Blind loyalty to a business is no longer a thing in today’s day and age. Today, more than 1 in 3 customers aren’t loyal to brands. They’re willing to shop around, find a better deal, and leave their current choice behind.
This shift means that businesses must have strategies in place to retain customers. Regardless of your industry, your competitors are ready to improve their customers' experience to take more of your potential customers.
Beat them to it by engaging your existing clients and pulling in new ones with a sharp and effective customer success plan.
What is a customer success plan?
You're not alone if you haven’t heard of a customer success plan. A customer success plan is a roadmap you create that allows you to prepare for, implement, and reflect on your customer’s goals.
Then, you lay out for your customers how your goals align with theirs, and you show them the pathway to success with your two organizations as partners.
It’s an opportunity to show your customers how invested you are.
Customer success vs customer service
How is a customer success plan different from customer service? Customer service is the traditional approach to ensuring your customers are satisfied, that you answer their questions, and that you have met their needs. It typically involves answering phone calls and emails and providing solutions to problems.
In short, customer service is a passive and reactive element of business.
Meanwhile, a customer success strategy is proactive.
With a customer success strategy, you have a team that works to stay in touch with your customers' brand, mission, vision, and values. From the time you onboard and throughout their journey with you, your customer success team will check in with your customers. Each step of the way, they’ll ensure your company is doing everything possible to help your customers succeed.
When to use a customer success plan
The customer success plan is a flexible, living, shifting document that welcomes your customers and then guides them through their key performance indicators (KPIs). So, when do you use this document?
Onboarding new clients
In your first meeting with your client, to bring them on board, you’ll discuss their vision and lay out how you expect to help breathe life into it. Introducing a customer success plan at this point in your relationship with your customer offers you a chance to lay a strong foundation to build on for years to come.
You’ll want to present a comprehensive, well-crafted document, typically delivered via presentation. Your customer will see that you’ve outlined your shared objectives, strategies, milestones, and pathways through them. This presentation fosters trust from those first moments, proving your commitment to your customer and their success.
“First impression is always the lasting impression. That means that CSM should identify “wow moments” early on and go beyond the scope - underpromise and overdeliver.”
Stan Stojanovic, Customer Success and Growth Partner
Expanding services
Another opportunity to present a customer success plan is when your customer’s business grows or expands. As they reach new milestones, they’ll want to reflect on where they’ve been and where to go next.
At this point, you can revisit the document you’ve created and highlight your role in their success. You can also use this meeting to demonstrate how you can be of further value to your customer in their future goals. You’ll provide a custom, tailored success plan that highlights how the next stage of their progress aligns with the services you provide.
Ongoing relationship management
It’s always a good idea to meet regularly with your customers to revisit their pathway to success. Setting quarterly meetings to review the customer success plan can ensure your customer understands your role in their journey. It also keeps you accountable for following through and following up on your functions as their partner in success.
These regular meetings reaffirm the partnership and keep both parties focused on your shared objectives.
Benefits of customer success planning
There are plenty of benefits of customer success planning, which is why this shift in business—toward the customer—has grown exponentially over the last decade. Here are just a few of those benefits:
Increase customer retention and revenue
Again, as you build stronger relationships with your customers through the creation of shared goals, you’re more likely to keep those relationships longer.
As CEO of Salesforce, Marc Benioff, notes, “Most of all, I discovered that in order to succeed with a product, you must truly get to know the customers and build something for them.”
It’s true what Marc says. You work for a customer’s success, and you increase customer retention. This increased customer retention ensures ongoing profits and revenues and avoids losses. It also allows you plenty of opportunities to upsell and cross-sell as your customers' businesses expand and grow.
Reduce customer churn
Holding onto your customers for extended periods and checking in with them regularly to ensure they’re still using your products and services naturally reduces customer churn.
The sad reality is that customers who don’t feel valued and don’t get your attention are more likely to simply drop off. Then, when they do have a need for services, they’re more likely to shop around for a different provider. The customer success plan helps you avoid this eventuality.
Identify upsell opportunities
The stronger your relationship is with your customers, the more opportunities you’ll have to recognize when they might need more products or services. Regular check-ins keep you in touch about your customer’s business health. As each customer’s demand increases, you’ll be right there to provide the services they need.
