customer management business plan example

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How to Write a Customer Relationship Management Plan

Last Updated: December 22, 2023

This article was co-authored by Michael R. Lewis . Michael R. Lewis is a retired corporate executive, entrepreneur, and investment advisor in Texas. He has over 40 years of experience in business and finance, including as a Vice President for Blue Cross Blue Shield of Texas. He has a BBA in Industrial Management from the University of Texas at Austin. This article has been viewed 90,210 times.

A customer relationship management (CRM) plan is a key component of running your business, as it describes how employees should deal with customers and provides a strategy for developing customer relationships. When writing a customer relationship management plan, it's important to define employee conduct and methods of handling customer inquiries or complaints in a manner that is easy to understand. The CRM plan also considers ways to foster a stronger, profitable relationship with a customer, not only dealing with him when problems or questions arise. Additionally, allowing room for improvements and adaptations as a result of periodic assessments will result in a more effective customer relationship management plan. The following steps will show you how to write a customer relationship management plan.

Reconciling Customer and Company Needs

• For example, if your goal is to increase repeat sales, you will need to focus more heavily on contacting and working with previous customers.

• Most of this information should be available in the marketing/sales plan if it has been developed.

Gathering Information

• Typically, the departments that interact directly with customers need guidelines on how to conduct themselves to best represent your company, as well as how to effectively handle inquiries they cannot resolve themselves. Depending on the type of company, this can pertain to departments such as sales, customer service, or repairs.
• Additionally, many companies send out email updates and newsletters to communicate new developments to customers.

• For indirect information gathering, look through your own records to figure out details like who your largest and profitable customers are, how often customers return after their first purchase, and which customers give you the most trouble (complaints, late payments, etc.).
• This information is easier to analyze if you have software for this purpose. CRM software packages may offer these tools.
• Identify your most valuable customers, which are usually customers purchasing profitable items or those who return often. Even though it may seem unfair, you need to incorporate in your plan a way to prioritize service to these customers.
• Use this information to identify the processes causing the most complaints. These could include missing prices, an inconvenient return policy, long checkout times, or late deliveries.
• You should also look for a way to cut off any customers that are more trouble than they're worth (excess complaints, unprofitable purchases, etc.). [1] X Research source

• Ask employees for any requests they may have gotten from customers for additional services or products that the business does not currently offer. Ask them for any ideas they may have for additional offerings based on their experience with customers. [2] X Research source

• You can also work to triumph over your competitors by identifying another way to provide greater value to your customers. This can be in customer service, as described, or in things like unique product offerings or comprehensive service packages. [3] X Research source
• Describe your findings in writing so you can refer to them as necessary.

Writing Your CRM Plan

• Evaluate your plans for additional offerings for risk and cost. Use this information to determine whether or not they are worth following. [5] X Research source

• Clarify who will be responsible for developing these relationships in your plan (which department, employee(s), etc.). [6] X Research source

• Depending on your business, you should think of aspects such as the maximum amount of time a customer should have to wait, how long it will take to handle complaints, and who will be responsible for gathering customer feedback. To explain this process, you might create create flow charts that you can use to instruct employees.
• Examine which methods are conducive for customer relations. For example, many companies use both telephone and email for inquiries and complaints, while others employ surveys to improve customer service, and yet others utilize all forms of social media to keep customers abreast of company news.
• Implement customer feedback when creating a customer communications policy.

Improving Your CRM Plan

• 4 Reward employees who stick to your CRM. Offer some positive reinforcement, such as a pay raise or a monthly lunch celebration, for employees who are working hard to implement the CRM. These kind of incentives will encourage other employees to do the same, in addition to raising morale.

• You may be able to get a full-service CRM package from one provider. However, you can also compile a CRM suite from different providers. Which you choose will depend on how much time and effort you want to spent on implementing the system.

Expert Q&A

You might also like.

• ↑ https://www.salesforce.com/crm/strategy/
• ↑ http://www.projectmanagementdocs.com/project-planning-templates/relationship-management-plan.html#axzz4CpKy6z8k

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How to Write the Customer Analysis Section of Your Business Plan

Written by Dave Lavinsky

What is a Customer Analysis?

The customer analysis section which incorporates the essential steps of writing a business plan step-by-step is a key component of your business plan and assesses the customer segments your company serves. The objective of the customer analysis is to justify your market choice, identify differentiators, and prioritize the segments you are targeting.

Components of a Customer Analysis

A complete customer analysis contains 3 primary sections:

• Identify your target customers
• Convey the needs of these customers
• Show how your products and/or services satisfy these needs

Download our Ultimate Business Plan Template here

Why Conduct a Customer Analysis?

A thorough customer analysis provides the following benefits:

• Supports your market choice and helps you avoid entering too broad a market
• Helps you focus on serving current customers rather than trying to find new ones
• Enables you to determine which segments to prioritize and how much effort to put into each one
• Helps you craft a strategic marketing plan and platform to reach these customer segments

How to Write Your Customer Analysis

The first step of the customer analysis is to define exactly which customers the company is serving. This requires specificity. It is not adequate to say the company is targeting small businesses, for example, because there are several million of these types of customers. Rather, an expert business plan writer must identify precisely the customers it is serving, such as small businesses with 10 to 50 employees based in large metropolitan cities on the West Coast.

When defining your target market, be sure to identify the following:

• The market segment you are choosing to serve (i.e., age range, annual income, etc.)
• The geographic location of these customers (i.e., city, region, state)
• What is the average revenues/income of these customers?

Once the plan has clearly identified and defined the company’s target customers and the customer demographics, it is necessary to determine the size of your target market: How many potential customers fit the given definition and is this customer base growing or decreasing?

Next, the business plan must detail these customers’ needs. Conveying customer needs could take the form of past actions (X% have purchased a similar product in the past), future projections (when interviewed, X% said that they would purchase product/service Y), and/or implications (because X% use a product/service which our product/service enhances/replaces, then X% need our product/service).

Prioritize the needs of your target customer according to how critical they are, and include a description of each in your customer analysis. Be sure to answer questions such as: 

• What pain points do these customers have? How is their current situation lacking? 
• What will your product/service do to help solve these problems?

The business plan customer analysis must also detail the drivers of customer decision-making. Sample questions to answer include:

• Do the customers find price to be more important than the quality of the product or service?
• Are customers looking for the highest level of reliability, or will they have their own support and just seek a basic level of service?
• Why will customers purchase your product and/or service rather than look for cheaper alternatives?

Prioritize the benefits of your products and services according to how much difference they make for customers and include a description of each in your customer analysis. Be sure to answer questions such as:

• What does your product do? How is it unique or better than other similar products?
• What type of customer could benefit the most from this feature/benefit and why?

Be sure to also show an understanding of the actual decision-making process. Examples of questions to be answered here include:

• Will the customer consult others in their organization/family before making a decision?
• Will the customer seek multiple bids?
• Will the product/service require significant operational changes (e.g., will the customer have to invest time to learn new technologies, and will the product/service cause other members within the organization to lose their jobs? etc.)

Finally, identify each segment you are targeting and how much effort you will put into reaching them. Be sure to answer questions such as:

• How many customers are in each segment and how much revenue will they generate?
• What percentage of total industry sales does this represent?
• What market potential did we estimate for each segment and how does that compare with actual sales? Include the number of leads converted and average deal size.

Example Customer Analysis Template for a Candle Making Company

The needs of this customer segment are that they are looking for high-quality candles that are made with all-natural ingredients. The benefits of their product that are most important to them are that the candles are vegan, eco-friendly, and made with essential oils. Drivers of customer purchase decisions include quality, price, and unique offerings. The company’s target market size is 750,000 people which represent a significant portion of the candle industry. They will put effort into reaching these customers through online advertising, social media posts, and word-of-mouth.

It is essential to truly understand customers to develop a successful business and marketing plan. That’s why including a customer analysis in your business plan is so crucial. Likewise, sophisticated investors require comprehensive profiles of a company’s target customers. By spending the time researching and analyzing customers in your target market, you will develop both enhance your business strategy and funding success.

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Other Resources for Writing Your Business Plan

How to Write a Great Business Plan Executive Summary How to Expertly Write the Company Description in Your Business Plan How to Write the Market Analysis Section of a Business Plan Completing the Competitive Analysis Section of Your Business Plan The Management Team Section of Your Business Plan Financial Assumptions and Your Business Plan How to Create Financial Projections for Your Business Plan Best Business Plan Software Everything You Need to Know about the Business Plan Appendix Business Plan Conclusion: Summary & Recap

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How to Write a Customer Analysis Section for Your Business Plan

Free Customer Analysis Template

Ayush Jalan

• February 12, 2024

A successful business idea equips customers with the tools necessary to help them reach their goals and fulfill their needs—professional or personal. To create such products and services that meet (and exceed) your customers’ expectations, you need to study their personas via customer analysis.

Customer analysis is a vital part of your business plan that helps you identify, define, and understand your customer base. Analyzing your customers is also crucial for creating a successful marketing plan, as it helps you communicate better with your customers.

In this article, you will learn how to conduct a customer analysis section for your business plan paired with a customer analysis example to help you create customer personas to study their personality traits, goals, challenges they face, and more.

What Is Customer Analysis?

Customer analysis is a comprehensive understanding of your customer base. It helps identify and describe your ideal customer. Through this in-depth analysis, you determine their needs, challenges, goals, and other important considerations. Given this info, it then helps you understand how effectively your products cater to them.

It further helps you optimize your strategic marketing process to create targeted advertisements, customize and prioritize specific features during product development, and make adjustments in your current business plan to align with your customer’s ever-changing demands.

How to Write a Customer Analysis Section

Writing a customer analysis includes extensive research and collecting data from various sources. This data consists of qualitative and quantitative aspects which help you write an accurate customer analysis for your business plan.

Writing a customer analysis has four main steps:

Step 1: Identify your customers

The primary step is to identify your potential customers and define their specific characteristics about them. The attained factual information is segmented into the following categories:

• Demographic: Age, gender, income
• Geographic: Location, type of area (Rural, suburban, urban)
• Psychographic: Values, interests, beliefs, personality, lifestyle, social class
• Technographic: Type of technology the buyer is using; tech-savviness
• Behavioral: Habits, frequent actions, buying patterns
• Industry (For B2B): Based on the industry a company belongs to.
• Business size (For B2B): Size of the company

To obtain the above data, a great place to start for established businesses is your customer database. If you aim to expand this information, you can use your existing communication channels to gather further details through surveys.

