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Customer Playbooks When is it useful and how to create one that evolves

Speakers: Emilia D'Anzica

June 28, 2022

Customer Success Playbook is a series of actions that are meant to be executed by customer-facing team members to achieve a desired outcome for your customer.

A series of tasks can be delegated to a group of users at different measures for their customer journey to help them adopt your product successfully, but when is a customer success playbook useful and how best to create one that is evolving?

This is a space for healthy disagreements and discussions but in a respectful way. Just by the nature of how we have conceived this, you will see passionate voices of opinions, friends having a dialogue, and thereby even interrupting each other or finishing each other’s sentences.

With this Experience dialogue you will learn about -

  • We talk about enabling more channels.

  • How support metrics are tied into the playbook.

  • Customer journey and why does it matter.

  • Discuss about Change Management.

If a series of past events can be delegated to a group of users at different measures for the customer journey to help them.

When we talk about the channels, one should start raising channels as soon as possible. It means ensuring that your product team, customer success, and support are aligned. So once you create a Customer Journey that everyone adheres to, and thought that is the customer Journey because remember it's not like this, it's not like this, it goes up and down all the time. So it's really important that you identify the key opportunities to engage with the client throughout that journey and understand what is the best channel to meet that client. Sometimes it's customer success with the more proactive and sometimes it's customer support and that is often reactive.

Always making sure product operations, success, and support are continuously aligned with the Customer Journey, especially when you're making any product changes, communicating with the clients, and how you're servicing them. If there are any changes you need to ensure that first, your internal team feels confident to speak to those changes and then notify your customers proactively, especially if it's a massive change, you can't just announce it. You need to announce it leading up to that change, so it won't be a big surprise when the change comes. xc

Before building a Playbook, you need to ensure that you understand the company, the company culture, who is serving the client, and then the client's needs. And if you're building a customer success Playbook, without looking at the customer support experiences, you're missing out on the key moments in the customer's Journey because a customer's journey is not just adoption and growth throughout the customer's experience. When you're Building A playbook, you need to understand the employee experience of the product. Experience and the customer's experience and build a Playbook to enable all three to work together seamlessly.

Customer Journey building for clients is when we bring them together, bring together leaders, and map out the customer's journey including the employee. What does it take from a product? Whether it's a technology or a human touch with the client and what we have found over and over again. Are there a lot of crunchy conversations between product sales marketing, customer success, and support before we can build that Journey that everyone will align with so it isn't it is not a one-time Workshop?

First, survey all of the employees that are engaged in touching the customer experience. Then gather that data and present it to the executives to mentally prepare them for building that customer Journey from there. Collaborative Workshop, It can last anywhere from two to four hours depending on the complexity of the product and then from there go back and gather all that data and create a beautiful Journey for them with steps for churn opportunity and growth opportunity. From there present it to them and start building a Playbook.

One should always reflect on the customer journey in the playbooks on a quarterly Cadence. When we look at the product map and what's changed? We look at the support tickets where they're the most challenging with the product, where's The NPS CSAT, wavering, and from there update the Playbook and get feedback from the teams as well. Because maybe rolled out a new way to do an executive Business review and it's at an earlier point in the customer journey. The new questions were asking them to use or to feel comfortable role-playing with any rub Junctions to the new pricing So, at least quarterly Cadence is the Playbook the customer Journey, supporting the customer experience and the company's revenue goals.

Ascendo AI is also to this point, NPS has been a very long-standing one. It is that you don't want the feeling of the moment, you want to collect the feeling of the customer. So, Ascendo has Modeled, which detects that type of sentiment continuously and also on an aggregated basis. All these things are automatically done and it's given as an alert so that people can take action. Customers are loving it, and it's just taking the whole voice of customers to the next level.

Change is something that is hard and companies invest Millions or Billions of changes sunsetting systems, implementing systems, only to experience failure. And so, transformational change with products is really hard because we're humans, we like habits, we like safety, and we fear whether it's our jobs that will fail using the new products, it may feel uncomfortable, it may not feel like it's the right decision. So prepare employees for change management things and explain what's in it. It is really important to hire a change management person.Letting people talk about the change in their fears, what they understand, the change to be, and then really ensuring that they understand what's in it for me. Because again, as humans we not only fear it but we want to know why are you doing this? So, being able to give people time to absorb the changes is a really important part of transformational change.

So basically it's all not just about learning, it's also putting the things into practice. And that's exactly what we worked with Ascendo AI. We bring such metrics that make it easier from a support perspective for customers to see them right on the leaderboard and the execution of the operational theme so they all can make those changes.

Emilia D’Anzica is a management consultant, board advisor, author, and educator, partnering with companies to create scalable growth & metrics-driven customer programs from onboarding to adoption, renewals, and advocacy. She is also the founder of a management consulting firm.

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