Maintain consistency
Nothing is worse for a customer than a wishy-washy brand. As your customers work to grow their business and remain consistent with their customers, they want to be able to rely on your stability and the structure you’ve laid out for them from the beginning.
The customer success plan ensures your customers can recognize that you continue to offer a consistent stream of support.
Who owns customer success plans?
The customer success plan is a shared journey and a shared document. Both the customer success manager and the customer own it, and both should be notified of any changes or updates made to it.
The customer success manager is in charge of building the original plan from the ground up and keeping it fresh. The CSM will then track the customer’s progress based on data and feedback from the customer and share updates with their team.
The customer will be an integral part of defining what success looks like for them. They can raise questions and present any challenges or roadblocks to success as they see them. As the premiere experts in their fields, they’ll provide the critical components of a pathway to realistic success.
With this shared ownership, you are more likely to get buy-in and accountability from both sides.
Key components to include in your customer success plan
The question then is, what exactly does a customer success plan look like? Of course, you can use Qwilr’s template to get started. But what should you include in each CSP?
- Thorough Onboarding: To begin with every customer, you should make it clear that you understand your customer’s brand, mission, vision, and values. Then, you’ll show your customer how your success strategy aligns with those elements. This first meeting is the foundation for the rest of your partnership.
- Goals and Milestones: Your CSP must include clear goals and a plan to meet those goals. To reach those goals, you’ll set milestones that let you know what kind of progress your customer is making toward their goals. You also want to include your proposed contributions each step of the way.
- Check-In Dates: Each time you meet with your customer, you should also be planning ahead for when you’ll meet again. You can set quarterly check-ins or schedule dates around specific milestones.
- Feedback Loops: Every CSP should hold space for feedback from your customer and a response to that feedback from you. Discuss how you’ll communicate — via CRM application, via email, via a project management application, or all three. Make sure the customer success manager has a team ready to respond in a reasonable time to all feedback from your customers. Also, empower your CSM and their team to respond appropriately.
- Educational Resources: Your customers should always have access to any educational resources you have that can help them succeed. Include links to training, classes, videos, and any other resources available that can further your shared pathway to progress.
- Community Forums: One tool many businesses don’t think of when planning for success is the opportunity to communicate with others in their field. LinkedIn has built massive success on this concept alone. Create an online forum for your customers and your CSM team to communicate about products, services, best practices, and more. You can even gamify the experience by rewarding top contributors, which will encourage participation.
- Data: Finally, and perhaps most importantly, you want to ensure all of your decisions, goals, and proposals are based on hard data. Provide clear links to sources, analysis, and the conclusions you’ve come to as a result. This generates a solid foundation of trust between you and your customer.
How to build an effective customer success plan, according to experts
Now, you’re ready to create your customer success plan, but where do you start to enable success for your customers? It’s important you get clear and prepare thoroughly before presenting your plan to your customer. Here’s what the experts have to say:
Create a customer journey map
Your first step, as you’re preparing your customer success plan, is to create a clear map that begins with where your customer is at the time of onboarding and takes them through milestones and goals.
As Stan Stojanovic, Customer Success and Growth Partner at Skale, says, “At-risk accounts are usually at that stage due to lack of proactiveness to recognize a churn risk ahead of time.”
Essentially, by the time your customer is “at risk,” it may be too late. Get started with a journey map, which allows you to start and continue to be proactive about your relationship with your customers.
Get to really know what success looks like for your customers
Communication is the key to any great partnership. You should always have an ongoing conversation with your customers about what success looks like for them.
Then, you align your products and services to that vision of success. It’s your job to breathe life into their vision, not create the vision for them.
“It’s crucial to always understand business objectives. Everything should tie back to business impact. Expectations should be managed early on, and you should always aim to get an agreement with the customer before you start working together.”
Stan Stojanovic, Customer Success and Growth Partner
Essentially, you’ll get the customer input, create the journey map, get feedback, and adjust your map, all before you start working together.
Remember, your customer success plan is flexible. It’s a living document.
Align the plan with broader company goals
A customer success plan should always be clearly connected to your customer’s goals. This is why you want to understand your customer's business's brand, mission, vision, and values. That way, every goal will tie back to those.
