Becoming Proactive About Client Success

Moving pieces, multiple accounts, new communication methods, a changing working environment and countless fires to put out, client success teams have their hands full. This group has as much impact on revenue goals as sales (hello re-ups and upsells), but at most business to business (B2B) organizations, they’re spending too much time reacting to issues and not enough time seeing the issues come up in the first place. 

Reactive client success teams spend most of their time with new accounts, answering emails and responding to questions. It’s not bad, at first. But eventually reactive client success teams are blindsided by churn and won’t know the reasons why. Proactive client success teams can see churn coming a mile away and can respond in time to keep the client happy. 

Here are five key ways to become proactive about client success. 

Map Your Customer Needs

Customer success journey maps are essential for proactive client success teams. The map should be comprehensive, including the earliest stages of onboarding through adoption and renewal. The map gives you a literal timeline on where clients should be throughout the process. If the client’s not quite where they should be, customer success teams can see those red flags and address them before the client starts talking to your competitor. 

Use the Data for Guidance

Adoption rates, usage rates, customer satisfaction (CSAT) and more can help your client success teams be proactive in supporting clients. We call these leading stats (learn more here) and they can be extremely useful in spotting issues before they become full fledged problems. 

On-Point Communication

Engagement, engagement, engagement. We love engagement so much, we named a product after it! Full engagement between clients and client success teams is essential for holding onto revenue. You want to have a good relationship with your clients, and open communication opportunities for clients to share successes and concerns. Central communication portals are the best place to do this, keeping the information together and all in one place. 

Steller Follow Up

Anticipating problems before they arise is great proactive activity for client success teams. Refer again to your customer success journey map. Where do your clients usually jump ship or have issues? How can you address that point ahead of time? How can you follow up with clients more throughout these tough points? 

Embrace Change

We’re looking at you, 2020. In a year unlike any other, we certainly got accustomed to embracing change. While 2020 was the tipping point, businesses (especially B2B) are no stranger to reinventing how things are done. Like sales teams, client success teams need to be proactive about shifting to meet new modern customer demands like omnichannel communication approaches, remote working and decision committees. 

Client success, account management and customer support teams have incredible potential to keep and grow revenue for any organization. But all too often, churn takes us by surprise and we’re hustling to keep up. Prevent the churn in the first place by empowering your client success teams to operate proactively.