Address two questions in your customer success playbook: what to do, and how to do it. For each customer touchpoint, lay out detailed instructions on how to make the interaction as successful as possible.

This could be instructions on upselling, suggested tactics for solving problems, resources for moving a customer along the journey map, and anything else that your employees might find useful in successfully executing their responsibilities.

If you can add value to your relationship at every interaction, you’ll have loyal customers that appreciate your product or service.

What sorts of things add value? Here are just a few:

• Recommending new features
• Suggesting best practices
• Offering training
• Sharing marketing resources (like blogs and podcasts)
• Highlighting industry news
• Congratulate them on successes

Have a customer success manager reach out to an existing customer to share the results of a study you just ran. Or let them know about a new training that you’re offering. When your product or service is updated, make sure your customers know about it.

If you’re monitoring your customer’s use of your product (which we’ll discuss in a moment), you can also reach out to help them with problems that they might not even know they have.

Using customer success software will give you deep insight into how your customer success team is performing. Are customers moving through the onboarding process smoothly? Are they using the product regularly?

Monitoring all of these metrics will show you where your strengths and weaknesses are. If onboarding is often a problem, for example, you can spend time improving that process. If you’re seeing a specific type of churn, you can put new practices into place to reduce it.

The more you can automate the monitoring and reporting of these metrics, the better