If you are a startup, conducting an audience analysis  might seem impossible as you don’t have an existing customer base. Fortunately, there are numerous ways through which you can study your potential customers. A few of them are:

• Identifying who would benefit from your product/service
• Analyzing your competitors to understand their target customers
• Using social media to prompt potential buyers to answer questionnaires

Want to create a Customer Persona in Easy Steps?

Generate valuable customer insights in minutes with Free Customer Persona Generator .

Step 2: Define the needs of your Customers

Now that you have identified your customers, the next step is to understand and specify their needs and challenges. This is the step where you need to go hands-on with your research. Getting to know your customers’ needs helps you determine whether or not your product or service hits the mark.

To understand the needs of your customers, you can adopt the following approaches:

1. Engage directly with potential Customers

A very reliable way to get to know your customers is to simply ask them, either in person or on a call. You can reach out to your customers, conduct one-on-one interviews, create focus groups, and invite buyers to test your new products. You can collect an ample amount of data through these techniques.

However, we recommend prioritizing accuracy over the quantity of data.

A technique that can help you get a deeper insight into your customer’s needs and opinions is the five whys technique . While practicing so, be mindful of the way you conduct the interview. It is essential to keep the customers in a comfortable and conversational environment to attain accurate answers.

2. Collect data from your Customer support

Customer support is the place where you can find feedback and criticism given by your customers. Analyzing this data helps you understand the pain points of your customers. You can further elaborate on this data by interacting with the customers who had issues with your products.

3. Run surveys and mention statistics

Talking to your customers helps you get qualitative information that you can use to alter your product or services according to your customers. The next part is to attain quantitative information, in other words, presenting numbers to support the previous data.

Conducting surveys is one of the commonly used methods for quantifying information. You can conduct in-app surveys, post-purchase surveys, or link surveys in email and apps, etc.

The second method is by collecting statistical data to support your conclusions from the interviews. These include stating studies related to customer choices, results from popular surveys, etc.

Step 3: Create a Customer Persona

Now, it’s time you present the information using a customer persona. A customer persona is a representation of a segment of customers with similar traits. Creating customer personas helps you process the data more efficiently.

You can use customer persona templates that are available online. To help get you started, we have created a customer persona example.

Customer Persona Example

Customer profile example of an internet service provider:

• About: A lot of customers remain at home and have a minimal and easy-going lifestyle. They need high-speed, interruption-free internet access.
• Demographics: Age is between 30 and 40, has a laid-back lifestyle, lives in suburban areas, and the income range is between $10,000 to $40,000.
• Professional role: Shop owners, employees, freelancers, etc.
• Identifiers/Personality traits: Introverts, like routines, makes schedules prefer online shopping, and stick with the companies they trust.
• Goals: Wants easily available service, and 24×7 customer support, prefers self-service technologies and chatbots over interacting with representatives.
• Challenges: Fluctuating internet connection while working or consuming media. Not enough signal coverage.

Step 4: Explain the product alignment to the Customer’s Needs

You’ve gathered info and created customer personas. The final step is to explain how your product or service caters to the needs of your customers. Here, you specify the solution you offer to your customers to tackle the challenges they face.

Mention the USPs of your product and its features, and they benefit the customer. Here, you also mention how your offerings make your customers’ lives better.

Create Better Solutions with Customer Analysis

Understanding your customers inside out helps you assist them better in solving their problems while also achieving success. Analyze your customers as often as required to stay updated about their ever-changing needs.

This helps you create better offerings to consistently fulfill their expectations. As a result, this builds up loyalty over time with each success.

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About the Author

Ayush is a writer with an academic background in business and marketing. Being a tech-enthusiast, he likes to keep a sharp eye on the latest tech gadgets and innovations. When he's not working, you can find him writing poetry, gaming, playing the ukulele, catching up with friends, and indulging in creative philosophies.

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Customer Relationship Management Plan Template

What is a Customer Relationship Management Plan?

A customer relationship management plan outlines the goals, and objectives of an organization with the purpose of improving customer satisfaction and loyalty. This plan should focus on improving customer service and developing customer relationships. It should include details about customer segments, customer interactions, customer feedback, and customer support processes.

What's included in this Customer Relationship Management Plan template?

• 3 focus areas
• 6 objectives

Each focus area has its own objectives, projects, and KPIs to ensure that the strategy is comprehensive and effective.

Who is the Customer Relationship Management Plan template for?

This template is designed for customer success and customer service teams in organizations of all sizes and industries. It provides a clear framework for creating a comprehensive customer relationship management plan. This plan can be used to create strategies for improving customer satisfaction and loyalty, ultimately leading to increased customer retention and profits.

1. Define clear examples of your focus areas

Focus areas provide a clear structure for the customer relationship management plan. Examples of focus areas may include developing customer relationships, enhancing service quality, or enhancing customer experience. These focus areas should be tailored to the specific needs of the organization, based on customer feedback, customer interaction data, and customer service trends.

2. Think about the objectives that could fall under that focus area

Objectives are goals that the organization intends to achieve. They should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. Examples of some objectives for the focus area of Developing Customer Relationships could be: Increase Customer Retention, and Improve Customer Satisfaction.

3. Set measurable targets (KPIs) to tackle the objective

KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) are measurable targets that are set for each objective. These KPIs should be set to track progress and measure success. An example of a KPI for the focus area of Developing Customer Relationships could be: Reduce Customer Churn.

4. Implement related projects to achieve the KPIs

Projects (also known as actions) are the steps that the organization must take to achieve the KPIs. They should be specific and actionable. An example of a project related to Developing Customer Relationships could be: Establish Proactive Support Process.

5. Utilize Cascade Strategy Execution Platform to see faster results from your strategy

Cascade is an all-in-one strategy execution platform that helps organizations track, manage, and measure their customer relationship management plans. It provides real-time visibility into performance, enabling customers to make data-driven decisions and measure the impact of their strategies.

500+ business plans and financial models

How to Write a Customer Analysis for a Business Plan

• March 21, 2024
• Business Plan , How to Write

Understanding your customers is essential for any business striving for success. A customer analysis provides valuable insights into the demographics, preferences, behaviors, and needs of your target audience .

This guide will walk you through the process of writing a thorough customer analysis, enabling you to tailor your products, services, and marketing strategies to meet the needs of your customers effectively.

Define Your Target Audience

Begin by clearly defining your target audience : the specific group of people you aim to serve with your products or services.

Consider factors such as age, gender, income level, geographic location, and psychographic traits (e.g., lifestyle, values, interests). Understanding who your customers are is the first step in building a successful business strategy.

• Example for a Coffee Shop : Your target audience might include young professionals aged 25-40, living in urban areas, who value high-quality coffee and a relaxed atmosphere for socializing or remote work.

Gather Data on Your Customers

Next, gather data on your customers through various sources, including market research surveys, interviews, focus groups, and customer feedback.

Analyze both quantitative data (e.g., demographics, purchase history) and qualitative data (e.g., customer feedback, testimonials) to gain a holistic understanding of your customers’ needs and preferences.

• Example for a Coffee Shop : Conduct surveys or interviews with your target audience to gather insights into their coffee preferences, frequency of visits to coffee shops, and reasons for choosing one coffee shop over another.

Segment Your Customers

Segment your customers into distinct groups based on common characteristics or behaviors.

This segmentation allows you to tailor your marketing efforts and product offerings to better meet the specific needs of each segment. Common segmentation criteria include demographics, psychographics, behavior, and purchasing patterns.

• Example for a Coffee Shop : Segment your customers based on their coffee preferences (e.g., espresso lovers, latte enthusiasts), frequency of visits (e.g., daily customers, occasional visitors), and reasons for visiting (e.g., socializing, work meetings).

Analyze Customer Needs and Preferences

Analyze the needs, preferences, and pain points of each customer segment to identify opportunities for product or service improvement.

Consider factors such as price sensitivity, convenience, quality expectations, and brand loyalty. This analysis will help you tailor your offerings to better align with customer expectations.

• Example for a Coffee Shop : Analyze customer feedback to identify common preferences in coffee flavors, brewing methods, and food options. Use this information to adjust your menu offerings and pricing strategies accordingly.

Assess Customer Behavior

Examine how customers interact with your business at each stage of the buying process, from awareness to purchase and post-purchase.

Identify patterns in customer behavior, such as browsing habits, purchase frequency, and loyalty. This analysis will help you optimize the customer experience and maximize customer satisfaction and retention.

• Example for a Coffee Shop : Track customer traffic patterns, peak hours, and popular menu items to optimize staffing levels, inventory management, and promotional strategies.

Identify Growth Opportunities

Based on your customer analysis, identify growth opportunities for your business. This could involve expanding into new customer segments, introducing new products or services, or entering new geographic markets.

By understanding your customers’ needs and preferences, you can better position your business for long-term success.

• Example for a Coffee Shop : Identify opportunities to expand your customer base by offering specialty coffee subscriptions for remote workers or partnering with local businesses to host networking events.

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How to create a customer success plan (7-step guide + free template).

Successful SaaS businesses are built on an ever-growing base of customers. But it’s nearly impossible to continuously grow your customer base if your customers aren’t happy. Happy customers give you lower churn , a stronger brand, lower acquisition costs and higher lifetime value.

To keep your customers happy, you need a strong customer success plan that will ensure that they become consistent users of your platform and get lots of value from it.

So how do you create a customer success plan? In this post, we’ll cover what a customer success plan is, why you need one and seven steps to creating your customer success plan.

What is a customer success plan?

A customer success plan lays out what customer success looks like (that is, what is the definition of success) and how you’ll help your customers achieve that success. The customer success plan is the roadmap that customer success teams use to operate. It ensures that the right resources are being delivered to your customers so that your customers will receive value from using your product.

What’s the difference between customer success and customer service?

You’ll sometimes see “customer success” and “customer service” or “customer support” used interchangeably, but they’re not the same thing.

Customer success is a proactive approach to making your customers successful (the function is sometimes even called “customer happiness”), whereas customer service or customer support is a primarily reactive function that handles unanticipated issues or needs from customers.

Customer service is reactive because it’s usually the customer who initiates the interaction with service or support, whereas the customer success team initiates the interactions with customers. Another way to think of it is that customer service or support is about putting out fires, whereas customer success is about the long term experience that your customers have with your product.

Why should you create a customer success plan?

There are a number of different reasons that you should create a customer success plan, but a few of the most important are to reduce churn, increase upsell and cross-sell opportunities, and increase recurring revenue.

Reduce Churn

As we mentioned in the introduction, decreasing churn, and thus, increasing retention, is a key component of growing a successful SaaS business.

High churn creates a “leaky bucket” situation where, although you may be successfully acquiring new customers, that topline customer growth is being offset by customers who are churning and leaving your business.

