Customer Success Plan Template

CUSTOMER SUCCESS ACTION PLAN

CUSTOMER SUCCESS ACTION PLAN

Your CompanyName, Title

Today’s Date

HOW TO USE THIS TEMPLATE

Now that you’ve developed your strategy to optimize customer usage, loyalty and renewal, use this Customer Success Action Plan template to outline the activities you and your team will implement in order to reach your goals.

CUSTOMER SUCCESS STRATEGY

Maximize CLVSegment & treat

customers by lifecycle and persona

Reiterate your strategy and goals to keep them front-and-center with your team. All activities in your action plan should roll up to these.TIP:

Identify and improve problem areas

Long-term metrics we’ll report on quarterly

STRATEGIC METRICS

Identify the long-term metrics that will demonstrate performance against your key strategies. These metrics should be of upmost interest to your CEO and broader executive team.TIP:

$16K13% 78% 83%

$18K

CLV % Annual Churn % Successfully On-boarded

15%

Q3 Goal Q3 Actual Q3 Goal Q3 Actual Q3 Goal Q3 Actual

PROBLEM AREAS (LEVERS)

Our efforts are focused on improving onboarding, ongoing engagement and renewal processes.

Onboarding

Engagement

Adoption

Customer Feedback

Renewal

Expansion

Target Customer

Acquisition

Free TrialPipeline

Influence Direct Impact

In addition to reviewing the strategy, visually remind your team what the levers you’ll focus on for driving improvement.TIP:

Q3 FOCUS

CUSTOMER SEGMENTATION

Low-touch High-touch

Early life-stage

Late life-stage

Low health score

Low #of seats

<35

TIP:

We will identify, name, and focus on 3 key customer segments

“Larry Long-Tail”

Not all customers are created equal! Focus on the customer segments that align with your identified initiatives and that provide the best opportunity for improvement.

28

High health score

High # of seats

<60

40

“Perry Pro Plan”

<70

>100

“Enterprise Eve”

PERSONAS – LARRY LONG TAIL

His Overall Business Challenges

• Difficulty continually increasing the engagement of posts

• Lacking supply of interesting content to share

• Hard to prove ROI

Where He Gets Information

• Reads email of trusted vendors• Social media thought leaders

via their social channels• Doesn’t read publications

His Challenge With Your Software

• Doesn’t “get” how to customize the dashboard

• Doesn’t use the out-of-the-box reporting templates

• Only periodic use of scheduling feature

His Title & Responsibilities

• Social Media Manager• Increase social engagement with

brand (social sharing and clicks)• Converts clicks into leads

Metrics He tracks

• Cost Per Click• Cost Per Lead• Total Clicks• Total Leads

Content He Finds Compelling

• Templates for presenting results and goals

• How-to guides for creating “clickable” content

• Data on social media trends

TIP:Create one for each persona/segment. Develop detailed “picture” for each priority persona. Use the persona to tailor your customer nurture streams and your content.

To monitor the success of our onboarding strategy, we’ll measure these 3 tactical metrics

ONBOARDING METRICS (TACTICAL)

Identify specific metrics that will demonstrate performance improvement for onboarding. For example, if one of your strategies is minimizing churn and you’ve recognized that onboarding plays a significant role, regularly measuring and reporting the performance trend will tell you if your efforts are working.

TIP:

Days To Onboard Avg. Engagement Score % Healthy Customers

33 31 50 59 85 90


ONBOARDING TACTICS

We will focus on 3 primary drivers to improve onboarding.

Reduce Customer Onboarding Delays. Review existing process for technical customer onboarding (e.g., integrations) to identify areas where customers get bogged down with their internal partners.

Revamp Business Requirements Kickoff. Revise the initial business meeting – build trust by including deep dive into their business goals above and beyond usage of our product.

Begin Engagement Onboarding. Intro concept of engagement onboarding – measure customer interaction with our email, blog and self-help content during onboarding.

TIP:Identify the 3 key things your team can focus on to improve onboarding. Goal is to drive the adoption metrics (e.g., Days to Onboard), which then roll up to drive the strategic metrics (e.g., churn %)

We’ll evaluate adoption by measuring Usage, Features Usage, and NPS.

ADOPTION METRICS (TACTICAL)

Identify specific metrics that will demonstrate performance against your focus areas. For example, if one of your strategies is maximizing CLV and you’ve recognized that adoption plays a significant role, regularly measuring and reporting the performance trend will tell you if your efforts are working.

TIP:

Usage Score % Sticky Features Used Avg. NPS

77 63 70 7.2

7.8

88


ADOPTION TACTICS

We believe 3 tactics will improve adoption of our application across all target users.

TIP:Highlight how you plan to drive achievement of your near-term tactical goals for this focus area.

Customer Blog. We will launch a customer blog to grow engagement by highlighting unique customer use cases, and showcase new feature announcements.

Proactive Outreach. Rather than rely on reactive outreach, we will now monitor customer health and reach out to key accounts when their health drops.

Usage Appreciation Contests. We will present customers with quarterly usage prizes. Those who boost their adoption of a new (or existing) feature will win a symbolic prize.

While customer success won’t drive renewal/upgrade signing, it will be responsible for driving the “renewal pipeline”.

RENEWAL METRICS (TACTICAL)

Renewal/Upgrade Renewal Win Rate

$1.2M

80% 90%$1.3M

Q3 Goal Q3 Actual Q3 Goal Q3 Actual

Pipeline Generated

RENEWAL TACTICS

We will support the Sales team in maximizing the revenue protected via renewals, and the new revenue generated from upsells.

Scoring for Upgrades. Customer success will help focus Sales’ efforts by monitoring customer health and rank ordering customers by likelihood to upgrade.

Key Contacts. We will ensure proper relationship-building (and documentation of the relationships) so sales can execute a smooth renewal process.

Business Case. Customer success will maintain clear records of the business case built for customers across QBRs (and the initial business meeting kick-off) in order to maximize renewal/upsell rates.

NEEDS ANALYSIS – PROFESSIONAL EDITION

CONDUCT QBR

The CSM team’s progress will be presented each month

REVIEW: Outline what’s been completed from last review session, outstanding items, and new items

REVIEW: Strategic Metrics

REVIEW: Overall tactical metrics for each focus area.

REVIEW: Remind team of strategy, goals, metrics

SET: Adjust tactics as necessary. Propose strategy adjustments.

MONTHLY CSM REVIEW

TIP:Monthly review meetings are key to maintaining a nimble team. They ensure the exchange of ideas on how to improve stubborn metrics, and to generate creative solutions to challenges that arise.