Our very own Carissa Phillips, Enterprise Customer Success Manager at Qwilr, notes:
“One-off goals are fine, like meeting a specific deadline. However, for actual relationship building, incremental progress goals are most valuable and need to include a conversation schedule. Relationships only work if people talk with one another.”
You need to hear from your customers regularly on what matters most to them to ensure your customer success plan fits those priorities.
Use a customizable template
You can take a lot of stress and strain off yourself if you use a customer success plan template, like the one offered by Qwilr. It offers options to customize, add links, and images, and tailor it to your customer’s specific needs.
With a template, you get a jump-start on building your relationships.
Use real examples from existing customers
No customer success strategy is complete without case studies. When you set milestones and goals for your customers in their success plans, show them the previous successes you’ve had with similar campaigns and approaches.
This part of the customer success strategy is closely linked to providing hard data. When your customers can see that this or that campaign has worked in similar situations for similar businesses, they’ll be more likely to buy in.
Track key customer success metrics and KPIs
Your customer success team should always track your customers' progress toward milestones and goals. Your customer success manager can update the customer success plan with key metrics and KPIs. This way, any customer success team member can access the platform to track progress.
As Georgia Mobley, Customer Success Manager at Qwilr says:
“If a CSM has a close relationship with customers and takes notes on their needs, they are able to send that information into our product team, who can consider catering development to customer needs.”
Use Qwilr’s smart editor to and customizable proposal templates to communicate KPIs clearly
Set out your action plan
Each time you meet to discuss your customer success plan, you’ll lay out an action plan to achieve the next set of metrics and track KPIs. Take an authoritative position here as the expert in moving your customer relentlessly toward success.
Gather customer feedback and iterate
Feedback at every step of the way is critical. As Georgia says, “Listening to your customer’s needs and feedback can alter the course of the training.”
After all, you’re here for them. As your customers let you know what they need, you’ll adjust your approach and respond accordingly.
Outline next steps
Finally, make sure you never leave a customer success plan meeting without looking ahead. Part of your document will include next steps, which goals you’re focusing on, and how you plan to help your customer get there.
Georgia makes this point here: “Make sure you are speaking regularly to a good team champion. Record calls and send good follow-up emails with documentation to back up the training. And always give them the next steps so they know what to do to move forward in the process. Then, try to stick to the timeline or have a goal for a “go live” date.”
Customer success plan template
Qwilr offers a customizable template for your customer success plan that can be tailored not only to your company but to each customer you work with.
You can add your company’s logo, colors, and other branding elements. Then, you’ll fill in the sections with relevant information about each of your customer’s success strategies. The template includes features like embedded content, so you can add links, and an ROI calculator, so you can show your customers exactly what they’ll get back from their investments. Team management ensures that every member of the team can access parts critical to their roles.
Real-life customer success plan examples to learn from
To give you a sense of the level of success you can achieve with your customers by using a customer success strategy, take a look at these businesses.
Slack
Slack may be one of the fastest-growing businesses that has gotten that way through a focus on the customer in the last decade. The company has made it a primary mission to listen to customer feedback and respond quickly. For this reason, it now has an estimated 38.8 million active daily users.
Microsoft
A much older company, Microsoft has been able to stay competitive in its market by providing a customer success manager for all new enterprise clients. This white-glove approach to customer service lets customers know how much they’re valued from day one.
Dropbox
Finally, Dropbox has seen amazing growth in recent years as it has shifted toward a customer-centric approach to business. Their onboarding process is designed to be personalized. The company takes a proactive view of its customers, ensuring Dropbox is aligned with its customers’ goals.
Create winning customer success plans with Qwilr
In the end, taking a customer-centric approach to business is the clear path to success for both your business and your customers. Creating a customer success plan is a large part of that approach.
Sign up for a free trial of Qwilr’s customer success plan template today.
About the author
Brendan Connaughton|Head of Growth Marketing
Brendan heads up growth marketing and demand generation at Qwilr, overseeing performance marketing, SEO, and lifecycle initiatives. Brendan has been instrumental in developing go-to-market functions for a number of high-growth startups and challenger brands.