If customers are churning out at a high rate, you need to acquire customers even faster, making it very challenging to grow your business. Conversely low or negative churn becomes a tailwind that makes growth much easier.

A good customer success plan will ensure that customers are happy users of your product, so they will be much less likely to churn.

Upsell and Cross-Sell

Another way that happy and successful customers impact your business is that you’ll have more success increasing upsell and cross-sell opportunities.

Upselling is getting your customers to buy into more feature rich, and more expensive, tiers of your product.

Cross-selling is selling additional products to existing users. To succeed with either strategy, you first need to make sure that your customers are happy and successful with your core product experience, which is the fundamental goal of your customer success plan.

Once you’ve achieved that, your customer success plan can include tactics to move your customers towards premium tiers or additional products.

Increase Net Revenue Retention

Net Revenue Retention is the measure of the percentage of recurring revenue you have retained between two periods. If you have an NRR of over 100%, it means that your revenue from expanding existing customer contracts exceeds the revenue you have lost from customer churn.

A great customer success plan will help your CSMs cross-sell and upsell, as well as maintain the customer you already have.

How do you create a customer success plan?

So you’re ready to create your customer success plan, but where do you start? Here are seven steps to get you on the right path.

1. Identify the customer's end goal

To create an effective customer success plan, you have to understand what success looks like to your customers. 

A well-aligned sales process will identify the prospective customer's goals and how they align with your solution  before  those prospective customers become actual customers. That way, you can avoid misaligning your prospect's expectations and your solution's value. 

Once the prospect becomes a customer, these goals can be handed off to the Success team and become the pillars of your customer success plan.

2. Map processes to Aha! Moments

Your SaaS product probably has one or more Aha! Moments. These are the moments during the product experience when your customer says, "aha! Now I understand why this solution is so important to my business."

For many, a "PQL" or " Product-Qualified Lead " is registered when a prospect in a free trial or freemium tier hits an "Aha" moment while also fitting an ideal customer profile. 

These critical moments shift from your product being perceived as a nice-to-have, interesting piece of software to an essential part of your customer's business. Customers who reach that Aha! Moment become far stickier and far less likely to churn .

Part of the mapping process here should be focusing on what defines an "Aha! Moment" and how that fits into your PQL strategy. 

You should identify those moments and then create processes in your customer success plan to ensure that your customers get to those moments as soon as possible.

3. Define customer success metrics

In addition to understanding the customer's end goal, other metrics will help you evaluate the health of each account. These will likely include activity-based metrics such as daily, weekly, or monthly average usage. You may use one or more of these, depending on the nature of your product. 

You may also develop custom health metrics that align with customer goals, progress to aha moments, or other relevant usage metrics.

This health score can be analyzed across all customers (how healthy is my customer base as a whole?), individual cohorts (what is the health score of my highest paying customer?) or individual accounts (which may be useful in preparing for a quarterly business review or another customer checkpoint).

Curious about more customer success metrics? We interviewed leaders across the industry to compile this post of the  Top 15 SaaS Customer Success Metrics .

4. Build a great customer success team

The right team to support your customer success plan will depend on the nature of your product and whether you apply a  high touch, low touch, or hybrid customer success model .

Your customer success team may need to be more or less technical, depending on the nature of your product.

That said, good  customer success managers  are deeply committed to customers' success and are personable and empathetic.

A passion for constantly improving the process will make for a more successful customer hire. In addition to your full-time customer success team, you should include input from sales, marketing, and product teams, since they each have critical roles to play in customer success.

5. Align your customer and product teams

Product teams mostly want to develop a product that customers will love, but they feel that most of the feedback that they receive from customer-facing teams is anecdotal. Meanwhile, teams talk to customers daily and believe they know what customers need most, but they struggle to make an effective case to the product team. 

While intentions are often good, the disconnect makes it much harder to keep customers happy and successful because these two teams are both essential to the customers' experience. 

Still, some effective tactics include sharing key goals across both teams, adopting a toolset that both teams commit to using, and emphasizing regular and open communication between the teams.

6. Choose the right tools

There are many different tools designed to help with various aspects of managing customer success. 

Choosing the right tools can be overwhelming, so focus on the tools that align with the goals of your customer success plan. 

Critically, you need to invest in a solution for tracking your customers' behavior within your product and identify any signals for expansion or risk of churning. 

While many tools are meant to capture product usage data and send it to various other tools in your stack, they almost exclusively require a technical team in your organization to implement - and often administer. 

Parative is the only Customer Behavior Platform that surfaces this data to the teams that actually need it when they actually need it and empowers them to take the necessary actions.

7. Collect feedback from your customers

Once you've put your customer success plan in place, you need to understand what's working and what isn't. Feedback mechanisms like NPS and CSAT can give you a high-level understanding of overall customer satisfaction and happiness. But these metrics are too blunt to help you understand what's working well and what isn't. 

In-app feedback approaches focused on specific aspects of the  customer experience , such as feature fit index and customer effort score, give you a much more actionable understanding of opportunities for improvement. 

You can gain even more insights by targeting in-app feedback for specific user cohorts, such as new or high-value customers.

Customer Success Plan Examples

Creating success plans is a challenge, especially if you are tasked with starting from scratch. Whether you are a Customer Success Manager who is just trying to optimize their customer success strategy or a VP of CS who wants to get customer retention under control, building a robust success plan can be a pain. 

Have no fear; here is an example customer success plan for you to work with. 

Want to get your copy of this Customer Success Plan Template? You are in luck!  Click Here to grab it.

Success Plan Example:

Section 1: Customer Overview

This section should serve as an overview of the customer your team is focusing on. It should include fast facts about the company and information on its history so you can understand how your product or service can best assist them.

Include details such as:

• Company Name
• Year Founded
• Annual Revenue
• Number of Employees

You may also want to include more detailed information, such as the company's mission, vision, etc.

Many, if not all, of these details should be in the CRM and gathered during the sales process.

Section 2: Customer Goals and Objectives

In this section, you will focus on the customer’s value expectations to create opportunities to grow customer relationships that are more strategic in nature. These relationships safeguard against competition while increasing customer loyalty.

Using the foundations from the previous section, fill out the prompts below so you can understand the customer's priorities. If you’re in direct conversation with people from the customer, ask them these questions so you can better help the company.

This section should include:

• Short-, Medium-, and Long-Term Priorities
• Key Company Projects and Initiatives
• Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Section 3: Customer Journey Map ‍

In this section, you will map out the customer's journey with your product or service, from initial contact to post-purchase engagement. This will help you identify key touchpoints and opportunities for engagement and improvement.

• Action: Create a visual representation of the customer journey, including key touchpoints, pain points, and potential areas for improvement.

Section 5: Customer Success Team Structure and Roles

In this section, you will outline the structure and roles of your customer success team, including the responsibilities of each team member.

• Action : Define the structure of the customer success team, including the number of team members and their roles and responsibilities.
• Action : Identify key skills and qualifications required for team members.

Section 6: Onboarding and Training Programs

In this section, you will outline the onboarding and training programs that will be provided to new customers to ensure they are able to fully utilize and benefit from your product or service.

• Action : Develop onboarding and training programs that are tailored to the specific needs of your customers.
• Action : Ensure that the programs are easy to follow, interactive, and provide a clear path to reaching the Aha! Moments.

Section 7: Communication and Engagement Plan

In this section, you will outline the plan for communication and engagement with your customers. This should include the frequency, methods, and channels of communication, as well as the key stakeholders and decision-makers.

• Action : Define the communication and engagement plan, including the frequency and methods of communication, the channels to be used, and the key stakeholders and decision-makers.
• Action : Identify key moments and milestones in the customer journey that require increased communication and engagement.

Section 8: Continuous Improvement and Feedback

In this section, you will outline the plan for continuous improvement and feedback, including the processes and methods that will be used to gather customer feedback, analyze it, and make improvements.

• Action: Develop a process for gathering and analyzing customer feedback, including methods such as surveys, interviews, and customer feedback sessions.
• Action: Define a process for incorporating customer feedback into the customer success plan and making improvements.

Section 9: Action Plan

In this section, you will outline the specific actions that will be taken to implement the customer success plan. This should include a timeline, resource allocation, and key milestones.

• Action: Create an action plan that outlines the specific steps that will be taken to implement the customer success plan, including a timeline, resource allocation, and key milestones. ‍
• Action : Identify the key stakeholders and decision-makers who will be responsible for implementing the plan and achieving the defined goals and objectives.

Your customer success plan is never “done."

The steps outlined above will get your well on your way to building the right customer success plan for your business.

But you don’t just build the plan, put it into action and forget about it. As your business grows, your product continues to change and your customers’ needs evolve, you need to constantly iterate and improve your plan to ensure it’s aligned.

Don't forget to share!

Mark Lerner

Head of Marketing @ Parative, the Customer Behavior Platform. SaaS enthusiast, B2B Marketing Specialist, Startup Survivalist. Dad x2.

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Table of contents

How to create a customer success plan (templates & examples).

Picture this: you have a strategic and comprehensive blueprint explaining how to organize personalized customer onboarding, provide continuous support, and plan for regular feature updates based on client feedback. This doesn’t just help you win clients but also helps maintain deep, lasting partnerships with them. This blueprint is nothing but a well-crafted customer success plan. 

In businesses, particularly SaaS/B2B businesses, merely offering a top-notch product or service isn’t enough. The real differentiator is the quality of support and the value-added experiences you provide your clients. A robust customer success plan is essential in this landscape. It goes beyond mere transactional interactions and cultivates genuine and meaningful relationships with your clients.

Thus, whether you’re a small business owner, a manager in a large corporation, or somewhere in between, understanding how to develop an effective customer success plan is crucial. And that’s precisely what we’re going to explore in this blog. 

We’ll cover all you need to create a plan that resonates with your customers and aligns with your business goals. So let’s dive in. 

Table of Contents

What is a customer success plan.

A customer success plan is essentially a detailed plan designed to ensure that your customers not only achieve their desired outcomes using your product/service but also receive a consistently positive experience throughout their journey with your business. This plan is crucial in building and nurturing customer relationships.

For example, imagine a cloud service provider working with a mid-sized e-commerce company. In their customer success plan, the customer success manager (CSM) of the SaaS vender identifies that the e-commerce company aims to improve its website’s loading speed and data security. The cloud provider then works closely with them to implement a customized solution: optimizing server configurations for faster response times and integrating advanced security protocols to protect customer data. This targeted approach not only helps the e-commerce company achieve its specific goals but also solidifies the cloud provider’s role as a vital partner in their business growth.

