Hello community friends!

When it comes to the Digital Customer Success world, you all know by now that my excitement knows no bounds.  And I was fortunate enough to meet & learn from the powerhouse team at WorkTango who leads the digital segment there.

We dived into their dynamic journey of crafting a digital segment, navigating challenges, unlocking growth opportunities at every turn and not to forget a key part - hiring for a Digital CSM role and the practical lessons around that.

But first, let’s meet the exceptional team behind this:

Dre @dre.heffington - Sr. Manager of Account Management

Dre oversees multiple segments of WorkTango's Customer base and is dedicated to operationalizing retention and revenue, while scaling processes to deliver efficient and repeatable outcomes. Because of this, she is passionate about the world of Digital CS and works to continuously improve the customer experience using data and automation.

Laura @Laura Rexford  - Vice President of Customer Success

Laura focuses on strategies that help WorkTango and its customers grow and sustain a positive work environment. She's excited about Digital CS because it enables a personalized value-driven customer experience that helps protect her team from burnout that can occur when too much manual effort is required.

Barbara @barbnitke - Head of Customer Marketing 

Barbara is passionate about not just retaining customers but also enriching their journey through personalized digital strategies - and believes the secret to success lies within the synergy between Customer Success and Marketing. This partnership fosters lasting relationships, fuels brand advocacy, and delivers unparalleled value for both customers and WorkTango.

Now, let’s begin diving into the treasure trove of their experience: 

Tell us the story about building a digital segment for your company? 

What has the journey been like so far?

At WorkTango, we've welcomed nearly 1000 customers from different industries and sizes through multiple acquisitions. This rapid expansion made it clear: we needed smart scalability to set our customers up for success, empowering them to effectively engage, motivate, and retain their employees using our platform. That's why we've overhauled our tech-touch approach, ensuring that every customer, regardless of their size, could thrive and succeed, even without their own dedicated customer success representative.

We quickly identified the need for an established role designated as our 'Tech Touch Specialist/Coordinator'. When hiring, we honed in on skills aligned with an SDR/BDR, prioritizing experience in overseeing diverse campaigns and engaging prospects to uphold our customer-focused strategy.

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Some of our learning curves:

In our quest for speed in launching automated nurtures to our self-serve customers, we discovered the critical significance of segmentation and personalization based on their journey stage, product preferences, and personas (like distinguishing between admins and economic buyers). 

It became evident that standard templates weren't effective and as a result our email engagement metrics such as open and click-through rates suffered. Striking the right balance between automated campaigns and personalized, one-on-one emails like newsletters and event invites also emerged as crucial. 

This realization led us to create an email calendar using Monday.com, ensuring we don't flood our audience with too many messages, thus keeping things relevant, maintaining their interest, and avoiding overwhelming them with constant communication. We also collaborated closely with our data team to sync segmentation data into our CRM, guaranteeing that we deliver tailored messages at the right moment in each individual's journey.

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What was most successful for us:

We've implemented a highly effective automated renewal process tailored to the end of the customer journey. This process is designed in line with our standard SSA, sending out notifications 90, 75, and 30 days before renewal. This automated nurture offers ample opportunity to proactively address risks while minimizing excessive touchpoints that could potentially impact retention negatively.

In addition, the introduction of our new digital segment uncovered significant potential in upselling and expansion opportunities, particularly in managing customer overages. Previously unexplored within this segment, we've now tapped into this area, identifying customers that are a good fit for cross-selling opportunities. This strategic move has uncovered additional growth avenues that were previously unexplored.

When it comes to multiple touch points being a great learning curve,

would you suggest any best practices to go about this?

To get started, we would recommend these key phases:

Phase 1: Customer communications audit - We analyze every message sent out - whether it’s a one-off, automated nurture, etc. It's our go-to to figure out what's clicking and what needs a tweak.

Phase 2: Customer communications strategy - This is where we brainstorm how to talk to our customers - the channels, the segmentation, and where they are in their journey. This comes from a strong collaboration between CS and marketing. 

Phase 3: Data - This is gold! Especially for segmenting and sending out the perfect message at just the right time. This is where you lean in with your partnership with your data team to ensure you have the right segmentation available, and accurate healthy data. 

Phase 4: Channels - Our customers are getting bombarded with emails from different platforms for different purposes. So think smartly and meet them where they want to be met. Start to leverage other parts of your tech stack - community, in-app,  in-person events, etc.

Keep an eye out for the next part of the series where we delve into the role of a Digital CSM, while offering insights into digital journey learnings, especially in partnership with the marketing perspective.

Meanwhile, if you’ve got any questions/thoughts, the comment section is all yours!