Scaled CS: How to find the accounts that need help

In this economy, so many SaaS companies are experiencing high churn of their smallest accounts. Most are looking for cost-effective ways to give more love to those long-tail “unmanaged” accounts who don’t have a dedicated Customer Success Manager (CSM). Usually this calls for using a mixture of digital and human touches at scale.

But when your unmanaged “scale” segment is hundreds or even thousands of SaaS customers, how do you zero in on the accounts and users where a human touch will have the most impact? 

Here are my learnings from how my team leveraged customer behavioral data in Heap to shape our robust Growth CSM function and focus on our unmanaged “Growth Tier” accounts that need the most help:

1. Find the REACTIVE danger moments when accounts might be in trouble 

First, address the existing barriers that are keeping your customers from getting value in your product. Every CSM knows that two key danger moments are

• When the “champion” who cares most about your product leaves the company and a new champion needs to take over, and

• When the total number of product users at the company drops

We know that the moment these things happen, it’s critical to reach out to the account. We used Heap and Marketo to make sure we do that right away. Here’s how:

1. We created events in Heap to identify when any of these things happen:

   • An email from the account “champion” bounces back, or a crawl of LinkedIn shows a “champion” has left the account

   • The count of Weekly Active Users (WAU) this past month is at least 50% lower than the previous month

2. We then created Heap segments of users who have done those events, and synced those segments to Marketo. This way the moment any of these events happen, that account receives a triggered email from our Growth CSM team, asking if they need any help via email or meeting.

We currently have over 500 emails going out each week via these triggered campaigns, offering users tips, resources, and the opportunity to meet with a Growth CSM.

2. Experiment with different PROACTIVE campaigns 

Of course, the strategies above are all reactive: they all depend on your getting signal that customers might be struggling. But what happens if you think proactively? What’s the right way to support customers so that they never reduce their product usage?

This was our other set of strategies: testing proactive campaigns geared to prevent potential pitfalls. To do this we put together a list of questions that would help us categorize accounts into segments, which would then receive different proactive outreach. Then we tested.

Here were our questions:

• Behavior-based:

  • What is the account health breakdown (Healthy/Neutral/Unhealthy) of the accounts in our Growth Tier? (Note that our Account Health Score was built in Catalyst and we sync daily snapshots to Heap)

  • What percentage of Growth Tier accounts have at least one Weekly Active User?

  • What percentage of Growth Tier accounts have users who have attended our 1:Many enablement workshops?

• Time-based:

  • How does health score in the first 120 days after signing the deal compare to account health for the remainder of the contract tenure?

• Demographic-based:

  • What is the average number of licensed Heap users in each Growth Tier  account?

  • What percentage of Growth Tier accounts have at least 1 contact populated in their Relationship Plan?

  • What percentage of Growth Tier accounts have added Connect or Session Replay (add-on products) to their core Heap product?

Then, we used the data we gathered to form hypotheses about moments when customers would want help. Over the next 2 months we launched several proactive email campaigns targeting those moments:

• Account has red health score - reach out to champion

• Account has yellow health score - reach out to champion

• Account has yellow health score - reach out to most active users

• Account is in first 120 days after deal signed - reach out to all licensed users

• Admin has not been active in the tool for the past 90 days - reach out to Admin

• Account has 0 Weekly Active Users - reach out to champion

• Account could get more value if they used Connect or Session Replay - reach out to champion and top 5 users

• User just attended a 1:Many enablement workshop - reach out to that user

Then we tested! We measured each campaign to see which ones led to the most fruitful meetings or email interactions where our Growth CSMs were able to improve health score of the accounts.

Of the above list, the proactive campaigns that performed the best were: 

• Account has yellow health score - reach out to most active users

• Account is in first 120 days after deal signed - reach out to all licensed users

• Account would get more value if they used Connect or Session Replay - reach out to Champion and top 5 users

So we turned on our “Frequent Users” and “First 120” campaigns as ongoing triggers which fire to over 300 users each week, inviting them to meet with a Growth CSM. And we send our Connect and Session Replay campaigns as batch-and-blasts each quarter to eligible accounts, inviting them to try these add-ons.

From all these experiments, we were also able to see more general patterns: 

• Targeting the users in Growth Tier accounts who used Heap most frequently worked better than targeting the contacts tagged as Economic Buyers or Champions, because at these accounts that contact data is often blank or outdated.

• Targeting Neutral-health accounts worked better than targeting Unhealthy accounts, because by the time their health score was so low, customers rarely wanted to talk to us. We realized it was crucial to catch them while they were still in “Neutral” health, before their health got any worse.

• Targeting accounts earlier in their journey worked much better than later in their renewal cycle.

Conclusion

Implementing a successful Scaled CS model requires ruthless prioritization of the long-tail accounts where your human touches can have the greatest impact. I guarantee that when you leverage these data-driven techniques for finding reactive danger moments and proactive signals, you’ll be able to focus your limited resources on the highest-ROI efforts to move the needle on customer success and retention.