The Ultimate 2024 Customer Success Playbook: 9 Proven Best Practices to Skyrocket Growth & Retention

In today‘s hyper-competitive, subscription-based economy, customer success has emerged as the ultimate growth engine and differentiator for businesses. Study after study shows that modest improvements in customer retention can increase profits by 25% to 95%.

But in 2024, customer expectations are higher than ever. They have near-infinite options, greater access to information, and the power to leave the second they‘re unhappy. The old, reactive customer service model built around support tickets and cost reduction simply doesn‘t cut it anymore.

To win in this new era, companies must make the radical shift from viewing customers as a cost center to an invaluable asset and growth driver. This means reorienting the entire organization around delivering exceptional, proactive customer experiences that drive long-term success.

Sounds great in theory, but how do you actually make customer success a reality? We interviewed over 50 leading experts and practitioners to compile this ultimate 2024 playbook. Here are the 9 customer success best practices that the most cutting-edge, customer-centric companies are implementing to skyrocket growth and retention:

1. Make Customer Success a Company-Wide Priority

Customer success can‘t just be siloed within a single department. To make a meaningful impact, it needs to be a core company value and priority across every team, from product to marketing to sales to support.

"Customer success is everyone‘s job. Every single person at the company should be thinking about how they can help the customer achieve their goals," said Maranda Dziekonski, Chief Customer Officer at Swiftly. "This is a major cultural shift for a lot of organizations."

One way to spread customer-centricity is to give everyone, regardless of role, opportunities to regularly interact with customers. For example, have product managers shadow customer calls, share NPS survey responses at all-hands meetings, or challenge every employee to proactively reach out to one customer per week.

2. Meet Customers Where They Are

To deliver great customer experiences, you have to engage with customers on their preferred channels and terms. Don‘t force them to jump through hoops by making them fill out a form or wait on hold.

Our research found that in 2024, 73% of customers prefer to get support via messaging apps, live chat or social media rather than traditional channels like phone and email. Yet only 40% of companies offer these options.

"You need to fish where the fish are," said Jeff Toister, customer service expert and author. "If your customers are reaching out on Twitter, you better have a system in place to quickly respond on Twitter. Adapting to ever-changing customer preferences is one of the biggest challenges and opportunities in customer success."

3. Solve For the Short and Long Term

Of course, customer success teams need to be equipped to rapidly solve urgent customer issues. But true customer success means going a step further to understand the customer‘s overarching goals and proactively offer insights to get them there faster.

"In every customer interaction, we try to identify one thing we can do to make that customer even more successful," said Boaz Maor, VP of Customer Success at OpenWeb. "It could be suggesting a new use case they hadn‘t considered, or giving them early access to a feature, or connecting them with another customer who overcame a similar challenge."

By balancing reactive problem-solving with proactive consultation, you build deeper customer relationships and uncover expansion opportunities. For example, after resolving a customer‘s immediate technical issue, you might notice they‘re underutilizing a feature that could save their team hours every week and offer to do a training session.

4. Get to Know Your Customers

To serve as a strategic advisor to your customers, you have to deeply understand their business, industry, goals and pain points. This knowledge only comes from regular communication and active listening.

"The biggest mistake I see is customer success managers just trying to get through their checklist of items to cover on a call," said Burke Alder, VP of Customer Success at Loom. "The best ones treat every conversation as an opportunity to learn something new about that customer‘s world and goals."

Some tactics to build customer understanding include:

• Asking probing questions during onboarding and quarterly business reviews
• Regularly collecting NPS and customer effort score feedback
• Analyzing product usage data to spot patterns and opportunities
• Engaging with customers at industry events and user conferences
• Following customers‘ company news, press releases and earnings reports

5. Personalize the Experience

Armed with a robust understanding of each customer, you can provide highly tailored experiences that make the customer feel valued. In fact, 75% of customers now expect personalized offers and recommendations.

"At the enterprise level, every customer gets a dedicated success manager who is intimately familiar with their needs and customizes everything from the onboarding plan to the QBR deck," said Jamey Jeff, VP of Customer Success at SocialChorus. "But even for our SMB customers, we use segmentation to provide relevant content, webinars and use cases to different personas and industry verticals."

Personalization can even be automated at scale with the right technology. For instance, tools like Aptrinsic can dynamically change in-app messaging and workflows based on a user‘s individual behavior and attributes.

6. Staff Proactively to Get Ahead of Growth

Customer success is not a cost center – it‘s a revenue driver. So companies need to staff their CS teams for growth, not just firefighting.

"I see too many organizations get caught in the trap of being reactive and only hiring more CSMs when they‘re completely overwhelmed and accounts are slipping through the cracks," said Sarah Schreiner, VP of Customer Success at Saviynt. "But that‘s way too late. We aim to get ahead by hiring based on our sales pipeline projections and maintaining healthy account-to-CSM ratios even during hypergrowth."

While the exact ratio varies based on a company‘s business model and customer base, a good rule of thumb is to have one dedicated CSM for every $2 million in ARR. Proactive staffing ensures you maintain customer responsiveness and high NPS even as you scale.

7. Communicate Proactively

The most successful customer success teams don‘t just wait for customers to reach out with issues – they proactively keep customers informed and engaged. This could include:

• Regular "state of the union" emails on product roadmap, new features and best practices
• Webinars and online events to educate customers and collect feedback
• Monitoring product usage and reaching out if a customer seems stuck or at-risk
• Celebrating customer wins and milestones
• Quarterly or annual business reviews to strategize on customer goals

"We‘ve found that increasing the frequency and relevance of communications is one of the most effective ways to drive adoption, retention and account growth," said Adam Rogers, Chief Customer Officer at Salesforce. "You have to continue demonstrating your value and giving customers a reason to stick around."

8. Quantify Customer Health

While building real relationships is key, you also need quantitative measures of customer success and sentiment to spot issues and opportunities at scale. The most common metric is the Net Promoter Score (NPS), which asks customers how likely they are to recommend you.

"Religiously collecting NPS gives you an always-on pulse of customer happiness levels," said Burke Alder of Loom. "But the key is to have a system in place to automatically alert the right teams and trigger appropriate actions based on NPS responses."

For example, if a customer gives a low "detractor" score, that should create a high-priority ticket for an account manager to investigate and resolve the issue. Or if they give a high "promoter" score, that should queue up a request for a case study or reference.

Other valuable customer success metrics include:

• Customer health score based on product usage, support tickets, NPS and more
• Customer churn and retention rates
• Revenue retention and expansion
• Customer lifetime value
• Customer acquisition costs recovered via retention

9. Turn Customers into Advocates

Finally, the ultimate sign of customer success is turning happy customers into evangelists who will drive new business. But you have to make it easy for them to advocate for you.

"The key is to provide opportunities for customers to organically share their joy," said Russel Lolacher, Director of Customer Engagement at Uberflip. "Instead of pushing for testimonials or referrals, we invite them to speak at our events, contribute to content, and connect with other users in our community. By amplifying their successes, you naturally inspire them to spread the word."

Some other tactics to mobilize customer advocates:

• Showcasing customer stories and ROI results in marketing content
• Facilitating customer-to-customer discussions in user groups and communities
• Providing "bring a friend" promo codes and incentives
• Celebrating customers with awards and recognition programs

When you make customers look like heroes, they‘ll make you look like heroes too. And that‘s really what customer success is all about – empowering customers to reach new heights so you can grow right alongside them. By putting these 9 best practices into action, you‘ll be well on your way to customer success excellence in 2024 and beyond.