So, a comprehensive customer success plan typically includes the following elements:

Needless to say, it’s not just about having these elements in place but about weaving them seamlessly into interactions with your customers. The customer success plan should be a living document, adaptable to each customer’s journey. For instance, if a software company notices a client struggling with a new feature, their plan might include proactive outreach with additional training resources, thereby preventing frustration and enhancing the user experience.

Recommended read: Why Customer Success is a Crucial Function For Your SaaS Startup

Why Should You Create A Customer Success Plan?

Creating a customer success plan is a smart move for any business looking to flourish. It’s much more than just pushing sales; it’s about crafting a journey where customers feel valued and supported at every step. Here’s why it’s so important:

Keep Customers Coming Back: With an effective customer success plan, you’re more likely to see your customers return . It’s similar to how you might feel at a café where the staff remembers your favorite order. This personal touch makes you more inclined to keep returning. Similarly, when a business understands and meets its clients’ needs, these clients are more likely to stick around.

Increases Customer Satisfaction: Imagine you buy a new smartphone, and the company helps you set it up and shows you some useful features (through in-product notifications) you didn’t know about. This extra help can make you really happy with your purchase. That’s what a customer success plan does – it helps your customers feel valued and satisfied.

Builds Stronger Customer Loyalty: When customers feel taken care of, they’re not just happy; they become loyal users. For example, if a fitness app not only tracks your workouts but also offers personalized fitness tips, you’re  more likely to recommend it to your friends.

Reduces Customer Churn: If customers leave your service or stop buying your products, a strong customer success plan can identify why this is happening and address it. For instance, an online learning platform notices that students are dropping out. A good customer success plan would give direction to the customer success team to take feedback from these students to understand the reason for dropping out. Through this, they may find out that students want more personalized courses. Then, the business can reach out with more tailored learning support to keep them engaged .

How To Create A Customer Success Plan?

Creating an effective customer success plan can be a game-changer for any business. Here’s a step-by-step guide to creating one suited for your business:

Step 1: Identify Customer Goals

Start by having conversations with your customers to understand their expectations and aspirations.  For example, if you’re a digital marketing agency, your client’s goal could be increasing their online sales. You can also collect this information by sending out surveys, asking them about their target audience, desired growth metrics (like website traffic or conversion rates),and specific campaign goals.

Step 2: Map Out Customer Journeys

Break down the customer experience into stages such as – discovery, purchase, onboarding, and ongoing usage. For example, for a subscription service like a streaming platform, this would involve understanding how users discover shows, sign up, navigate the platform, and interact with various other elements on the app. Identify the potential pain points and opportunities to enhance the experience at each stage.

Recommended read: A Detailed Guide to Customer Journey Mapping

Step 3: Set Actionable Objectives

Based on the customer journey, set specific and measurable objectives. For instance, for a fitness tracker software, this might mean ensuring that atleast 90% of new customers receive a personalized workout plan within 24 hours of purchasing the tracker. They can additionally aim for atleast  75% customer engagement with these plans.

Step 4: Tailor Plans to Different Customers

Segment your customers based on factors like industry, purchase power, or usage patterns and create offerings accordingly. A cloud storage provider, for instance, might have different offerings for individual users versus corporate clients, with tailored communication and support offerings for each group.

Step 5: Regular Review and Adaptation

Establish a regular schedule for reviewing the customer success plan’s effectiveness using feedback, usage data, and performance metrics. For example, a boutique hotel might analyze guest feedback and booking patterns every quarter to adjust its services and offerings, ensuring they continually meet or exceed guest expectations.

7 Customer Success Plan Templates

Here are seven customer success plan templates tailored for different business scenarios:

1. High-Value Client Onboarding

Onboarding high-value clients smoothly is key to establishing a strong, long-lasting business relationship. This process not only sets the tone for your engagement but also impacts how quickly and successfully your client can use your services. 

Here’s a focused approach to ensure premium clients have a seamless and satisfying start:

Objective: Smooth onboarding for premium clients. Goals : Client satisfaction with the onboarding process, rapid adoption of services by the clients. KPIs: Client feedback scores, duration to complete onboarding. Engagement Strategies: Customized onboarding plans, dedicated support, regular progress check-ins. Process: 1. Create a Personalized Onboarding Plan: Develop a unique plan for each high-value client, tailored to their specific needs and goals. Identify the goals during the initial calls and before the onboarding process.  2. Assign a Dedicated Account Manager: Provide each premium client with a dedicated point of contact. This account manager should be knowledgeable about the client’s business and needs. 3. Schedule Regular Check-Ins and Progress Updates: Set up frequent meetings or calls to take updates on the client’s onboarding progress and address any concerns. 4. Provide Customized Training and Resources: Offer training sessions and resources that are customized to the client’s business to help them get the most out of the product/service. 

By carefully executing these steps, you can ensure that your high-value clients are onboarded effectively, leading to a more satisfied and engaged client base.

2. Enhancing the Customer Support Experience

Providing exceptional customer support throughout the customer lifecycle is an important element. When done correctly, It can significantly improve customer satisfaction and brand loyalty.

Here’s a framework to enhance your business’s customer support experience:

Objective: Elevate the customer support experience. Goals: Reduce response time, increase resolution efficiency. KPIs: Average response time, customer satisfaction score post-support, customer effort score Engagement Strategies: Streamlined support processes, regular training for support staff, implementing customer feedback. Process: 1. Optimize Support Channels: Provide multi-channel support to your customers via email, chat, or phone so that they can easily reach out to you. 2. Make use of a shared inbox: A shared inbox gives complete visibility into customer queries and their statuses. Agents can also easily collaborate on queries to resolve them faster. 3. Train Support Team: Regularly train your support team on product features and soft skills. 4. Implement Customer Feedback: Use customer feedback to improve the support experience continually. 5. Monitor Support Performance: Keep track of support metrics and make necessary adjustments to improve service quality.

By focusing on these key areas in your customer support, you can ensure customers get a prompt resolution whenever they reach out to you for help.

3. Handling Negative Feedback

Handling negative feedback effectively is crucial for maintaining customer trust and improving your services. Here’s a detailed template to manage such feedback:

Objective: Effectively resolve complaints. Goals: Improve resolution rate, restore customer trust. KPIs: Time taken to resolve issues, customer satisfaction post-resolution. Engagement Strategies: Empathetic and timely responses, offering resolutions or compensations. Process: 1. Establish a Clear Process for Receiving and Responding to Feedback: Implement a system where feedback is easily submitted and tracked, like a dedicated email address or a feedback form on your website. 2. Train Staff in Conflict Resolution and Customer Empathy: Conduct regular training sessions for your team to handle complaints empathetically and effectively. Include role-plays and discussions of real-life scenarios to make the sessions enriching. 3. Offer Solutions or Compensation Where Appropriate: Develop guidelines for offering solutions or compensation to dissatisfied customers. This could be a refund, a discount on future purchases, or a free service. 4. Learn from Feedback to Prevent Future Issues: Analyze the feedback to identify any recurring problems or areas for improvement. Use this information to make changes in your operations or service. 

By following these steps, you can turn negative feedback into an opportunity for growth and enhance your customers’ overall experience with your brand.

4. Cross-Selling to Existing Customers

Cross-selling or upselling to existing customers is an effective strategy to enhance sales and deepen customer relationships. It involves identifying additional products or services that your current customers might need or enjoy. 

Here’s how you can implement this customer success strategy:

Objective: Increase sales through cross-selling by [X]% Goals: Enhance customer purchase frequency and variety. KPIs: Cross-sell conversion rate, average customer lifetime value. Engagement Strategies: Personalized marketing campaigns, analyzing customer purchase history for targeted offers. Process:Analyze 1. Customer Purchase History and Preferences: Examine conversation history and past purchases to understand customer preferences. This becomes relatively easy if you have a centralized hub that stores all your customer information. 2. Identify Products or Services That Pair Well: Look for items that naturally complement what the customer has already bought. A gardening supplies store, for example, could suggest garden tools to someone who already purchased flower seeds from their store. 3. Create Targeted Marketing Campaigns : Develop marketing campaigns that target these customers with personalized suggestions. This could be in the form of targeted newsletters or SMS to your customers. 4. Measure Success and Adjust Strategy as Needed: Track the performance of your cross-selling efforts and make adjustments based on customer response. 

By following these steps, businesses can effectively increase sales while providing value to their customers through relevant and thoughtful product suggestions.

5. Improving Customer Retention

Retaining customers is crucial for sustainable business growth. It involves understanding and addressing your existing customers’ needs to keep them engaged and satisfied with your services.

Here’s a detailed strategy playbook that could work for your business:

Objective: Increase customer retention rate by [X]%. Goals : Boost customer satisfaction and loyalty. KPIs: Customer retention rate, repeat purchase rate. Engagement Strategies: Regular customer satisfaction surveys, loyalty programs, and personalized offers. Process: 1. Gather Customer Feedback Regularly: Use surveys and feedback tools to understand customer satisfaction and areas for improvement. You can also collect NPS score from your clients during annual or quarterly business review. 2. Offer Tailored Rewards: Create loyalty programs or special offers based on customer purchase history or preferences. 3. Engage Through Personalized Communication: Keep in touch with customers through personalized emails, newsletters, or social media updates. 4. Evaluate and Adapt: Continuously monitor retention metrics and adjust strategies to improve customer loyalty.

Implementing these steps in your customer retention strategy can significantly elevate your business’s ability to keep customers engaged and satisfied.

6. Recovering from a Service Outage or Product Issue:

Effective management of a service outage or product issue is crucial to maintain trust and minimize the impact on customer satisfaction.

Objective: Successfully manage and recover from a service outage or product issue. Goals: Minimize customer inconvenience, maintain trust and transparency. KPIs: resolution time, customer satisfaction post-issue resolution. Engagement Strategies: Timely communication, direct outreach to affected customers, compensation offers where appropriate. Process: 1. Immediate Notification: Inform affected customers as soon as possible about the issue and expected resolution time. 2. Provide Regular Updates: Keep customers informed about the progress in resolving the issue. 3. Offer Compensation or Benefits: Depending on the severity of the issue, offer appropriate compensation, such as discounts, extended service, or refunds. 4. Gather Feedback Post-Resolution: After resolving the issue, seek customer feedback to understand their experience and to improve future incident handling.

This scenario focuses on how businesses can effectively address and navigate through service disruptions or product issues, ensuring customer trust and satisfaction are maintained.

7. Handling Seasonal Demand Peaks in Retail

Retail businesses often experience seasonal peaks, and managing these effectively is crucial for maximizing sales and customer satisfaction.

