support or sales. It's the digital economy and the experiences we create for our customers need to match their expectations. According to a survey by Software Advice, they found 70% of customers with questions first search online to find answers.

Digital customer success is the antidote. It can meet your SMB customers where they are. It can also make your CSMs more efficient, freeing them up for a greater percentage of high impact activities.

What is digital success?

Digital Success means using tools, automation, and content to drive higher portion of outcomes across your customer base. I view this across the four categories:

1. Measurement - How do you measure your customer's outcomes? What data do you need to support this?
2. Engagement - How will you use that data to proactively engage customers?
3. Content - How will your customers find resources they need and discover new products and services you offer?
4. Automation - How can you extend automation to mid to high touch accounts?
   

So, for a hypothetical segment of 1,000 customers, how do you measure the health of these customers, what actions at scale can you take to improve those outcomes, and what content will you create to support customers in self-service and discovery?

Measurement

Start here. Without data supporting your program you cannot measure outcomes in a scaled program. Unlike CSMs who can get a pulse on customers during meetings and calls, you cannot do this at scale. So start assessing the data you need to support a customer health score. This will include the qualitative (surveys, NPS) and quantitative (Logins, Adoption, Support Cases, etc.). I've written a post on how to begin organizing your customer data that will save you time. It suffices to say that without a data roadmap, you are not able to drive a digital success operations.

Engagement

Once you have your data, how will you use it? What channels can you use to communicate with your customers proactively? Many teams begin by creating a customer lifecycle. This video by ESG partners is a fantastic overview of where to begin.

Here's a few places to start:

1. Onboarding - what series of automated emails can I begin sending to customers?
2. Risk - How do CSDs view risk today? How can we automated touchpoints to proactive alert customers?
3. Growth - Who are our best-in-class customers? How can we automate up-sell or cross-sell campaigns to these?
4. Unengaged - Which customers aren't logging-in, opening emails, viewing content? How can we re-engage those?
   

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Content‍

A consistent event schedule, group events, and driving community involvement is the key to unlocking scaled retention. When you've gotten one customer to speak to another you know you are on to something. And just like UGC is powering the content in the eCommerce world, so it should for the SaaS customer success world. A few ideas that have worked for us:

• Digital Events - Can you host a consistent event series highlighting customer stories or covering product topics?
• Office Hours - Can you schedule a time each week that customers can use to receive help?
• Interviews - Can you host a customer interview series so customers can learn from best-in-class customers?
• Videos - Can you setup a process to create short videos highlighting different success topic?
  

Measuring Success

While the KPIs set out for your team may vary, one thing is universal: when customer achieve their outcomes they buy more from you. So, the traditional measurement of health score - which should tightly couple outcomes - should be your north star.

At Bazaarvoice, we track this via Gainsight's Health Score Snapshot table, which thankfully is built-in (unlike many other time-based snapshot tables at Gainsight).

We have several of these charts which highlight specific areas of our client's outcomes.

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Since content and engagement is large part of this role, including traditional marketing benchmarks is recommended. How are your communication channels performing: email, in-app, videos, landing pages?‍

*Bonus* Community

Lastly, the idea of building communities has grown in the SaaS space. This is not surprising. And engaged audience is pivotal for distribution of new products and services. Taking that principle a step further, an engaged and strong community is a powerful moat and cost-savings mechanism for driving outcomes at scale. This is difficult work but has large return on investment.

Some benefits include:

• User Generated Content - Let your users create massive amounts of content for SEO indexing. Use this UGC to dominate keywords in your niche. Also, lean on their expertise as thought leaders in their roles.
• Community Help - Let your customers help each other through forums, questions, and comments
• Feedback - Let your community be a large voice
• Distribution - Like traditional audiences, your community can amplify distribution for new products and services you are releasing. This can help enthusiastic product marketers reach your varied customer base.
  

Also, it's fun. My favorite part of this role is creating new online events and content that connects customers with each other.

In conclusion, it's important to take digital customer success seriously. As modern products take a product-led growth approach in their go-to market and retention strategies, they'll gain a footing on legacy SaaS companies doing what they've always done. They'll grow faster, have lower overhead. This gives them an advantage with lower CAC, higher LTV, and greater unit economics over less efficient competitors.

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There has grown a movement online called FIRE: Financial Independence Early Retirement. On a practical level, it promotes a strategy of high savings and sound investing in order to retire early.

At the core of it's philosophy is this: Comfort comes from freedom and independence, not from possessions.

That true luxury is your resilience to adversity, not in expensive things. From the ERE manifesto, an early and big blog on the subject,

Some things make life easier, but more things do not make life more easy. More things mean more things that can break down and more time spent fixing or replacing them. Comfort is freedom and independence. Comfort is having the sweat glands and metabolic tolerance to deal with heat and cold. It is not central heating or air conditioning which may fail or be unavailable. It is not plushy seats but a healthy back...

Growing in popularity after the financial crisis in 2008, it's message is valid. Most Americans live in debt, save little, and are unable to retire on their savings alone. In other words: your spending is keeping you a slave.

