According to a recent poll we ran in Pulse’s executive community, 97% of respondents say that Customer Success departments are at least somewhat important to the execution of a Product-Led Growth Go-to-Market strategy, with 20% of respondents saying that Customer Success plays a very important role in its execution.

If your company defines itself, or aims to define itself, as a Product-Led Growth (PLG) organization, it’s imperative that all departments within your organization, from Sales to Customer Success, support that mission in order for your Go-To Market strategy to find success at scale. 

In this post, we’ll define Product-Led Customer Success, cover the key ways Vitally supports Product-Led Customer Success, and highlight features of Vitally’s CS platform that can help your organization scale its Customer Success efforts to better support PLG.

[Executive Summary: Download the one-minute version of this post]

What is Product-Led Customer Success?

If we’re being honest, Product-Led Customer Success is not all that different from ‘traditional’ Customer Success. The biggest difference lies in how we approach the customer and set them up for success with our product. And, because Product-Led Customer Success is far more data-driven than traditional Customer Success, it makes the approach a lot more scalable. 

Unlike traditional Customer Success, product-led customer success is based on the constant monitoring of your users’ in-app data, behaviors, and engagement, along with assessments of customer health. 

Why Product-Led Customer Success?

When we know which stages users feel stuck in, pinpoint where they’re facing obstacles, and therefore help them overcome those obstacles, we’re enabled to boost our overall trial-to-paid conversion rates, and, in turn, it will also improve retention and overall customer success and growth.

In-app data can tell us exactly how customers feel when they’re inside a product. Rather than guestimate how we can be helpful, we know exactly what needs to be done. Now that the actual product is driving growth, we can start using product data to tailor the perfect customer experience. This is the most effective way to ensure a successful long-term relationship.

The Three Pillars of Product-Led Customer Success

To better conceptualize Product-Led Customer Success and how it differs from more traditional Customer Success strategies, you can break Product-Led Customer Success down into three pillars; clearly defined user journey(s), user onboarding, and feature adoption flows, various user segments (both account-based and product-based), and the ability to proactively reach out to and educate customers (both in-app and out of the app). 

User journeys, user onboarding, and feature adoption flows: User journeys, user onboarding, and feature adoption flows will differ from product to product, but some general rules apply to everyone, specifically as they relate to two key moments in the user journey—when your customers realize what the product can do for them and when they try your product and actually experience the benefit/solution to their pain point(s).

Account-Based and product-based user segments: In Product-Led Customer Success, there are two different user segmentation methodologies you’ll work with. 

• Account-based user segmentation: Segmenting your users based on account data (company size, premium clients, free trial, etc.)‍
• In-app user segmentation: Segmenting your users by different in-app events, such as the time when they were last seen, the number of features they activated, and so on.
  

Proactive outreach and educating customers: Having the ability to reach out to your customers exactly when they need it, in a way that’s scalable, is one of the aspects of Product-Led Customer Success that makes it, well, successful. With this strategy, customer outreach needs to be proactive, timely, fast, and educational. And, thanks to automation and user onboarding triggers, user journey(s), user segments, and user identification, this can be easily achieved—especially because you’ll know exactly when and why you should be reaching out.

Key Ways Vitally Supports Product-Led Customer Success

Empower Customer Success Teams

Vitally combines data across your tech stack to create a real-time, unified customer view so CS teams and leadership can:

• Analyze customer success metrics at scale
• Gain visibility to in-app product behavior
• Identify blockers, trial opportunities, and upsells
• Reduce churn with alerts for accounts at risk
• Build comprehensive reports and dashboards

Immediate Time to Value (TTV)

Vitally leads the industry in TTV. Get up and running in minutes with our suite of plug-and-play integrations to power customer experiences faster; measure results in real-time with out-of-the-box reporting.

Seamless data integrations

Unify your entire tech-stack and stay informed with real-time data using Vitally’s bi-directional syncing capabilities. 

Ability to scale with your customers

Deliver white-glove customer experiences at scale by automating workflows and optimizing them for each stage of the customer lifecycle. 

Automate repetitive tasks

Reduce the time your team spends on carrying out repetitive tasks by centralizing customer data and automating the completion of tasks, in turn decreasing costs around the upkeep of accounts.

Accelerate growth

Apply team best-practices to every account at scale with Vitally Playbooks; track the KPIs that drive your business at every stage of the customer lifecycle with fully-customizable dashboards and out-of-the-box reporting.

Customize customer experiences at scale

With Vitally's Conversations feature, you can auto-schedule conversations to go out at the right time and make manual edits when further personalization is needed to increase engagement.

Vitally features that support Product-Led Customer Success broken down by pillar

User Flows

Automation: Automate common Customer Success needs by performing a series of actions (e.g. fire a risk indicator, send an email, create a task) on accounts or users that meet certain requirements.

Project Management: Create a project for your process i.e. onboarding a new customer or contract renewals, then save as a template to use time and time again. Along with templates, you can also create custom categories, and statuses for any customer project scenario. 

Segmentation

Customer Health Scores: When creating customer health scores, you can define a health equation for each segment, defining specific health conditions and weights for each. 

Success Metrics: Success Metrics are custom KPIs defined using the data you feed into Vitally, and then calculated for each of your accounts. You can then auto-organize your accounts into any number of segments, using any of these data points (and beyond). 

Proactive Outreach

Conversations: View and start conversations with users at your accounts directly within Vitally; we’ll even pull in data from conversation tools across your tech-stack like Intercom, Gmail, and Outreach. 

Indicators: Reach out to your customers exactly when they need it, in a way that’s scalable, with automated alerts (indicators) that detect significant opportunity or risk states customers may transition into during their lifetime with your product.

Now that you have better idea of what Product-Led Customer Success is, the key ways Vitally supports Product-Led Customer Success, and the features within Vitally’s CS platform that can help your organization scale its Customer Success efforts to better support PLG, schedule a personalized demo with Vitally to learn how our platform can help your organization scale its Customer Success efforts to better support Product-Led Growth.

Don’t own the Customer Success tech stack at your organization? Share the Executive Summary of this post with the person who does. 

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