Objective: Efficiently manage increased customer demand during peak seasons. Goals: Optimize inventory, maintain customer service quality. KPIs: Sales volume during peak seasons, customer wait times, inventory turnover rate. Engagement Strategies: Timely promotions, staff training for peak seasons, improved inventory management. Process: 1. Forecast Demand: Analyze sales data from previous years to predict inventory needs. 2. Train Additional Staff: Hire and train temporary staff especially in sales team in advance to handle the increased workload. 3. Launch Timely Promotions: Plan and execute marketing campaigns and promotions well in advance of the peak season. 4. Monitor and Adapt: Continuously monitor sales and customer feedback during the season to make quick adjustments as needed.

This template focuses on strategic planning and execution required to handle the influx of customers and sales effectively during the busiest times of the retail calendar.

Top 3 Customer Success Plan Examples

Here are some real-life examples of successful customer success plans from different industries, showcasing various strategies and outcomes:

1. Amazon Web Services (AWS) – Cloud Platform

AWS has been instrumental in helping numerous businesses increase agility, reduce costs, and accelerate innovation through its cloud-based services. 

By offering a range of services , including computing, storage, and databases, AWS has demonstrated how cloud platforms can be tailored to meet the diverse needs of businesses, aiding their growth and technological advancement. 

AWS’s approach focuses on providing comprehensive cloud solutions that cater to the varied needs of different businesses. Their plan typically includes:

2. Apple – Product Company

Apple’s success can be attributed to its innovative approach and customer-centric products like the iPhone and iPad, which have revolutionized the tech industry. 

Their customer success plan is built around creating high-quality, user-friendly products and complementing them with effective marketing strategies and innovation. This approach has made Apple one of the most valuable companies globally.

Apple’s customer success plan is rooted in several key strategies that focus on customer satisfaction and loyalty:

3. Kiwi.com – Online Travel Agency

Kiwi.com, a Czech online travel agency, has become one of the top five online sellers of flight tickets in Europe. Their operations heavily rely on support operations like email communication, especially for consolidating ticket availability and prices from various partners, including airlines and travel agencies.

Their customer success plan focuses on a strong customer support strategy. Kiwi.com has been able to maintain a 100% Service Level Agreement (SLA) success rate.

Here’s how Kiwi.com’s action plan ensures a strong customer support strategy:

Read more about how Kiwi.com manages their support operations. 

Final Words

Creating a customer success plan is essential for any business focused on long-term growth. Each part of the plan –  from getting to know what your customers need, and customizing your services for them to regularly updating your strategies, plays a crucial role. These steps make sure that your customers have a positive and rewarding experience with your brand.

Another important aspect of your customer success plan is the tools you invest in. For instance, if you plan to optimize your customer service interactions, you might want to consider Hiver. 

Hiver works right inside your Gmail inbox, making it easier to manage support emails. It comes with powerful collaborative features, helping your agents work as a team and resolve issues faster. With Hiver, you can quickly assign emails, track them, and ensure that no customer query is missed. This helps in providing top-notch customer service, a vital element of any customer success plan.

Sign up for a free trial to check out its features.

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4 Customer Success Plan Templates and How to Use Them

Customer success is an incredibly impactful function when it comes to the longevity and happiness of your customers. Unlike customer support, there are often identical moving pieces in each customer's life cycle that make it easy to predict what kind of success interactions your customers will need. Creating reproducible plans can be a great way to ensure the success of both your team and your customers.

When you document customer success managers' actions, it makes it easier to guarantee that every customer has the same excellent experience. We've gathered some customer success plan templates that you can use to get started with a more defined customer success experience, along with tons of information about what customer success plans are, why they are valuable, and how to create them.

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What is a customer success plan?

A customer success plan is an actionable list of items that lays out what customer success looks like and what a customer or customer success manager (CSM) can do to get to it. It serves as a guide for CSMs to ensure that every necessary action gets accomplished and every customer receives the same fantastic experience.

Having a customer success plan in place can also ensure that every customer gets the outcome you intend from your actions. When you create a customer success plan, you usually do so with a customer success metric. That means that the value and impact of the plan can be easily trackable and that you can change the plan if you aren't hitting your goals.

Using a CRM, you may have your customer success plans built out to assign tasks to your CSMs automatically. If you aren't quite there yet, a documented checklist will do just fine (more on this later).

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What's the difference between customer success and customer service.

Customer service is typically reactive in response, whereas customer success is more proactive. While there will always be exceptions to this rule, the responsibility of customer service most often lies in responding to customer inquiries that come through a queue via email, live chat, or phone. Most customer service representatives aren't reaching out to customers proactively when they notice something has gone amiss with a customer's usage.

It is the responsibility of a CSM to ensure that customers are using the product as expected and meeting their goals. They routinely check customer engagement and health to reach out proactively with helpful tips and information to guide the customer in their usage.

Customer Experience vs. Customer Success: Explained

Why should you create a customer success plan.

Customer success plans are helpful for your customers and your team members in that they ensure that specific, essential objectives get met. A good customer success plan should do the following:

Take the guesswork out of CSMs’ jobs

Having prebuilt customer success plans for specific, everyday things within the customer journey makes things more straightforward for your CSMs. Given that plans help standardize actions, the customer responses should be more predictable than with a customer success plan entirely of the CSM's making. Having a plan for your CSMs is like giving them a map before a road trip rather than driving without direction.

Create consistency

Inevitably your CSMs and others working on your team will have different personalities. While that may mean that some of their general approaches to working with customers may be different, there should still be a level of uniformity across experiences. Your customers will be more comfortable if they can know what to expect, and customer success plans do that by creating repeatable processes.

Boost revenue, expansion, and product usage

Customer success plans are custom-designed using company metrics and data. You build them to ensure specific outcomes, sometimes around expansion, revenue, or even product usage. Creating customer success plans around those actions helps to generate attention and focus. The more attention everyone pays to a unified thing, the more effective you will be when working toward it.

Track changes and maximize efficacy

Having a documented process put in place makes it easy to track changes and how they affect key metrics. With customer success plans, you can know exactly when you made changes, what they were, and what impact they had.

This knowledge has power: You can measure what impact your customer success team has at the business level and also understand precisely what levers you had to pull to make it happen. This understanding is beneficial for your team, who can use this learning to change other aspects of the customer experience, and for your company, which now knows how to move the needle for other teams.

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How to create a customer success plan.

The process for creating a customer success plan will differ slightly depending on what tools your team has access to. For instance, if you have a CRM, you may want to build your processes there. If your team isn't yet investing in a CRM, you may just have a list of documents in your Confluence, Help Scout, Notion, or Google Drive folders.

In our examples, we'll create customer success plan templates that you can use without a CRM. That said, no matter where you're creating it, the things you will need to think about will be the same. Let's look at how to create a customer success plan.

1. Understand what success looks like for your customers

Take some time to work cross-functionally and understand what activities successful customers need to undertake on their journeys. This process should consider the perspectives of every team — product, marketing, sales, engineering, customer experience, etc. — and the customer. Sometimes what a company wants a customer to do with their product is different from what the customer actually does.

Create a list of everything that a customer needs to accomplish to be successful, including everything from "open an account" to "turn on [x] feature" and "pay a monthly subscription."

2. Create a customer journey map

After you list all of the activities your customers need to take, begin to map them out on a timeline. When supplemented with data around customer touchpoints, this timeline will serve as the basis of your customer journey map.

A customer journey map is a visual representation of everything a customer goes through during their life cycle. Your CSMs should use this map as a data source when structuring your customer success plans and determining when they need to come into play.

3. Identify the highest impact, most replicable activities

It might not make sense to create customer success plans for every activity — having too many to go through can hinder rather than help your team's progress. So, look over your journey map and consider which actions would have the most impact if turned into customer success plans.

These should be activities that yield a high customer engagement orrevenue — for example, setting up conversations around renewal or getting a customer's team onboarded to your project.

The activities should also be reasonably high frequency to requirea customer success plan. If it's not something you are frequently doing, your team probably doesn't need to have a customer success plan for it.

4. Set metrics and benchmarks

As with almost anything you do in business, it's essential to have a way to measure the effectiveness of what you're implementing. With every SaaS customer success plan that you implement, identify the metric you are trying to shift. When you have a metric determined, take note of where that metric currently stands to understand what impact you have as time goes on and your team makes use of the plans you create.

Never be afraid of change. While creating a customer success plan is a significant first step, you should plan to visit and update it on a regular basis. Depending on the cadence of your product releases and updates, this may need to be more or less frequent (we think quarterly us a good rhythm to start at). After all, you don't want to add a fantastic new feature to your product and have it left out of conversations that your CSMs are having with customers. Even if your customer success plans don't mention specific features, it's still good to regularly revisit and update anything public-facing that may affect your customers.

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Customer success plan templates.

While every company is different, there are often a few key components of the customer life cycle that remain the same. The following customer success strategy templates will be helpful to kick-start your processes and give your team some ideas about where to start when working with new customers.

Handoff from sales to customer success

If a sales team primarily drives your revenue, the customer will likely already have a relationship with them. A handoff from sales to customer success ensures that the customer feels taken care of and the customer success team feels prepared with any information that the sales team gleaned during the sales process. Here's what this SaaS customer success plan might look like:

Schedule an internal handoff meeting. Your sales team should come prepared to talk about the customer's critical reasons for buying, any concerns they had, and what they are most looking forward to using.

Review other internal customer notes. See if the customer reached out to your support team, talked to your marketing team over social, or had any different touchpoints that you can review.

Email the customer to schedule an external handoff meeting. This meeting should be similar to the internal handoff but more customer-centric. Your sales team should explain the difference now with the engagement, what the customer can expect from customer success, and how they'll be stepping down.

Schedule the customer kickoff. This step involves emailing the customer and letting them know what the kickoff will entail and giving them the option to schedule a meeting at a time that works for them.

Copy template slides and create the deck. If you don't already have a slide template for kickoff calls, it may be helpful to create one.

Follow up if the customer hasn't responded to the request to schedule a kickoff.

Conduct the customer kickoff and present the product plan.

Send a wrap-up email. This email should include notes on any questions the customer asked and what their answers were.

Update customer notes. If you have a CRM or a central place where you keep customer information, update your notes on this customer after the call.

Customer has gone quiet

If a customer is not responding to your CSM's requests for contact or meetings, it may signify that something is amiss. Use this customer success plan template to get your customer to reconnect:

Check customer notes. Review them for any extra contact outside of customer success, like if they have reached out to customer support, have any active bugs logged that are waiting for resolution, or are in talks with your sales team.

Verify the existence of a power user. Ensure that the person you are emailing is still at the company and is still the person that you should be in contact with.

