Customer success

This is our playbook for new customer success engagement. These are customers who have been with us for a while and we are ready to establish an ongoing relationship with them.

The core job of a Customer Success Manager (CSM) is to ensure the longevity of the customer by ensuring their overall success and that they are getting the most value out of using PostHog. This may include helping the customer with onboarding, training, support, strategies, cost-saving, and more. Ultimately, the CSM serves as the customer's champion within the company and advocates on their behalf, and ensures the customer is successful.

Four principles to bear in mind:

• Establish strong customer relationships - customer success is built on open and honest connections with customers and empowering their growth. This will often mean having candid conversations, getting in-depth details about what drives their business and what key metrics or goals they are trying to achieve, and being proactive in helping them achieve those goals.
• The customer comes first - Show, not tell. Demonstrate and communicate their value to PostHog, help prioritize their needs, and under promise and over deliver. Always be transparent and honest, and deliver bad news as early as possible. Take responsibility to stay on top of their needs and inquiries, help get support prioritized, and be strategic in your approach to help them achieve their goals.
• Provide customer value - Beyond helping customers get optimal use out of PostHog, help with strategies, cost-saving, or other timely solutions that can benefit their business. We are always looking for ways to help customers save even if it means in the short term we don't make as much. The long term value and care matters more. Offer continual education on new features and create a cadence of communication that is helpful but not intrusive. If you're seeing something that is off, check in with them to see if they are aware of it.
• Become the voice of the customer - Listen with intent and advocate for your customers. You are their champion within the company and should help their voice be heard whether that's creating feedback loops to make them feel heard or get their needs prioritized, or working cross-teams to help product and engineering understand why certain features are important to the customer and their success. Advocacy only works if you're willing to go to bat for your customers.

Maximizing your chance of success

As a CSM, you’ll be spending most of your time managing your book of business and investigating churn signals so that there should be zero surprises should a business churn. Your first initiative should be focused on establishing a relationship with your book of business and prioritizing your understanding of their business, how they use PostHog today, and where you can add the most value to their business. It helps to approach this from a viewpoint of how you can be most helpful to your book of business as you learn what drives their success.

In order of priority, your objectives should be:

• Create a clear introduction of who you are, what a CSM can do, and what values you can provide for your customers so there’s no confusion. Not everyone is familiar with what a CSM does or is clear on why they should engage with one, especially if your book of business are long time customers who may not have had a dedicated point of contact till now.

• Evaluate your assigned list for signals and churn risk and prioritize outreach accordingly. Pay extra attention to recent conversations or open support tickets that you can dive head-first into to ensure these customers are cared for. Zendesk, our support ticketing system, allows you to follow tickets and get notified when there are updates, so add yourself to open tickets for any of your assigned customers.

• Set up a Vitally Playbook notification to get alerts when new conversations occur for your book of business, allowing you to keep a pulse on when your customers write in. Use this Playbook Template as a reference. You should also set up a Vitally Open Tickets Tracker to view all of your customer's open tickets in a single view. To do this, clone this Open Tickets Tracker, remove the existing filters, then add a filter for the assigned CSM, and save to your account.

• Add yourself to all your existing customer Slack channels and invite customers who are not in Slack yet to offer them an easier way to communicate with our team for their needs. Make sure to add Pylon and relevant team members on our side. Adding customers to Slack has the added benefit of giving us an additional communication channel, as email is usually one of the worst ways to reach our ICP (though you should start with email). We've found that informing customers you'll be sending them a Slack Connect invite, then sending the invite, works significantly better than asking customers if they'd like to join us on Slack. A couple of tips to set up Shared Slack Channels with Customers

Tips on success engagement

• Highly recommend reviewing our section on getting people to talk to you. What we’ve found works really well when establishing an initial connection is to be candid about wanting to learn more about your customer’s business, how they are currently utilizing PostHog, and to get a better understanding of where you may be able to add value for them. Most customers are pretty receptive to wanting to help, especially if it can benefit them in some way, so don’t be afraid to ask directly.

• Review your existing book of business to see how many products each of your customers is currently engaged with so that in your conversations, you can better understand why they may or may not be using certain products or if they find upcoming beta features useful. Make note of how many of them are on specific plans and if there are any opportunities you could help the customer save (always a great topic to help interest customers to engage).

• Don’t focus on a specific champion during your initial outreach. When prioritizing outreach, do look at engaged users and user types but aim to connect with multiple team members. You never know who will be responsive and become your best point of contact. Don’t focus on just reaching out to an identified champion (if one exists).

• On initial engagement calls initiated from you to learn more about the customer, it is helpful to prepare a simple agenda and re-iterate this on the call to make it easier for customers to understand what you'll be discussing, particularly if you're not familiar with their business, and what you hope to get out of the meeting, then wrap up with a summary of any action items you'll be taking to follow up with the customer. This can be a great time to gauge if the customer is interested in setting up a recurring check-in call.