The Customer Success Elements were introduced by Gainsight in 2018 as a tool for solving Customer Success business challenges. I would recommend reading this Gainsight post written about it here.
What it will allow you to do is give you an idea of where you are today on the scale of transformative customer success and help focus your plans for building and developing each element.
Where to start?
Take a look at Gainsight’s maturity curve and do a quick assessment of where you are along it. If you’re new to the Periodic table of Customer Success Elements it’s a fun exercise to give a good assessment of where to focus your attention for work that will get you results.
The starting position will be different for everyone. It might be that you are heavily weighted in one element and it will depend on resources available, how you select the next elements to work on. My advice would be to work on what brings you the fastest and best results. For example, if you already have an email marketing function and stretched resources to cover the number of customers you have, then a tech touch program is an easy element to develop and officially launch. It will relieve your CSM’s of a number of accounts to proactively manage and give them time to focus on higher value customers who need a more 1:1 treatment model.
Don’t tackle it all at the same time
Unless you have all the resources available to tackle development in each element, start with 2 or 3, get them off the ground in a quarter and move onto the next few to build the foundations.
This has worked really well for me. I’ve heavily focused the team and other business resources on a quarterly plan to develop two or three elements. At the end of the quarter, the sense of achievement is great, everyone has helped contribute towards the goals and we do not become stale by a longer term focus on delivery.
Where to focus efforts for the greatest results
Once you have established a baseline in a few elements, you can go back and work on further strengthening a few more elements. Again, the focus at this second stage is where you can get the most bang for the buck but, there may be an element that requires a total overhaul in order to take you to the next level of transformation.
In the past, as part of a large team, we had depth of development in several elements, the Renewal Management for example, but we were far from reaching the nirvana of a fully functional tech touch or success planning solution. There were obstacles in the business that would require complex project management for change. This type of scenario however shouldn’t deter or de-motivate you or the team. Do the best you can do to strive for complete overhaul in the areas that give results for customer outcomes.
Getting to the stage where you are able to reliably and repeatedly deliver customer outcomes at scale then celebrate! This blog probably isn’t for you because you’ve a level of achievement that many teams won’t see for a long time or ever. At that stage you’re moving into much greater depths of collaboration working with the whole business to deliver a transformational customer centric experience, the pinnacle of Customer Success maturity.
If you have an idea for what you’d like for me to write about in more detail from this blog post please contact me.