How to Scale Customer Success for High-Touch Customers

How to Scale Customer Success for High-Touch CustomersHow to Scale Customer Success for High-Touch Customers

A high-touch customer success experience is essential for businesses to nurture strong relationships with high-value clients. That said, as businesses grow, maintaining this level of personalized engagement can be challenging. 

Scaling customer success without compromising service quality can be tricky to navigate. Maintaining a high-touch customer success experience while scaling requires significant strategic planning, innovative tools, and a clear focus on customer needs. 

This blog post will guide you through the challenges, best practices, and actionable strategies you can use to implement the high-touch service that your clients expect. Whether your goal is to enterprise customer success management or to enhance customer loyalty in a SaaS environment, these insights will empower you to grow sustainably while keeping customer satisfaction a priority. 

Understanding High-Touch Customer Success

High-touch customer is a proactive, personalized approach to client management where customers get personalized support along with tailored solutions. This goes beyond transactional support and is focused on building strong relationships, understanding unique customer needs, and driving long-term value.

SaaS or B2B customers often have intricate requirements and higher stakes tied to the success of your product or service. A high-touch approach ensures these customers receive the guidance, customization, and attention they need to reach their goals. Successful high-touch customer success can foster trust, maximize product adoption, and improve retention, making it an important strategy for maintaining satisfaction, loyalty, and sustainable business growth.

The Challenges of Scaling High-Touch Customer Success

Typically, when you think of high-touch service, it’s at odds with scaling or enterprise customer success management. Bigger companies typically don’t offer the white-glove service customers expect from smaller businesses, making it challenging for businesses to scale and maintain this level of service. The challenges for these companies come from a few different angles:

  • Resource allocation: Scaling high-touch customer success demands substantial investments in both workforce and technology. Companies need to balance the need for more staff with budget constraints to maintain high engagement levels.
  • Maintaining personalization: As the customer base grows, delivering individualized attention becomes more difficult. A study reveals that 70% of customers prefer a personalized experience where a company knows their history such as support calls and buying history, which can be tricky while growing.
  • Consistency across accounts: Providing a uniform experience across all accounts is critical for customer satisfaction. Inconsistent service can lead to reduced trust and loyalty, making it crucial to standardize processes while prioritizing personalization.
  • Technology integration: Integrating the right tools like CRM systems, automation tools, and analytics platforms requires seamless coordination. According to McKinsey, 70% of digital transformations fail, in part due to insufficient investment in integrating new technologies.

Customer Success Engagement Models

Different customer success engagement models cater to the diverse needs of clients, balancing resources with the level of support required. Selecting the right model depends on multiple factors such as the size of your business, customer value, and scalability goals. Here’s a look at three main engagement models most businesses rely on.

High-Touch Engagement Model

High-touch is focused on personalized, frequent interactions with customers and is ideal for high-value and enterprise customers who require tailored support and guidance. Examples include:

  • Dedicated account managers
  • Custom onboarding documents
  • Regular business reviews

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Low-Touch Engagement Model

Low-touch models rely on scalable, automated solutions to manage a large customer base. This model is better for small businesses or self-service clients. Examples include:

  • Chatbots
  • Knowledge bases
  • Automated email campaigns

Hybrid Engagement Model

A hybrid approach blends high-touch and low-touch strategies, providing a flexible model that can adapt to customer needs. For instance, enterprise clients may receive personalized onboarding, while support agents rely on automating routine tasks for smaller accounts.

Strategies and Best Practices for Effective Engagement with High-Touch Customers

Scaling high-touch customer success isn’t simple, but with the right strategies and best practices, it can help streamline workflows across the board while allowing your customer success team to offer a better service. The right approach balances efficiency and personalization, empowering teams to maintain strong client relationships while managing growth effectively. Below, we’ll look at some key ways to help you improve engagement while expanding.

Workflow Automation

Automating key workflows is a foolproof way to scale high-touch customer success without sacrificing quality. By automating routine tasks like onboarding reminders, check-in scheduling, and reporting, teams can focus on value-driven activities, such as building relationships and addressing complex customer queries. CRMs or customer success platforms with automation features allow teams to streamline workflows while still maintaining visibility into each client interaction.

Offering Self-Service Models Alongside Personalization

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Combining self-service tools with tailored service interactions creates harmony between scalability and customer satisfaction. Self-service portals, knowledge bases, and AI-driven chatbots empower clients to resolve simple queries quickly while freeing up customer success teams for high-impact tasks. Tailoring a self-service experience through personalized recommendations or curated content ensures high-value clients feel valued and supported.

Being Both Reactive and Proactive

Effective customer success teams strike a balance between being reactive by addressing immediate issues and practicing proactive customer success by preventing problems before they arise. Regular health checks, usage insights, and tailored suggestions help teams proactively care for customers. At the same time, being reactive by responding quickly to customer concerns helps build trust.

Productizing Customer Success

Productizing customer success by turning experiences into scalable offerings can drive efficiency while maintaining high-touch enterprise customer engagement. For example, companies can offer better onboarding programs, tiered customer success plans, or workshops by relying on platforms like EverAfter that can be tailored to common client needs. Productizing these services helps maintain consistency across accounts while creating repeatable processes that cater to high-value customers without overextending resources.

How to Scale High-Touch Customer Success With EverAfter

High-Touch onboarding Interface

For companies to be able to continue offering their regular standard of service while expanding their businesses, it’s essential to turn to the right tools. With an enterprise customer engagement platform like EverAfter, your customer success teams will be able to automate routine tasks and create unique customer portals for each account, making it easier to offer multiple levels of customer service while maintaining a high level of quality.

EverAfter allows teams to productize the high-touch customer onboarding for SaaS companies from start to finish with both high-touch and low-touch approaches. With EverAfter, companies can streamline repetitive processes like onboarding workflows while entrusting customers to act more autonomously with self-service. At the same time, the platform can help teams humanize elements of a low-touch customer approach by personalizing the journey with curated resources, topically relevant videos, and more. 

A Gartner survey shows that 86% of B2B customers expect companies they work with to be well-informed on their personal data in interactions, making visibility into the customer journey vital. With EverAfter’s onboarding solution, agents get deeper visibility into each customer journey, allowing them to work reactively to help customers when they get stuck while also remaining proactive by giving them all the tools they need to succeed in one place through a customizable portal.

Scaling High-Touch Customer Success: A Balancing Act

Growing your business while keeping high-touch customer success a priority is nothing short of a challenging balance. You need to prioritize both personalization and growth, which at face value, seem at odds. However, by incorporating platforms like EverAfter, you don’t need to sacrifice a custom onboarding experience when expanding your business. Through tailoring automated customer workflows, solutions like EverAfter allow your customers to feel cared for even while your company grows.

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