Email the power user to follow up. This email should either be the new power user you have identified or the existing power user you've already been in contact with.

Email the executive or business sponsor. If you do not receive a response from the power user, loop in the executive or business sponsor.

Conduct a review. If able to get a meeting scheduled, review any open or challenging areas on the call with the customer. If unable to get an appointment scheduled, conduct a review of any open, problematic areas and try to move toward resolution.

Communicate any challenges conveyed by the customer internally.

Review usage patterns. Ensure that the company is still using the product and that usage hasn't dropped off. Usage drop-off is a sign that the customer is heading toward churn.

Continue trying to connect with the power user/business sponsor if you still haven't gotten a response.

Send a wrap-up email and address feedback. After you have made contact, write up a summary of your conversations and address any feedback that the customer brought up in your discussions.

Update customer notes. Continually update the customer notes after conversations to ensure that everyone internally is on the same page.

In some companies, customer success will be responsible for managing renewals. This responsibility will often fall to sales or a specific renewals team in larger companies. There are substantial benefits to both options. When customer success handles the renewal process, there is a lot more trust from the customer. When another team takes the renewal process, it's less likely that you will erode trust by bringing money into the conversation.

If you are choosing to have your customer success team handle renewals, here is a customer success plan template that you can modify and use:

Check customer notes to see if any open support conversations, bug logs, or other company contacts with other teams still need to be resolved.

Check if the renewal has already occurred automatically. If not, proceed.

Resolve any issues that showed up in step 1.

Prepare the renewal paperwork, including any options for expansion or upgrade.

Reach out to the business sponsor to schedule a meeting.

Meet to talk about the renewal process and continue the conversation about any upgrades or expansions that you have positioned.

Confirm expectations with the business sponsor.

Send renewal paperwork.

After receiving the signed renewal paperwork, update any customer notes and internal systems to reflect the change.

Customer success quarterly business review

Some customer success teams find it helpful to do a regular quarterly revisit with their customers, also known as a quarterly business review (QBR). In these meetings, the CSM reviews trends and metrics with the customer and covers how the customer progresses toward the goals they initially set in their kickoff.

Even if you don't plan to have your team execute QBRs, this is an excellent customer success plan template for standing meetings where your CSMs review progress.

Review the customer’s health score and health score trend. Is it going up? Going down? What aspects of the health score have the most significant impact on its shifting?

Review any customer notes, including anything other teams add, such as marketing, product, or sales.

Review support tickets. Look at both currently open conversations and the ones that have been closed over the last quarter.

Check on open feature requests. Try to give them updates on anything that they've asked about.

Email the customer to set up the meeting.

Meet with the customer and review all of your findings from the previous steps.

Send a write-up of notes from the meeting to the customers and any attendees within your company.

Conduct an internal debrief on any action items that came from the meeting. For instance, give updates on the specific needs related to a feature request or feedback about how a support interaction went.

Schedule your next touchpoint; perhaps it’s not a QBR but a follow-up to address anything that came out of this meeting.

Use customer success plan templates for everyone's success

Planning never hurts anyone. Creating customer success plans ensures that your CSMs are well-prepared to be the best representatives of your company. It also means that they have the tools to help your customers be successful.

Use our templates to create plans that work for your needs within your team — remember, no two companies are alike!

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Mercer smith.

Mercer is the VP of CX Insights & Community at PartnerHero, a yoga fanatic, and strives to make the world a little bit happier one customer at a time. You can find her at mercenator.com and on Twitter .

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Customer success plan templates, share this article.

The profitability and longevity of your business depend largely on your customers being able to achieve their goals with your product. To help them do that, you have to anticipate their questions and challenges, and offer answers and solutions. This is known as customer success. 

Unlike customer support which aims to resolve customers’ short-term issues, customer success caters to customers for the long term. This involves identifying the identical elements in each customer’s lifecycle, which makes it easy to predict your customers’ needs and take a preventative approach to ensure successful product usage. 

Customer success, while essential, can be hard to do, especially if you have many customers. However, documenting the steps your customer success reps/managers make helps you ensure that each customer derives value from your product. 

In this article, we’ve created some customer success plan templates you can use to get started. You’ll also learn why structured planning is important in customer success, the best practices for using customer success plan templates, and some additional resources/tools for customer success planning. 

Skip ahead:

​Understanding customer success plan templates

​types of customer success plan templates, ​best practices for using customer success plan templates, ​additional resources and tools for customer success planning, ​boost customer satisfaction with customer success plan templates .

Structured planning in customer success is the systematic and organized approach you can take to anticipate, meet, and exceed customer needs and expectations. It involves developing a clear roadmap to ensure that customers derive maximum value from your product or service throughout their entire journey.

This roadmap is called a customer success plan — a tool that outlines the actions your customer success reps/manager has to take to develop long-term relationships with your customers and help them reach their goals. 

Customer success plans play a pivotal role in ensuring customer satisfaction, building long-term relationships, reducing churn, increasing upsell and cross-sell opportunities, and boosting net revenue generation . Documenting customer success actions in these plans helps:

• Customer success reps understand the customers’ journeys, preferences, and unique challenges. This understanding is crucial for providing personalized and effective support;
• Prevent the loss of critical institutional information when employees leave or move to different roles;
• Maintain consistency in customer interactions. When different reps handle the same customer or similar issues, having a documented history ensures that the approach and information shared are consistent;
• Team members collaborate smoothly with one another. If multiple reps are working with the same customer, a documented history allows for seamless handovers and ensures that everyone is on the same page;
• Ensure that the customer success team can efficiently manage a larger number of accounts without sacrificing the quality of interactions;
• Provide new customer success hires with insights into how previous situations were handled and offer a foundation for developing their own customer interaction skills;
• CSMs assess how effectively reps are addressing customer needs, meeting goals, and adhering to established processes; 
• CSMs identify patterns, common issues, and areas for improvement. This allows them to refine processes, update training materials, and enhance overall customer success strategies.

Customer success plans are applicable to many business instances, including customer onboarding/offboarding, customer reactivation, and product renewals, to mention a few. Using customer success plan templates makes it easy to customize a plan for each unique scenario. With templates, you can:

• Clearly define your customers’ goals and objectives in using your product or service; 
• Identify specific milestones that indicate progress toward achieving your customers’ goals; 
• Define success criteria to measure the effectiveness of your product or service;
• Outline the specific actions your customer success team will take to reach the defined milestones;
• Establish a communication plan that helps you check in regularly with your customers to address their concerns and gather insights;
• Define key performance indicators (KPIs) to track and measure success;
• Monitor metrics related to customer satisfaction, product usage, and other relevant factors.

Here’s a breakdown of the different types of customer success plan templates you can use to help your customers derive maximum value from your product/service: 

Quarterly Business Review (QBR) meeting template

A Quarterly Business Review (QBR) template is a structured outline that helps you conduct comprehensive reviews of your performance, goals, and strategies on a quarterly basis. A well-structured QBR meeting template contains components like: 

• Client/customer information; 
• Performance metrics; 
• Challenges and solutions; 
• Next quarter objectives;
• Action steps, etc. 

In a typical QBR, the CSM:

• Assesses the company’s overall performance against established goals and metrics;
• Reviews and adjusts strategic plans based on market changes and business performance;
• Analyzes customer feedback and discusses strategies for enhancing customer satisfaction; 
• Reviews both open and closed support tickets over the last quarter;
• Evaluates financial health, revenue growth, and cost management;
• Recognizes and celebrates individual and team achievements; 
• Set clear and measurable goals for the upcoming quarter that align with the company’s vision;
• Ensure alignment and coordination between different departments and teams;
• Discuss employee feedback and strategies for enhancing team engagement and morale.

Quarterly success plan template

A quarterly success plan template is a structured document that outlines the goals, activities, and strategies you plan to implement over a span of three months to ensure the satisfaction and success of your customers. A good quarterly success plan template includes components like:

• Customers’ goals and objectives; 
• Key milestones (with deadlines) that indicate progress toward customers’ goals;
• Action plans to help you reach defined milestones;
• KPIs and metrics to track and measure success;
• Resources needed to help customers succeed, etc.

Here are some tips to use the quarterly success plan template effectively: 

• Tailor the template to each customer’s unique goals and needs;
• Involve key stakeholders, including the customer(s) and your team, in the creation of the success plan to ensure alignment;
• Use the plan as a living document and encourage regular updates as needed throughout the quarter;
• Regularly monitor progress and analyze metrics to assess the effectiveness of your strategies;
• Acknowledge and celebrate achievements and milestones with the customer, fostering a positive and collaborative relationship;
• Conduct a thorough review at the end of the quarter to assess overall success, identify areas for improvement, and inform future planning.

​Annual customer success plan template

An annual customer success plan template is a comprehensive document that outlines the strategies you plan to implement over the course of a year to ensure that your customers get maximum value from your product and achieve their goals. 

This template provides a structured framework for both you and your customers to collaboratively work towards achieving long-term objectives. It also helps you align yearly objectives with your overall business strategy. 

The key components of an annual customer success plan include: 

• Your broad objectives for the year;
• The long-term goals your customers aim to achieve over the course of a year;
• The strategies you’ll implement to achieve these goals and objectives; 
• The resources you’ll need to help the customer succeed;
• Your check-in dates (they could be quarterly or bi-annual), etc.

Long-term planning is important for customer success because it: 

• Ensures that customer success efforts are aligned with the broader strategic goals of both your company and your customers; 
• Allows you to maximize the long-term value that customers derive from your product or service; 
• Enables you to identify potential issues or challenges in advance, allowing for proactive resolution and risk mitigation; 
• Helps you foster stronger relationships with customers as you demonstrate a commitment to their long-term success; 
• Provides opportunities for continuous improvement as you’re able to learn from successes and failures over an extended period; 
• Helps reduce churn, increase customer retention rates , and build customer loyalty as you address issues and ensure ongoing value; 
• Allows for better resource planning and allocation, ensuring that the necessary support is available to customers when needed;
• Allows for the collection and analysis of data over a longer timeframe, which helps you make data-driven decisions; 
• Contributes to upselling and cross-selling opportunities , which drives revenue growth from existing customers.

Weekly success plan template

A weekly success plan template allows you to outline the goals, tasks, and priorities for an individual rep or a team on a weekly basis. This template serves as a proactive tool to help you plan and organize smaller activities, track progress, and ensure that short-term goals/objectives are met within a specified timeframe. 

The components of a weekly success plan template include: 

• The goals you want to achieve during the week;
• The main tasks to do to achieve the aforementioned goals;
• The priority levels for each of the tasks;
• A section to track progress on each task throughout the week;
• A section to schedule and document any important meetings, appointments, or deadlines;
• A daily schedule to allocate time blocks for different tasks and activities, etc.

