The Playbooks Guide for Customer Success Managers

The handoff of the customer from sales to CSMs should be smooth and offer the same level of care and attention they’ve come to expect from your organization. CSMs are in charge of keeping customers successful and happy—they’re the key to retention.

But when CSMs are overloaded with accounts, it’s easy to get bogged down by day-to-day tasks. Important events like renewals might get missed, customer messages go unanswered, and customers may feel left out of the loop when new features or problems arise.

Playbooks gives CSMs more visibility into and accountability for their accounts. They can see quickly how a customer is coming along at any stage of their journey and engage with them at the right time with the right message. CSMs can also receive activity triggers whenever there is a change for an account record or be alerted if a certain amount of time has passed without activity on an account—ensuring that customer relationships remain healthy.

Here’s how Playbooks gives CSMs the tools to manage their accounts intelligently and give customers the attention they need, whether they have dozens or hundreds of accounts.

Stay Ahead of the Customer Journey

For organizations who’s reps manage large books of business, automation for customer success managers (CSMs) is essential. The right tools enable CSMs to focus their energy on the right accounts at the right time, no matter the number of accounts they manage.

Keeping up with renewal timelines, tracking onboarding and implementation, and pinpointing issues before they become a problem for sales are just a few of the ways that CSMs can easily stay on top of their accounts through automation.

For customers with fewer accounts, beginning with Playbooks allows CSM teams to scale quickly and without sacrificing quality or letting tasks slip through the cracks.

Automation and Personalization for Onboarding

During the sales cycle, reps use automation to customize messages, cadences, and contacts. This level of personalization doesn’t have to stop after the deal closes. Using a tool like Playbooks during onboarding gives customers the same tailored experience as they go through the next important step of their journey.

Customers purchase products as a solution to business problems, and hangups with onboarding, using or understanding key features, or other failures to adopt are top reasons why they churn. And while your organization may collect a lot of user data, gathering it into one place and turning it into action is what makes that data valuable.

Automating the adoption phase of the customer lifecycle allows CSMs to create and view adoption metrics. If a customer dips below certain levels, they can receive educational emails or an invitation to schedule a session with their account manager to resolve issues before they become a renewal problem. CSMs can even use integrations to email personalized video messages to customers at the point of purchase or throughout the onboarding process.

Communicate Important Announcements Quickly

At XANT, our Customer Success Managers use our product to deliver release notes to customers after a release.

Not only is this useful for notifying customers about our latest features, but we can also integrate calendar invites and LinkedIn messages. If a customer wants to talk to their account manager about the new release, they can do that seamlessly.

After every new release or throughout the customer lifecycle, automation allows customers to receive content that matches their journey. Playbooks keeps the line of communication open to account managers so customers can stay up to date on what’s new with your products, provide feedback, and get support. All of these events are tracked and become invaluable during the sales and renewal cycles.

Harnessing customer data with Playbooks and turning it into actionable and automated goals and tasks makes a CSM’s job easier. As a result, customers will have a better onboarding and adoption experience. Your CSMs might be managing hundreds of accounts, but every customer will feel taken care of on an individual level. Demo Playbooks now to see how it can help your CSMs.