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In the ever-evolving landscape of customer success, I am excited to share how I see businesses are harnessing the power of digitization to elevate customer engagement and achieve sustainable growth. The rise of 1:Many programs has been a game-changer, revolutionizing the way businesses scale their customer success efforts. These programs play a pivotal role in maximizing efficiency, fostering consistent communication, and identifying growth opportunities within the customer base.

 

In this post, I want to share my take on how 1:many programs are set to revolutionize businesses across various aspects, ultimately leading to amplified customer satisfaction and growth.

Scalability: 

1:Many programs empower customer success teams to reach and engage with a larger number of customers simultaneously. This scalability is crucial as businesses onboard and support a growing customer base without compromising personalized attention.

  1.  Imagine the empowerment of Customer Success Managers (CSMs) when their tools handle routine tasks, allowing them to focus on high-potential customers and handle larger customer volumes. 
  2. With reduced administrative burdens, CSMs can devote more time to strategic customer engagement and nurturing relationships that drive customer success and growth.

Consistent Messaging:

 1:Many programs ensure consistent messaging and delivery of information across multiple customers. 

  1. This helps align customer expectations, provide standardized training and support materials, and maintain a cohesive customer experience.
  2.  Creating an impactful digital communication stage for customers is essential, delivering the right messages to the right audience at the right time.
  3. Let data take the lead in decision-making for customer messaging by leveraging utilization patterns, defined thresholds, and pattern alerts. By analyzing these valuable insights, we can ensure that our communication is targeted, relevant and timely.

Time and Resource Efficiency:

 By automating certain aspects of customer success, 1:Many programs save time and resources. 

  1. CSMs can focus on high-touch interactions while still providing valuable resources to a broader customer audience. 
  2. Leveraging initiatives like webinars and training sessions can significantly increase CSM efficiency, allowing them to reach multiple customers simultaneously and ensure effective knowledge transfer.

Proactive Communication: 

1:Many programs facilitate proactive communication with customers, enabling consistent updates, best practice sharing, and relevant insights. 

  1. Segmenting customers based on similarities brings efficiency, streamlining workflows and enhancing customer experiences, making their lives easier.
  2. Recognizing the similarities among customers within the same segment, our Pooled Customer Success Managers (CSMs) can effectively identify common patterns and requests. This valuable insight allows them to develop tailored automations that can be applied across the entire segment, leading to streamlined processes, increased efficiency

Scalable Education and Training: 

Through 1:Many programs, businesses can deliver educational resources, webinars, and self-paced training modules to multiple customers simultaneously. 

  1. This approach promotes consistent learning, empowers customers to leverage product capabilities effectively, and encourages adoption and engagement.

Customer Community Building: 

1:Many programs often incorporate customer community platforms where customers can interact, share experiences, and learn from each other. 

  1. These communities foster collaboration, knowledge exchange, and peer-to-peer support, enhancing the overall customer experience.
  2. When the community acts as the frontline Customer Success Manager (CSM), it significantly reduces the workload on our CS and support teams. Customers are motivated to engage with the community, where they find solutions to their problems through peer interactions and shared experiences

Upsell and Cross-Sell Opportunities:

 Leveraging 1:Many programs allow businesses to identify upsell and cross-sell opportunities across a wider customer base. 

  1. By delivering targeted messaging and value propositions, businesses can effectively expand their product or service adoption within their customer ecosystem.

As I  conclude my exploration of 1:Many programs in customer success digitization, it's evident that they play a pivotal role in driving business growth and enhancing customer experiences. By embracing these programs, businesses can unlock scalability, streamline resource allocation, and ensure consistent messaging across their customer base.

How are you unleashing the full potential of your customer relationships? 

Do you agree with the remarkable impact of digitalization and how 1:Many programs are positioned to drive the maturity curve of Customer Success within organizations?

I’d love to hear and learn from you all.

 

Thanks for this post, extremely timely as we prepare to start deploying GS/CS. Our struggle is less about growing our customer based and how we scale internal processes, as we have confidence in GS, especially with a 1:many program.

That said, relative to 1:many programs, we want to come up with the best strategy for growing our newly formed CS team, and how we apply 1:many as a stop gap while we grow our CSM team, and specifically how we partner with the CAEs who have owned these relationships until now.

So, how do we best apply a 1:many program with GS /CS features and functions, and who picks up the 1:many work? our CSMs or our CAEs from a best practices perspective? And as we hire more CSMs, I presume a clear path for moving a customer from un-named “CSMs” to named CSMs to be as simple as updates to role records.

Any thoughts?

Hey @ericbmuller great question! Although as a DCS practitioner myself I would argue that perhaps you are thinking about it the wrong way. 1:many shouldn’t be seen as a stop gap, but instead as a way to communicate with your customers throughout key moments in their journey to ensure their continued success and keep them on track.

I would suggest starting by creating a customer journey. Write down what are the key moments throughout the journey from contract signature through to renewal, expansions, upsells, or crossells. Once you have that mapped, you can start adding in touch points, defining what your team should focus on as a 1:1 and what could perhaps be a 1:many. 

My colleague / boss @lane_h spoke more about this in Pulse 2022 with her amazing presentation on Building Digital CS for Scale. An example of the journey map could look something like the below:

In terms of who is best suited to help build this, it really depends on your team/company size. Ideally you would have someone on your team dedicated to creating these moments (as they’re ever evolving) but I’ve seen CS Ops take the charge as well as CSM’s who treat it as a side project from their day-to-day.

Finally, having a team of un-named CSMs is great so long as your customers are healthy, and are realizing the value/ROI from your product/service. If you find your customers are starting to question the value/ROI this is typically when a traditional CSM should take over (albeit perhaps temporary).

I can’t stress this enough, but 1:many isn’t always for your smaller, happier, value realized accounts. It can be for your biggest accounts as well - just with a different approach.

As you can tell - I can talk about this for hours. Hope it helps!

Hi @ericbmuller ,

Glad that this post helped !1

These are fascinating questions! To start, I highly recommend referring to this helpful ebook, which is ideal for customers planning to implement Digital Customer Success or 1:Many initiatives. You can find it here: https://info.gainsight.com/the-big-book-of-digital-customer-success-ebook.html. The ebook provides clear insights on setting up the platform for Digital CS and assessing the maturity of our Customer Success organization.

When establishing 1:Many initiatives, the first step is to identify the critical moments of truth and ensure data accuracy. Creating robust playbooks that encourage collaboration between CSMs and CAEs is essential to the success of these initiatives.

Moreover, it's crucial to ensure that your 1:Many initiatives reach the right audience at the right time; otherwise, their purpose won't be fulfilled.

Regarding the question of who handles the 1:Many work, the digital handbook shared above provides an interesting answer. It outlines various phases of maturity and the gradual evolution of pooled CSMs responsible for 1:Many programs. These experts identify and analyze patterns to craft more personalized messaging.

 

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