 Organizing your weekly customer success plans has many benefits. It: 

• Provides clarity on weekly objectives, ensuring that efforts are focused on high-priority tasks; 
• Helps you allocate time effectively by creating a schedule and setting realistic deadlines; 
• Ensures that weekly goals align with broader company/customer objectives; 
• Facilitates better communication within teams  by aligning everyone on weekly priorities;
• Reduces stress as you break down tasks into manageable steps and provide a clear action plan.

​​Client onboarding success plan template

A client (or customer) onboarding success plan template shows the process involved in onboarding a new client successfully. It helps businesses ensure a smooth and effective transition for clients/customers from the initial stages of engagement to becoming fully integrated and satisfied with the product. 

The key components of a client onboarding success plan template include:

• An overview of the onboarding process; 
• Details about the client, including key contacts, industry, and specific business needs;
• Clearly defined goals for the onboarding process;
• Key milestones and deadlines for each phase or stage of the onboarding process; 
• KPIs to measure the success of the onboarding process, etc. 

Using a client onboarding success plan template ensures that: 

• There’s a standardized and consistent onboarding process for all clients;
• Clients know what to expect during the onboarding process;
• Clients have the knowledge, resources, and support they need to effectively use the product or service;
• Clients start realizing value from the product or service more quickly (i.e. low time to value );
• There’s a scalable framework for onboarding as the business grows, making it easier to manage increased client volume;
• The likelihood of client dissatisfaction or frustration is reduced, which results in lower churn rates .

Customizable fillable templates

The five templates outlined above aren’t the only kinds of customer success plan templates there are. Because so much goes into ensuring that customers reach their goals, there are other templates you can personalize for specific needs. 

The features of customizable templates include: 

• Editable content. You can modify content according to your needs, including text, images, and other elements. 
• Flexible structure. You can add, remove, or reposition sections based on your needs, allowing you to tailor a template to different purposes. 
• Placeholder elements. Customizable templates may have placeholder elements that guide you on where to insert specific content. You can replace these placeholders with your own text or media. 
• Customizable color schemes and fonts . You can change the color scheme, fonts, and overall style of the template the match your brand colors, fonts, and style. 
• Export formats. Customizable templates typically support various export formats, including PDF, Word, or image files, which give you flexibility in how the final content is shared or distributed.

Here are some situations where you can use customizable fillable templates: 

• Sales-to-success handoffs. If your sales team is the first to speak to prospective customers, it will likely have a relationship with them before customer success takes over. A customizable success plan template allows the sales team to document all they’ve learned from your customers, which makes it easier for the customer success team to take over.

A sales-to-success handoff template should include the customer’s basic information, their main objective(s), their budget, how they heard about the company, their preferred communication method, follow-up actions, and KPIs to measure the performance of the product. 

• Customer reactivation. Sometimes, your customers may stop using your product abruptly, especially if you’re a subscription-based SaaS business. In this case, you need a specified process to reactivate them. 

You can outline this process in a customer reactivation template, with steps like checking for unresolved issues, reviewing the customer’s usage contact, verifying the customer’s contact, following up with the customer to find out why they went silent, reviewing any issues or challenges the customer has, sending a follow-up email, and a simple reboarding process. 

• Customer renewals. While renewals are an automatic process for subscription-based SaaS companies, some companies let their customer success teams handle renewals, especially if the customer is an enterprise or if they’re hiring for a service. If that’s you, you can use a customizable template to outline a simple renewal process with steps like checking for (and resolving) any open issues, setting up a meeting with the customer to confirm expectations and discuss new product features, if any, and the filling of renewal paperwork. 
• Customer offboarding. A customer leaving your company can offer a valuable learning experience and an opportunity to part ways without burning bridges. Your customer success team will need a documented process to identify why the customer doesn’t want to do business with you anymore and use that data to decrease churn in the future.  

A customer offboarding template should cover things like the reason(s) the customer is leaving, what your company could do better, the parts of the contract that were broken by either party (if applicable), incentive(s) to retain the customer, collection of last payment, and a final thank-you to the customer for working with your company. 

Here are a few practical tips for using customer success plan templates: 

• Set SMART goals. SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Timebound. When setting goals for your customer success processes, be it for client onboarding/offboarding, reactivation, renewals, or quarterly business reviews, ensure that your goals meet these criteria. This clarity will make it easier to track progress.
• Communicate and collaborate clearly. As you fill in your customer success plan templates, communicate and collaborate with relevant stakeholders from both your team and the customer’s organization (if applicable). This transparency builds trust, ensures alignment, and helps manage expectations. 
• Define actionable steps. Break down your goals into actionable steps and tasks. This makes it easy for both your team and your customer to understand what needs to be done. If any challenges arise, clearly outline the strategies for addressing them.  
• Do regular reviews and updates. Schedule regular reviews of your customer success plans to ensure that they’re still relevant. Update the plans based on changes in your customers’ business, goals, or market conditions. 
• Collect feedback from your customers. Feedback mechanisms like Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) and Net Promoter Score (NPS) can help you understand what’s working and what isn’t. You can also collect in-app feedback or conduct 1-on-1 interviews with your customers to get feedback on the efficacy of your processes. 
• Quantify success metrics. Clearly define the customer success metrics and KPIs you’ll use to measure progress. Quantifiable data makes it easier to assess success.

Customer success plan templates are just one tool to help you give your customers the best experience you possibly can. Here are some additional resources and tools you can use to improve your efforts:

Customer education platforms

Customer education platforms allow you to create an online academy filled with structured, accessible learning resources for your customers. These courses enhance their understanding of and proficiency with your product or service, leading to increased customer satisfaction. 

An online academy also cultivates a continuous learning environment, allowing customers to stay updated on product updates, new features, and best practices. This ongoing education contributes to customer retention and loyalty, as users feel supported and engaged with your product. 

A great example of an online academy is Hootsuite Academy . 

This academy offers several certification courses taught by industry experts to help customers improve their social media skills, grow their audience, run successful ad campaigns, and use the Hootsuite platform like a pro. 

Another example is Chargebee’s Subscription Academy , which has online courses that aim to teach customers all things SaaS — from pricing and analytics to BillingOps and churn. 

Both of these online academies were created with Thinkific Plus , a powerful tool with robust features that allow you to create and ship specialized training programs for your customers. With Thinkific Plus, you can create online courses, microlessons, and even cohort classes, to help your customers get more familiar with your product and the industry at large — which, in turn, improves customer satisfaction and retention.

Customer relationship management systems

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platforms provide an organized and unified system for managing customer interactions, data, and relationships. In this dynamic hub, customer success teams can store, track, and analyze customer information, from contact details to historical interactions and preferences. 

By centralizing customer data, CRM platforms break down silos and facilitate communication among sales, marketing, and support teams. This cross-functional collaboration ensures that every touchpoint in the customer lifecycle is well-coordinated and aligned with overarching business objectives.

With features like automated workflows and customer segmentation, CRM platforms enable customer success teams to tailor their strategies, anticipate needs, and provide a more personalized and proactive approach to customer support. 

Examples of CRM platforms include: 

• Salesforce  

Customer feedback and survey tools 

Customer feedback and survey tools allow customer success teams to communicate directly with customers, and capture valuable insights regarding customer pain points, product or service satisfaction, and overall expectations. 

By gathering quantitative metrics such as Net Promoter Scores (NPS) and Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), alongside qualitative feedback, customer success teams get a better understanding of customer sentiment. This, in turn, makes it easier to address specific pain points, identify areas for improvement, and tailor strategies to align with the evolving needs and preferences of their customer base.

Customer feedback and survey tools include: 

• SurveyMonkey

Project management tools

Project management tools provide a structured and organized framework for customer success teams to efficiently execute and manage initiatives that contribute to customer satisfaction. These tools offer a centralized platform where customer success teams can plan, track, and collaborate on various tasks and projects related to customer onboarding, support, and engagement.

With features like task assignment, deadlines, and progress tracking, project management tools enable clear communication and collaboration among team members, ensuring that everyone is aligned on goals and timelines. This transparency not only enhances internal coordination but also allows for proactive communication with customers, providing them with visibility into the status of ongoing projects and reinforcing a sense of partnership. 

Examples of project management tools include:

Collaboration platforms

Collaboration tools foster seamless communication and collaboration among team members and clients. For example, Slack has real-time messaging and collaboration features, which enable instant communication, file sharing, and the creation of dedicated channels for specific projects or client interactions. This ensures that customer success professionals can quickly address queries, share insights, and coordinate efforts, leading to swift issue resolution and a more agile response to customer needs.

Another example of a collaboration platform is Zoom, a video conferencing platform that facilitates face-to-face meetings, webinars, and training sessions. Zoom allows customer success teams to conduct personalized and interactive sessions with clients, fostering a stronger connection and understanding.

Collaboration platforms that help customer success teams  communicate with one another and work seamlessly together include: 

Customer journey mapping tools 

Customer journey mapping tools provide a visual representation of the entire customer experience, from initial contact through post-purchase engagement. This allows businesses to understand and empathize with the customer’s perspective, uncover pain points, and identify opportunities for improvement at each touchpoint in the journey. 

By identifying critical moments in the customer journey, teams can implement targeted strategies to address potential issues, enhance satisfaction, and guide customers toward successful outcomes. 

The visual representation of customers’ journeys also fosters cross-departmental collaboration, aligning sales, marketing, and support teams toward a unified goal of delivering a positive and cohesive customer experience. 

Examples of customer journey mapping tools include:

Email marketing platforms

Email marketing platforms are a powerful tool for personalized communication, engagement, and relationship-building throughout the customer lifecycle. These platforms enable your customer success team to deliver targeted and relevant content (product updates, special offers, and valuable resources) directly to customers’ inboxes, facilitating ongoing communication and relationship-building. 

Email marketing tools also allow customer success teams to design automated email sequences that guide customers through onboarding processes, provide educational content, and offer timely support. This ensures that customers receive the right information at the right time, enhancing their understanding of your products/services and encouraging active engagement. 

By tailoring messages based on customer preferences, behavior, and lifecycle stage, email marketing platforms help build a more personalized and meaningful connection, which results in enhanced customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Email marketing platforms include: 

• ActiveCampaign

Knowledge base platforms

Knowledge base platforms can help you create a centralized and accessible repository of information, resources, and self-service tools that empower customers to find answers and solutions independently. With these tools, you can provide a comprehensive library of articles, tutorials, FAQs, and guides on your website for customers seeking information about your products, services, or common issues.

