You can’t have a successful business without happy customers. And that’s the goal of a customer success team – to help your clients thrive using your product. As your company grows, scaling a customer success team is crucial for maintaining these strong relationships and driving long-term growth.
Knowing how to scale a customer success team requires understanding when to expand, what key milestones to aim for, and how to hire the right talent. This guide explains how to build and scale a customer success team…successfully!
Understanding When You Need Customer Success, as Opposed to Customer Service or Sales
Customer success is often confused with customer service or sales, but it serves a distinct purpose in long-term client satisfaction and retention. If you want to scale a customer success team correctly you need to be able to recognize the unique benefits of each of these roles.
The Difference Between Customer Success and Customer Service
- Customer service is mostly reactive, addressing customer issues and troubleshooting problems as they happen.
- Customer success is proactive, focused on helping customers achieve their goals with your product or service.
While customer service helps resolve issues, customer success works to prevent them in the first place. When 52% of customers say they’d switch to a competitor after just one unsatisfactory experience, preventing problems is key to maintaining a customer base.
Sales teams focus on acquiring new customers, while customer success teams work to ensure those customers continue to find value in your product. This improves long-term retention and upselling opportunities.
When Is It Time to Create or Scale Up a Customer Success Team?
When to build and scale a customer success team depends on several factors, including growth rate, customer retention challenges, and revenue expansion opportunities. A well-timed customer success team expansion can prevent customer churn and drive lifetime value.
Watch for these signs it’s time to scale your custom success team:
- Rapid Growth: If your customer base is expanding quickly and your current team is struggling to keep up with onboarding, support, and relationship management, it’s a sign you need to scale. Growing a customer base without proper success management can lead to dissatisfaction and churn.
- Missed Revenue Expansion: If your customers are showing interest in upsells, cross-sells, or expanding their use of your product, but your team lacks the time to handle these opportunities, it's time to scale. A well-staffed customer success team will help drive revenue growth.
- Declining Customer Satisfaction: If your company’s Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT), or engagement rates are dropping, it indicates that your current team is overwhelmed and unable to provide the high-touch experience customers expect. Scaling will allow the team to provide proactive outreach and problem-solving.
Using Churn Rate as an Indicator
One of the most significant signals that it’s time to scale a customer success team is an increasing churn rate. If customers are leaving at a high rate, it indicates your team is too small to provide the support needed. A well-scaled customer success team can identify pain points and work proactively to address them before customers churn.
Customer expectations also increase as a company grows, making customer retention even more challenging. As you scale, a proactive approach to customer engagement becomes essential to maintain these strong relationships and keep customers satisfied with your product or service.
Key Milestones to Aim for When Scaling a Customer Success Team
Focus on clear objectives and measurable outcomes when scaling a customer success team. These will keep you on track. Here are key milestones that indicate smart scaling:
- Define Clear Roles: Establish the scope of customer success responsibilities and clearly differentiate them from customer service and sales.
- Implement Scalable Processes: Ensure standardized onboarding, training, and engagement strategies.
- Leverage Customer Data: Use customer data to help predict potential churn and proactively address issues customers are facing. AI-powered predictive analytics can help you personalize customer success efforts like never before.
- Set Measurable KPIs: Define your target goals for metrics such as Net Revenue Retention (NRR), Customer Lifetime Value (CLV), and Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) to track success.
- Expand Technology and Automation: Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems and automation tools can help you scale customer success efforts more efficiently.
Understanding What Type of Talent to Look For
Scaling a customer success team requires a strong focus on recruiting the right talent. Don’t rush the process. You want to ensure you find talent that is not only good at the job, but also the right fit for your company culture.
Unlike sales roles, which focus on closing deals, customer success professionals need to prioritize long-term customer relationships and success. Look for applicants who excel at:
- Communication
- Relationship Building
- Customer Service
- Strategic Thinking
- Problem Solving
- Empathy
- Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Software
Customer success management can be a stressful job. As you scale, be sure to provide your customer success team with the information they need to understand the value and meaning their work brings to the company. Providing good benefits and work-life balance can also help retain quality customer success team members.
Sales or Customer Service Backgrounds
Many successful customer success professionals come from sales or customer service backgrounds. Sales experience helps them understand revenue growth strategies, while customer service experience ensures they can effectively engage and support clients. The ideal hire will have a blend of both skill sets, allowing them to balance relationship management with proactive problem-solving.
Good Listeners vs. Good Talkers
A common misconception is that talented customer success professionals need to be persuasive talkers. In fact, active listening is a far more important skill because customers always want to feel heard. Understanding customer needs, identifying pain points, and offering personalized solutions all require exceptional listening skills. Empathy and problem-solving abilities often outweigh the ability to deliver a perfect pitch.
Correctly building and scaling a customer success team requires strategic planning, recognizing when you hit key milestones, and hiring the right talent. Your company’s long-term growth depends on customer happiness and retention, and a strong customer success team can help you reach those goals!
Want more scale-up advice? Read this next: How to Scale a Startup: Signs Your Company is Ready to Grow