But misunderstanding the core of the message and blindly increasing your savings rates could do more harm than not. The idea of the philosophy, as stated by MMM, is to:

Complete freedom to be the best, most powerful, energetic, happiest and most generous version of You that you can possibly be.

What is missing? Any mention of retiring early. This is where I believe some proponents (or critics) of the lifestyle get it wrong. When taken to it's logical conclusion, extreme savings rates can also be a cover for a mindset of scarcity and non-confidence. In fact, MMM thinks money and confidence are interchangeable.

The real goal is how to live a rich life.

The mental leap is when you build the confidence to quit your job today and never go back. It's not stacking dollars for an early and cushy retirement. And if that means spending today on your own personal growth with books, courses, or coaching to build that confidence, then do it.

Ramit Sethi, author of I Will Teach You To Be Rich, summarizes this well.

Ramit could retire tomorrow. But he'd rather live in New York and live his version of the Rich Life instead of maximizing his savings.

Here's a few questions to ask yourself as you go through your journey.

• What does the Rich Life mean to me?
• How do my spending habits contribute to this vision?
• What possessions do I have that I can remove? Ex. Single purpose kitchen tools
• What spending can I increase to move me toward this vision? Ex. books, courses, seminars, etc.
• How can I become the person I need to be to quit my job tomorrow

If your financial life is a code red - no savings, credit card debt - then adopt the FIRE mindset completely. It will change your life. You need it.

But once you've made progress, keep in mind what your vision of a Rich Life is and whether extreme savings rates is that best path forward for you. There are other ways to get there.

If you are creating an audience around a topic you enjoy, you likely aren't narrowing your focus enough.

If you want to talk about cars, then you need to talk about Ford Mustangs pre 2005 for road racers.

If you want to talk about makeup, talk about foundation for internet influencers under the age of 25.

If you want to talk about Bitcoin, talk about how to acquire and hold bitcoin safely and easily for folks over 65.

You can never niche down too far. But you can be too broad and unfocused. And when you're just starting out you'll be drowned out.

For our team I've created themes which will determine how we'll work together. We think of these as the mental models we'll work from but also the underlying values and philosophy for ho we'll work.

One of them is "let's see what happens". This sentence hopes to instill in the team a helpful heuristic for making decisions and taking action.

You see, we are a new program and testing and iteration is where most of our progress is made. We are not a mature program in which strict processes and optimizations are needed.

Instead, we need to make lots of small best, quick tests, and see what is most impactful. So whenever a member of our team needs to make a decision and take action, they'll recite this heuristic for moving forward, "let's see what happens". They can test and measure the results, rather than do the opposite, which is doubt the process and not take any action.

How can you instill heuristics in your team so you can standardize decision making?

Your job as a manager is to delegate effectively. Without delegation you are not leveraging the human capital at your disposal and reducing the opportunity to focus on higher impact activities.

Your other job is to teach your team to think and produce autonomously. The quickest route to ruin as a new manager is trying to solve all your team's problems. You know you are doing this when you have the most action-items coming from your team meetings.

Your final job as a manger is to spark debate and act as a final decision maker when conflict arises. This is not to be confused with preventing conflict and healthy debate, but to spark it, moderate it, and leverage it. The outcome is meetings that are never boring, always engaging, and results in buy-on on the decisions made.

Managing when done right is rewarding. But if not done well can be torture.

One book that inspired me to read is the Autobiography of Malcom X. His is a story of profound awakening and transformation.

Malcolm grew up in foster homes. As a young man he hit the streets, committed crimes, and landed in jail, sentenced to 10 years. He was 20...

Malcolm meets a fellow convict he calls "Bimbi". Bimbi convinces Malcolm to study and learn to develop his mind, "the only way we knew how to rebel was to cram some knowledge into our brains."

This begins one of the most radical transformations documented in literature. He discovers philosophy, history, science, and of course, black history. His transformation and self-discovery during his journey of reading should be standard education,

....But I'm digressing....my alma mater was books, a good library. Every time I catch a plane, I have with me a book I want to read- and that's a lot of books these days. If I weren't out here every day battling the white man, I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity-because you can't hardy mention anything I'm not curious about. I don't think anybody ever got so much out of going to prison than I did. In fact, prison enabled me to study far more intensively than I would have if my life had gone differently and I had attended some college. I imagine that one of the biggest troubles with colleges is there are too many distractions, too much panty-raiding, fraternities, and boola-boola and all of that. Where else but in prison could I have attacked my ignorance by being able to study intensely sometimes as much as fifteen hours a day?"

You can read the entire excerpt here. Every so often I return to it as motivation to continue reading and cultivating curiosity as a means to improve.

There is a major theme I hear on the topic of content creation and building an audience. It applies whether you are tweeting, blogging, instagramming or whatever else.

Create tons of content. Always show up and always be creating.

Followers at the least expect consistency in your creation. If you blog daily, never miss a day. If you tweet often, never skip more than a few days.

At the most, create as much as you can. Give your followers or audience the choice of consuming the content they want.

Those who show up win.