Scaling Customer Success

​Customer Success is a relatively a new discipline that focuses on maximizing customer business value and outcomes realization. Practitioners focus on customer adoption, customer experience and then positive correlation, organic growth and retention is achieved. This book will provide a practical guide for operationalizing the Customer Success function and methodologies.

As we now step into the next phase of Customer Success, a phase of growth and standardization, it becomes important to start thinking about how to effectively scale this extremely important function. You’ll see how to go from just offering a taste of Customer Success experience to your top customers, to offering it to all your customers, irrespective of their tier, spending, and current growth potential. As you expand the scope of Customer Success across all your customers, it becomes very important to understand how to operationalize Customer Success, how to convert the philosophies and ideas and best practices to usable operational models, and how to build a Customer Success Center of Excellence (CoE) focused on standardizing, scaling and expanding Customer Success practices and methodologies to optimize customer and company success and ROI.

Scaling Customer Success will show you what kind of operational processes and workflows need to be put in place based on the stage of your company, products, customer engagement model and desired outcomes, what metrics are important to measure and how to capture those metrics. You’ll also study what kinds of workflows to establish, how to effectively map and analyze results and most importantly, how to do Customer Success at scale effectively.

What You’ll Learn

Understand what a Customer Success Center of Excellence is• Establish a blueprint for how to scale and automate a Customer Success practice• Review information on key Customer Success metrics and workflows

Who This Book Is For

Company leaders and customer success managers

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Customer Success Center of Excellence (CS CoE)

Part I: CS CoE Phase 1: Core

Chapter 2: CS Business and Operational Models

Chapter 3: Key Customer Success Workflows and Processes

Chapter 4: Customer Onboarding – A Methodology

Chapter 5: Key Metrics and Beyond

Chapter 6: Making Sense of Data

Chapter 7: Designing Customer Success for Scale

Chapter 8: Role of CS Operations in Scaling a CS Practice

Part II: CS CoE Phase 2: Extended Functions

Chapter 9: Extending CS CoE

Chapter 10: Where Are We Headed?

Appendix A: The Evolution of Customer Success

Appendix B: Customer Account Team Roles and Responsibilities

Appendix C: Customer Satisfaction Survey Template

About the Authors

​Chitra Madhwacharyula is a self-directed and driven technology and business leader with comprehensive accomplishments leading post-sale customer and partner strategy, technical advisory, onboarding, adoption, retention, service monetization, and global cross-functional teams to maximize business goals. She has 20 years of global professional experience combined with innovative thinking and execution with strong hi-tech, finance, insurance, retail, manufacturing, and health care industry acumen. She has demonstrated success in developing and executing programs in complex, fast-paced organizations.

She has a highly organized, creative problem-solver who excels at leading teams through challenging projects and translating complicated technology into easy-to-understand concepts and have proven expertise in retaining and growing multimillion-dollar contracts, budgets, products, and advising C-level executives.

Chitra hold a Masters in Computer Science from National University of Singapore and a Masters in Information Management from University of California at Berkeley. Herprofessional experiences includes working for companies like TIBCO, LinkedIn, Motorola, Ayla Networks, Couchbase and HPE. She is currently the head of Worldwide Customer Success Center of Excellence at HPE and responsible for enabling and supporting our 10+ worldwide geographies (geos) and all the Customer Success Managers (CSMs).

Shreesha Ramdas is SVP and GM at Medallia-Strikedeck. Previously he was the CEO and Co-founder of Strikedeck, customer success automation company. Before Strikedeck, Shreesha was the GM of the Marketing Cloud at CallidusCloud, Co-founder at LeadFormix (acquired by CallidusCloud) & OuterJoin, and General Manager at Yodlee. Prior to that, Shreesha led teams in Sales and Marketing at Catalytic Software, MW2 Consulting, and Tata. Shreesha is also active in the startup community as an advisor/investor- Workato, Enact, RevvSales, Elastica (Symantec), DX Continuum (ServiceNow), EmpInfo, Fullcast, ObeoHealth.