How CleverTap Scaled Its Customer Success Team to Delight Customers In 100+ Countries

“We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It’s our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.” – Jeff Bezos

Running a great customer success practice can be challenging in a high growth environment. And when you expand to multiple time zones, countries, and continents, it increases the complexity.

Your customers expect to see value in your company everyday.

Over time, we learned from our experience and created an organization that is driven to build relationships that create tremendous value for our customers. We’ve scaled our customer success practice to serve 4,000+ customers in over 100 countries and counting.

Today, we share some Colombia Phone Numbers List customer success best practices that created organizational differentiators for CleverTap and drove long-term customer relationships. Let’s start by looking at the difficulties of running a SaaS customer success team on a global scale.

4 Roadblocks High-Growth SaaS Businesses Must Solve Before They Scale Across Geographies

When we started CleverTap, we worked with companies in US and Asia, and our customer success team handled both sales and service. It reduced our overhead, but it also took our team’s time away from selling. This led to longer sales cycles and conflict during the selling process, since the same person was solving the issue and trying to cross-sell and up-sell. We made sure that the Customer Success team was focused on serving the customer (no more selling).

As we expanded our customer base, we had to address some challenges along the way.

Timely Service

Customers are willing to wait for customer service—but not for very long. In fact, they expect a response within an hour. When the average customer service response time is over 12 hours, being quicker to respond is a great way to stand out from the competition.

Internal communication

Customer success reps can’t solve every customer’s problems. Many a times a software engineer needs to get involved. Reps need to have a system in place to get engineers the information they need to start working on the problem. Ensuring the right tools and process is very important here.

Transparency and accountability

62% of companies don’t respond to customer emails. Without transparency and accountability, that number isn’t going to improve. Coordinating worldwide customer success teams and clients makes that especially difficult.

Getting a system in place right away is crucial, but it’s not always a priority for expanding businesses. That’s a big mistake that we knew we couldn’t afford to make.

Transmitting feedback

Customer success reps are often the first people who learn about issues customers are facing, and their input can be invaluable in influencing the product roadmap. They can convey to the rest of the team what customers really need and will appreciate.

Making sure that feedback gets to where it needs to be is tough. It’s easy to lose that information in email chains.

And when the problem does get solved, customer success representatives need to be aware and proactively pass that information to the customer.

6 Core Pillars of CleverTap’s Global Customer Success Organization

Here’s a short roadmap that we created, based on our experience in scaling our own customer success team. It contains all the tasks we found helpful in our own scaling process.

We Established a Company-wide Culture of Customer Success

Shep Hyken says, “Customer service is not a department. It is a philosophy to be embraced by every employee – from the CEO to the most recently hired.”

This is the most important thing you can do when scaling your customer success teams. Everyone at CleverTap understands that customers’ success is top priority. It is a Top down, company wide commitment.

Each new employee in every department has to spend two weeks in customer success so they understand what it’s like to be on the front lines of the company. They understand that their actions have a direct impact on our customer success reps, and they understand what that means.

But don’t just tell them—show them, too. Your executives should be visibly involved in customer success initiatives. Even better is to get them involved in day-to-day customer success activities. Peter Strebel, the chief marketing officer of Omni Hotels, actually answers customer emails.

His goal is the same as any rep: ensure that the customer has a better experience. If your employees see that the whole company, starting at the top, is committed to customer success, they’ll get on board.

GrooveHQ has a great article on how to create a culture of customer success that fits your business. We recommend starting there.

We Hired the Right People

There are three things that we look for in our employees to ensure that they’re able to deliver the ultimate customer service experience: empathy, cultural fit, and product knowledge.