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When creating a digital-led customer success program, you quickly realize that the information that a given customer needs will depend on what they’re trying to do with your tool. Capturing (and then acting on!) a customer’s intended business outcomes is straightforward for an enterprise CSM who’s able to have in-depth conversations (even if it’s a lot of work). The tactics are not so straightforward for digital-led CS.

On September 20, 2021, 40 digital-led CS leaders got together to dig into the topic in small group discussions. These were their most valuable takeaways, in their own words:

Handing off goals

  • It’s challenging to collect outcomes as a part of the sales process - CSMs end up asking the same questions again, which isn’t a great customer experience
  • Translating outcomes collected from sales process to success in a digital way
  • Capturing the right business outcome in presales that aligns with the intended outcome vs customer expectation during adoption
  • Capture outcomes at the close of sale & sharing them with success team + renewals
  • Incentives for sales is the way to get data in to SFDC and GS
  • Implementation is key point to ensure smooth pass offs of outcomes sales to CSM and into Go Live - surveys, hand off calls, leveraging Success Plans, etc.

Where to record goals

  • It’s challenging to capture outcomes at scale
  • It’s not just me. Success Plans are hard to get CSMs to adopt.
  • We track outcomes differently and welcome best practices for tracking via Gainsight (CTAs? Timeline?)
  • Great idea around having the customer filling out a survey to identify what goals they have. And through journey orchestrator, having a program to follow through steps to support that journey.

Making use of goals

  • Great to have outcomes recorded so that you can share at renewal and revisit once one outcome has been met to reiterate

Engaging customers

  • Many “Scaled CSM” teams actually do not do success planning at all and are focused on more reactive actions.
  • Our open rates aren’t as bad as I thought ;)
  • Digital is also not just email so be aware of the comprehensive options available to you
  • It’s hard to get customers to define key outcomes
  • Customer education & enablement is key to delivering on outcomes at scale
  • Success has traditionally been viewed from a company perspective, but is moving toward more of an individual or persona perspective.

Where to start

  • It’s challenging to capture outcomes at scale, but a simplified list of common outcomes could be a good place to start
  • Good reminder to start small: you can solve for small cohorts of customers and then expand.
  • Reaching past output and getting to outcomes (outside of product functionality itself) has been a year long journey for us. Scaling that effort is the next step!

I am standing up a digital team at the moment.  I am super curious about best practices for using surveys to capture account goals and how to leverage that data to show ROI to customers.  

General: If anyone is open to sharing some insights, I would love to learn.  Let’s connect.

@seth : if there are any specific resources/articles that I could leverage, I would love it if you could share.  The above dialogue left me, in a good way, with more curiosity than answers.

Very interesting topic. My company is rather new to Gainsight, we currently have no standard way of requesting customer KPI/Objectives and very often, the CS may ask the question and it never gets answered.

The seller may have collected some intel on this but this does not get shared with the CSM team,

The CS team then do not always ask, and if they do they often do not always get an answer from the client which makes it difficult to be strategic and efficient. It then makes QBR less engaging for client as they are not very tailored to what they care or focus on.

I would also love to hear what more experienced CS Ops Orgs have put in place to solve these issues.

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