Customer success is when your customers choose your product and company because they are happy and see ROI appropriately. This revenue was once the responsibility of customer service or account executives. However, customers now want more personalized products and services. This is where a customer success specialist comes into the picture. A customer success specialist is one who is responsible for the customer realizing their goal and ensuring customers are happy.
The main goal for B2B SaaS companies is to keep their customers. SaaS companies need to deliver value to customers, making them stay back with the company. In fact, onboarding is the peak time of churn for customers.
What is a Customer Success Specialist?
A customer Success specialist takes your customer from the level of onboarding through various key stages and ensures they understand the comfort. This lets you improve the customer lifetime value and overall profit from it. A customer success specialist allows you to increase your customer’s lifetime value. You can learn from customer success managers and even other stakeholders in the customer success process. A customer success manager who can ensure customer success is a customer specialist. A customer success professional will help you learn more about the company and its customers.
Most B2B SaaS companies must introduce customer success professionals early in their sales to CS team handoff. This will help the CS specialist take over the customer account to build a new relationship. Top questions a customer success specialist needs to ask-
- What are your pain points?
- How can we improve them?
- Is there a solution you’ve used previously?
- Is there any pain point you want to address immediately?
- How do you think this is affecting your growth?
A customer success specialist is responsible for handling the customer launch lifecycle. This starts with sending the customer the product credentials, guides, product roadmaps, and any FAQs. This will help customers familiarize themselves with the product. You also need to train customers on how to use the product.
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Role of a Customer Success Specialist
The customer success specialist is one who needs to be the centerpiece for a lot of conversations. These include customer support professionals, sales development representatives, marketing teams, and more to drive conversations around the product.
The customer success specialist also interacts with the sales representatives to understand their relationship with the customer. Based on the inputs, you can build a new relationship with the customer and chalk up a strategy for customer satisfaction. A customer success specialist will need all the information on the customer when they were prospects to make onboarding easier.
A customer success specialist also needs to hold regular meetings with the marketing and product teams. They need to possess complete knowledge about the product. Customer success specialists need to work with product designers and developers to understand how the product interplays with the customer’s needs.
Responsibilities of customer success specialist
A customer success specialist has multiple responsibilities. The customer success specialist needs to manage specific aspects of the customer lifecycle. They need to handle the customer and ensure they are used to the product and its nature, complexity, market use, customer problems, and more.
Helping Customers Understand the Product
The customer success specialist helps customers understand the product by developing tutorials. They will create a training program that customers can go through to understand the product. This will help customers know how to use the product. This can be interactive walkthroughs, blogs, webinars, and videos about the product. All of this will help improve the prospects in the company and help the user reach value. This decreases time to value and helps manage information in a simple manner.
Recording customer behavior
One of the primary responsibilities of a customer success specialist is to record customer behavior. This means understanding how customers are reacting to the product and business. How is the customer responding to a new feature or existing feature? Are they excited about the value they’d find? Is it easy to use these features? Is it going to be hard to explain the feature to customers? Is the customer behavior close to what was expected? Are there any anomalies in how the customer is from their buyer persona? You need to understand features better based on how they are helpful for customers.
Other responsibilities of the customer success specialist that overlap with a customer success manager include-
- Driving product adoption
- Enhancing technical knowledge and understanding of customers
- Manage customer health along the customer journey
- Educate customers on the product, value, and performance
- Build credibility at various levels and enhance the customer life cycle
- Make the onboarding process simpler and easier to handle
- Improve customer conversations in a systematic manner
Skills and Qualifications for a customer success specialist
- Five years of experience in customer experience management
- Familiarity with customer success software tools
- Excellent creative and thinking skills
- Strong presentation and communication skills
- Ability to boost product adoption
- Manage customer journey and complex activities
Bottom Line
The customer success specialist must ensure that customers get value from their products and services. It is also necessary for them to create roadmaps for customer success and build cross-functional teams to necessitate better results. Building the best practices and plans to meet customer demands is also important.
Stanley Deepak is an accomplished sales and marketing professional with 15+ years of experience. He loves tech products and book reading. He writes on philosophy and culture on LinkedIn.
Published July 20, 2022, Updated February 14, 2024
