How to build a Customer Success organization?

2. What should you do before creating a customer success organization?

Promote as a company-wide initiative

To create an optimal customer success organization, it is necessary to first work towards the same goal of customer success throughout the company. To do this, it is important to clearly define the position of customer success in the top-down management strategy and to promote efforts to create a customer success organization. Under this promotion, each department will understand their respective roles and work towards the same goal.

Organize the customer journey

Understanding the customer's environment, needs, and challenges, creating a customer journey map, and visualizing the path to solving customer issues is crucial. This is because customer success involves multiple departments. By sharing the process to achieve goals through a customer journey map, we ensure that customer success tasks are carried out properly.
(Reference: What is a Customer Journey? Steps for Creation and Key Points for Operation)

Set Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for Customer Success activities

Set KPIs to ensure the proper functioning of the customer success organization.

Example:

LTV	Total amount (sales) used by customers from start of use to cancellation
Onboarding Completion Rate	Percentage of customers taking actions expected to continue using
Cancellation Rate (Churn Rate)	Percentage of Canceled Customers
Upsell/Cross-sell rate	Upsell/Cross-sell Ratio

When setting KPIs, ease of operation is also important. Additionally, since situations are constantly changing, it is also important to regularly verify that the set KPIs are appropriate.

3. How to Build and Manage a Customer Success Organization

Project Planning and Budgeting

We plan to launch an organization for customer success as a company-wide project. It is also important to recognize the importance of customer success in the project and allocate a budget. In the midst of the difficulty in acquiring new customers, customer success is crucial for maintaining relationships with existing customers. If we can successfully launch a project to establish an organization for customer success, we can also achieve success in customer success. The success of customer success increases the LTV of customers and contributes to the stable operation of the company. Therefore, it is necessary to allocate appropriate budget and personnel to customer success.

Pre-arrangement with departments in contact with customers

In order to promote company-wide initiatives, it is important to have cooperation between departments. To properly manage customer success, it is important to divide responsibilities and decide on methods of cooperation beforehand. This includes coordinating with departments such as sales, customer support, after-sales, and product departments that have contact with customers, and setting clear roles and responsibilities. If roles and responsibilities are unclear, it can lead to confusion within the organization and make it difficult to evaluate results. It is important to coordinate beforehand to avoid conflicts between departments and to ensure the existence of customer success.

Define business processes along the customer journey

By visualizing the actions, thoughts, and emotions of customers through a customer journey map, we can think from the customer's perspective. In addition, we will be able to understand the information and content that customers are looking for. Based on that, we will define the necessary business processes.
The following is an example of a customer journey map.

First, support with a single team

We will build a "single team" for customer success at an early stage. By creating a single, independent customer success department, we can foster a culture of customer success within the company. We will start small and scale up the size of our customer success as our customer base grows.

Promote systematization through standardization of support, introduction of tech touch, and implementation of tools to improve efficiency.

As the team grows, it becomes necessary to standardize individual support and also work on tech touch. We will document onboarding tasks, templates for product and service usage, manuals for service usage know-how, and success stories to prevent the customer success team from becoming too personalized. We will use tools to organize the customer journey, expand support know-how, and deliver content on the website.
Some useful tools for customer success include SFA (sales management system), measurement environment (health score, BI, etc.), digital channels (website, email, etc.) for smooth communication with customers, and content creation tools (LMS, CMS) for e-learning and manuals.

Specialize in cutting out each function as a team

By incorporating support models and tech touch, and as the customer success organization expands, each function can be specialized and separated into teams. First, prioritize onboarding and operation/consulting related to support, followed by tech touch, and based on customer experience. Functions such as account management, customer communication, customer training and support, data analysis, and operations can be specialized.

Optimizing organizational structure

It is also important to optimize the team structure as the customer's attributes and regions expand. As mentioned above, it is possible to divide teams by region or organize support teams according to customer size. Additionally, there are methods such as dividing by high touch/low touch/tech touch models or by industry. We will create the most suitable organizational structure based on the characteristics of the products and services we provide.