What is Playbook?

The customer success playbook is a set of rules or guidelines to navigate through the customer instances. It inculcates the creation and structuring of key customer success processes to make a unified team with best practices for customer management. The customer success playbook helps to align team goals with customers in order to drive improved results and retain customers. These books are often not a one-size-fits-all solution; in fact, they vary based on business models and company requirements.

A business may have various playbooks that may address a high number of customer interactions. Each book is curated for targeted guidance to align customer success teams with organizational expectations. Having a set of playbooks can be beneficial in managing cross-departmental accountability and gauging the results of customer interactions.

Crucial Components of a Customer Success Playbook

The details within the playbooks can change based on use case. But the structure remains more or less the same. Some of the critical components of a playbook are

• Objectives, which are the desired outcomes the playbook must achieve.
• Reference material that includes scripts or knowledge base resources team members can use for customer conversation.
• Team responsibilities that shed light on the roles of each team member.
• Step-by-step guidance involving detailed actions for tracking team goals.

If your playbooks are advanced with complete solutions to most of the company’s needs for managing customers, you can stay ahead of the competition.

What are the types of customer success playbooks?

Customer Qualification Playbooks

Before applying monitoring or onboarding playbooks, begin with qualification playbooks. These will subsequently allow you to construct efficient, customized workflows.

In real life, you can qualify your customers on a variety of parameters:

Communication language: To make it standardized, designate the language options of your customers. As you add a new customer, a playbook can select if they speak French, English, both languages, or other. A new contact will have an automatically applied tag specifying the customer’s native language. With multiple-language accounts, you will be asked to choose the customer’s preferred language for each new contact to receive future messages.

Subscription plan: When you gain a new customer, a playbook may ask you to define their subscription plan. This will determine future playbooks. For example, onboarding or support tiers can be configured according to the customer’s selected plan.

Technology stack: It may be CRM, HRIS, or e-commerce platforms. Have the CSM validate this data when bringing on a new customer.

Contact Qualification Playbooks

Prior to creating more tactical playbooks, one must know how to react depending on the type of contact, as contacts have varying expectations. This is where contact qualification playbooks come in handy. They help ensure the right roles are being assigned to the right people. The trigger condition can be made at the contact creation level. This is not the case with existing contacts. To overcome this, you can use a catch-up playbook triggered after every interaction between the CSM and the customer if the contact has not been qualified before.

Additionally, if you have a large customer base, you may end up being swamped with requests at the time of contact creation. Use a playbook that is triggered only at the time of exchanges, like email or phone, allowing you to qualify contacts incrementally.

Account segmentation and account allocation Playbook

This must-have playbook starts by asking the team manager to assign a CSM as soon as a new customer arrives. The assigned CSM gets notified to indicate whether the account is high-potential or not. The account is then automatically placed into a segment depending on its potential and MRR.

Both high MRR and high potential place customers into a category that is separate from, say, customers with high MRR but low development potential.

Crisis Management Playbook

This playbook will navigate companies through unforeseen adversity or crisis situations, upholding customer trust and relationship integrity.

As a case in point, in the case of a product recall or service disruption, this playbook would walk the business through the crisis, laying out communication plans, support procedures, and how to fix the situation without losing customer trust.

Renewal and Upsell Playbook

This customer success playbook is centered on keeping customers and growing their usage through renewals, upselling, or cross-selling. Think about a digital marketing firm that, having broken down a client’s successful social media campaign, sees an opportunity to upsell B2B SEO services. They go to the client with a customized offer, pointing out how SEO optimization will enhance their current success and generate even more online activity. This tactic, outlined in their playbook, is based on data-driven insights and individualized communication, designed not merely to renew the original agreement but to upgrade it with added, quality services.

Escalation Management Playbook

This playbook assumes the responsibility for dealing with customer complaints and issues in an efficient manner. Here, the aim would be to reduce customer churn and increase satisfaction to the utmost degree.

For instance, for a technical products company, an Escalation Management Playbook might detail how technical issues are to be handled, comprising response time periods, communication guidelines, and steps for resolving the problems. This will make customers feel that they have been heard and looked after when in need.

Feedback and Continuous Improvement Playbook

This playbook is designed based on systematic methods of gauging customer feedback, its analysis, and the implementation of changes. It focuses on the collection of valuable customer feedback that can help address pain points as well as improve factors that are well liked by customers. By using a feedback playbook, firms can design strategies for the integration of customer reviews into product developmental cycles.

Churn Prediction Playbook

The churn prediction playbook is a strategic guide that showcases steps and processes to analyze and prevent customer churn. Churn takes place when customers stop using your product/services. This allows companies to retain customers through actionable strategies and helpful steps. The key components of a customer churn prediction playbook are

Data Collection: gathering and using customer data such as feedback to read why churn is occurring.

Churn triggers: defining KPIs to signal a customer who is at risk of churn with decreased usage.

Risk scoring: assigning high-risk customers scores based on likelihood of churn and segmenting them accordingly.

Intervention strategies: developing targeted interventions to meet with the concerns of customers, such as via personalized communication.

Escalation procedures: establishing these helps with clear escalation processes involving senior teams and specialized support.

How to build a customer success playbook?

Creating and designing a customer success playbook helps your team to better understand the business model and how to align business strategies with customer needs. It also involves consistent refinement to what approaches you are using:

Some steps for creating playbooks are

Analysis of business and customer base

As the first step, you must begin by analyzing your business model, offerings, and customer demographics. For instance, a software company with specialization in project management tools can do thorough market research to gauge an understanding of various customer segments or potential users in small or medium-sized enterprises. It can allow insights about what features are needed for project tracking, where companies lag, and thus apply marketing tactics to allow others to know about their features or specialization areas.

Involvement of Stakeholders

It is important to involve various stakeholders such as service reps, sales teams, and customers in playbook development. For instance, conducting in-depth interviews with sales teams can offer insights into customer needs and buying behaviors. These interviews can help identify effective strategies and tactics that sales teams use to meet customer needs and close deals, which can then be incorporated into the playbook.

Also, establishing a customer advisory board can provide a platform for customers to share their feedback and insights, allowing the business to develop solutions that meet their needs and exceed their expectations.

Tailor strategies for various customer segments

You must develop varying strategies for customer segments and journeys. For instance, a SaaS business can create playbooks for segments of users, dividing small and medium enterprises. This can help to separately address user segments and cater to their problems or challenges they may be facing.

Use the right tech stack

Identify and use the right tech tools that can be advantageous in the development of the playbook. For instance, utilizing collaboration software like Slack or Microsoft Teams can facilitate communication and feedback among team members. Project management tools like Asana, Trello, or Jira can help organize and track progress, ensuring that deadlines are met and tasks are completed.

Additionally, document management tools like Google Drive, Dropbox, or SharePoint can provide a centralized location for storing and sharing playbook documents, making it easier to access and update information. Analytics and reporting tools like Google Analytics or Tableau can help track key performance indicators (KPIs) and provide insights into customer behavior.

Merge the playbook into daily operations.

You must ensure that the playbook becomes a part of the daily operations and must not isolate but remain a living part of the business ecosystem. For instance, a SaaS company can merge the playbook on upselling to ensure customers are sold products based on preferences, thereby enhancing how to deal with such cases where any upselling opportunity arises.

Establish a feedback loop

In addition to internal metrics and measurements, you can actively collect customer feedback to measure how effective your strategies are. For instance, a SaaS business with project management software may establish a feedback loop by offering an in-app feedback tool allowing customers to offer feedback and suggestions within the software. They may also send Net Promoter Score surveys to customers to gauge loyalty.

Create a Culture of Ongoing Learning

Promote ongoing learning and adaptation, making playbook revision an ongoing part of your business growth. For example, a software company may hold regular department meetings to review the addition of new features and related information in their playbook. These meetings would be used to determine the technology’s effect on work efficiency, solicit feedback from employees regarding its ease of use, and brainstorm additional means of improving real-time tracking ability for enhanced customer satisfaction.

What are the benefits of playbooks?

For any business maintaining a SaaS playbook is important for several reasons. Here we have identified a few for you to better understand the benefits of a playbook:

Team Management

For any startup or SaaS, it is necessary to manage the team carefully as it helps keep all teams on the same page. To serve this, a playbook is crucial as it helps new hiring and existing team to do better. It allows everyone to stay updated regarding any policy changes and makes onboarding and training a lot easier.

Avoids Confusion

Simplification of complicated business processes is important for a company to thrive. A playbook helps with familiarization with major KPIs for making necessary adjustments without any confusion. A SaaS playbook helps employees to get to the roots of an issue and find solutions with ease. It thereby avoids any inefficiencies in business processes.

Centralization of company information

Organization of process guidelines can make it complicated for team members to find the needed documents. Playbooks can answer questions like How to do abc things? What are instructions for xyz things. Skimming through unstructured poorly managed data can be tough. That’s where playbooks can offer guidance making information centralized for all to access.