Knowledge base platforms also play a huge role in customer education and onboarding as they provide a structured and scalable way to deliver training materials, product documentation, and best practices, ensuring that customers have the resources they need to maximize the value of their purchase. 

By enabling customers to self-serve and troubleshoot, knowledge base platforms facilitate faster issue resolution, reducing the need for direct support interactions and enhancing the overall customer experience.

Examples of knowledge base platforms include: 

• Help Scout 
• Gainsight (formerly Insided)
• Zendesk Guide

The templates in this blog post provide a structured framework for customer success teams to navigate the intricacies of each unique customer journey. With these templates, your team can proactively address challenges and deliver personalized experiences that resonate with the diverse needs of your customer base. 

Consider Thinkific Plus to create an online academy for your customers and streamline your customer success. 

It’s a powerful, yet easy-to-use, platform that helps you attract new customers and retain existing ones through customer education. 

With Thinkific Plus, you can deliver comprehensive learning experiences that teach your customers how to derive value from your product or service. Not only does this platform have advanced analytics and reporting features to help you track your impact, but it’s also designed to scale with you as your customer education programs evolve. 

Book a call with a Thinkific Plus expert today .

Althea Storm is a B2B SaaS writer who specializes in creating data-driven content that drives traffic and increases conversions for businesses. She has worked with top companies like AdEspresso, HubSpot, Aura, and Thinkific. When she's not writing web content, she's curled up in a chair reading a crime thriller or solving a Rubik's cube.

• The Ultimate Guide to Customer Success
• Best Customer Success Software, Platforms, and Tools.
• Customer Success Metrics and KPIs
• Customer Retention Program Examples (+ Retention Plan Template)
• The Best Customer Onboarding Software & Tools for 2023

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Home » Here’s How to Create a Customer Relationship Management Plan

Here’s How to Create a Customer Relationship Management Plan

Here’s how to create a customer relationship management plan. Read on to learn more.

What Is a Customer Relationship Management Plan?

A customer relationship management plan outlines the steps a company will take to establish and maintain a good relationship with its customers.

A CRM plan is not just a list of  marketing strategies , but a working document that describes how strategies will be implemented, who’s responsible for what, what the goals are and when the goals will be met.

What Is a CRM Plan Used For?

A CRM plan helps an organization to:

Decide what kind of relationship they want with their customers

A company might choose to have a marketing or cooperative relationship with its customers. 

Define what a good customer relationship entails

In a cooperative relationship, for example, customers will expect the business to inform them of new products and services. 

Businesses should also help them to  solve  any problems with existing products. 

Identify the customers that will form the focus of the relationship management

Given limited resources, companies must decide which customers are most important to them. So, they can concentrate their efforts on those customers only. 

Identify how the company will work with its customers

Most businesses will want to develop a strong working relationship with their most important customers and this should be included in the plan.

Planning Your Customer Relationship Management Plan

CRM planning is not something you can do in one sitting. It will take time, energy, and resources to put together an effective CRM plan.

For one thing, you want a plan that really works for your business, so it’s best not to rush it. 

You may find it useful to  break down  the planning process into stages. In that way, you’re able to keep track of each stage without getting overwhelmed:

Decide what kind of relationship you want with your customers

What exactly does your business hope to achieve from its customer relationships? What kind of relationships do you expect your customers to have with you? 

Make sure your vision is as clear as possible. So, you know exactly where you’re headed and why you’re headed there in the first place.  

Define what a good customer relationship entails 

What do good relationships look like? How do they feel? How can they be improved on? What are some examples of good relationships in your business?

These questions will help you define exactly what makes a good customer relationship. And that can lead you toward an ideal vision for your own business, too.  

Identify the customers that will form the focus of your relationships

This stage involves listing all of your current customers and determining which ones are most important to your business now and in the future.

Identify how you will work with your customers

There are a number of ways you can work with your customers. Either way, what kind of working relationship do you want with each customer? 

How will you ensure that this relationship is maintained over the long term?

As you can see, there are a number of steps involved in creating a customer relationship management plan.

But with careful attention to detail and a lot of hard work, your business should have a plan that will help you to build strong relationships for years to come.

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Published September 25, 2020

Creating a killer customer success plan: best practices and pitfalls to avoid.

What is a customer success plan? What are the best practices and steps involved in creating a customer success plan? Read on.

With so many different customers, each with their own needs and goals, helping your customers succeed can sound like a pipe dream. But that’s only if you’re not creating one key element—a customer success plan. What is a customer success plan and how do you create one that helps your customers see results? In this guide, we’ll cover what it is, best practices to try, mistakes to avoid, and much more!

What is a Customer Success Plan?

If a customer success management strategy is about helping your customers achieve goals through your product, then a customer success plan is the “what” and “how” portions of it. The plan states what value your product offers your customers and how you would deliver it to them. It consists of the series of actions you and your customers would take to help them meet their goals.

Expectations can arise from both ends—customers as well as vendors. To fulfill the expectations of both sides, you need a solid plan that would clearly state the actions you would take. It should be realistic, measurable and achievable to hold its viability. A customer success plan becomes a key tool for a CSM to align their resources, tasks, time, and efforts to meet the end goal.

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Customer success plan example.

Customer success plans can be created if we keep certain important value-based pointers in mind. These customer success plans help you understand what can be achieved if everything goes well. The company’s customer success plan needs to include some aspects. Here are some examples-

Customer Success Plan Example 1

Customer information

This needs to include all the information about the customer like name, industry, company name, point of contact, and company executive.

Customer success team information

This section includes details about the customer team like primary contact information, project details, a secondary person of contact, and more.

Customer goals to be achieved

What is the customer’s goal they want to reach with your product? Their short-term goal? Long-term goal?

Customer success solution    

• What is the customer’s definition of them being successful?
• Does their expectations match what your product can do? If not, can you offer alternative solutions to their problems?
• How will you and your customer work together to reach those goals?
• Timeline for each task to be completed and by who in order for goal to be reached.
• What’s the next step you or your customer should take if you can’t complete your task?

Open and existing issues

This includes if there are any ongoing action plans for the customer, any problems they are facing, or any processes or playbooks running.

Follow-up action

These are details of any follow-up action for your customers. This can include if customers have any questions about the product or service.

Go over the entire success plan with your customer so that all parties—you and them—agree on the necessary steps that everyone must play to reach those goals.

Customer Success Plan Example 2

This customer success plan will involve the following elements:

• Personas to define and segment users to improve activation and onboarding flows
• These personas can be matched to expectations. Every customer has certain expectations. This can include reducing churn, increasing product usage, understanding user patterns, and keeping customers engaged.
• Feature importance can be marked as per which feature is best for a customer. You can pick the top 5 features that are needed for the customer.

A customer success plan example will only help you draw up a rough estimate for your company. However, the plan must differ from industry to industry.

Customer Success Plan Example 3

Benefits of customer success plan.

Here are a few benefits of having a customer success plan:

Consistent Efforts Throughout Customer Lifecycle

A customer success roadmap makes sure that you always have the end goal of your customer in mind. This way you never wander off in your efforts toward meeting the customer’s expectations. Every stage of the customer lifecycle must have their goals, and a plan, with the necessary action steps to help them reach it.

Easier to Adjust Strategy

Even with a well-thought-out plan, things are always bound to change. And while a success plan can’t prevent it, you can work with your customers to alter their plan as needed to fit their new goals.

It has been commonly observed that the time spent on firefighting issues is always more than the time when you were already prepared for it. Planning takes care of some of the unprecedented issues in advance so that you are always prepared for any possible outcome.

Reduce Churn

Some customers churn because they have perceived expectations of what your product can do for them and in a specific time frame but never fully discussed those expectations with you. But when you have a customer success plan with your customers, it’ll help keep everyone on the same page and increase transparency, allowing them to see exactly what needs to be done for their success.

Best Practices and Steps for Creating a Customer Success Plan

Here are some of the best practices that you can use to help you create a customer success plan that gets results.

Identify Expectations

You must help your customers express their expectations of your product right from the beginning. The best time to discover these expectations is the customer onboarding phase. Through strategic discussions, you must unravel their expectations of you.

Then clarify which expectations are achievable and which are not. You should also find out why they expect that out of your product. If you can get to the bottom of their expectations, you might find a solution that’s realistic for your product and helps satisfy your customer’s needs.

Create Processes to Meet Goals

Those expectations are the goals you would be directing your customer success plan towards. This is the “how” part of your plan. You must lay out clear steps you would be following towards meeting those goals. Make sure to cover all the possible scenarios that can occur during the course of action.

For example, if your customer’s expectation is quick onboarding, then you must have the right training material already in place along with the team of experts who would configure their systems.

Use Metrics to Measure the Progress

Through the right metrics, you must measure the progress of each of your customer success processes. For example, you must measure the time your customer takes for onboarding. Having a pre-defined ideal metric for each stage would help you know the efficacy of your processes. It will also help you know how you can increase the efficiency of the process.

For example, if you have already defined that the ideal time for onboarding is 60 days, then you can measure in real-time whether that is achievable or not.

Assign Employees and Schedules for Each Stage

Each stage should have a person responsible for its execution. Their responsibility lies in ensuring that the goal of their respective stage is being monitored and met. They would also measure the data for that stage and cross-check with the pre-defined ideal metrics.

The pre-assigned schedule must be followed that helps in tracking the progress of the tasks. Any lag in the execution must be discussed with the proper parties to see what needs to be done to get back on track or alter course.

Using a customer success plan template would help you cover all aspects of planning and execute with the right steps.

Mistakes to Avoid

Facing unprecedented challenges while executing a plan is natural. You cannot completely address all the challenges beforehand. Yet, there are few common mistakes that you should be aware of.

Not Considering Customer’s Inputs into the Plan

No matter how thorough and foolproof you have made your plan, if you forgot to take the customer’s input, it would most likely fail. Setting up customer goals is the first step. You must take every measure to include their views rather than assuming on your own.

Overdelivering

Creating a plan with ambitious goals that are hard to achieve can turn out to be disastrous. Make sure they are realistic and achievable. Otherwise, you’re creating unrealistic expectations that can potentially lead to churn.

Using Vanity Metrics

Using the right kind of metrics to measure your progress is must. Sometimes, CSMs use vanity metrics to measure their efforts that give a false sense of achievement. Instead, focus on metrics that are value-based.  

Lack of Improvisation

A plan is a set of guidelines to execute when all things are in place. But sometimes when surprises occur, you must be able to improvise and re-prioritize your actions for a quick solution. An example could be an early warning of churn right after onboarding. Your plan should always be in a state of further enhancements.

The Best Way to Create a Customer Success Plan Template

The job of a customer success team is to decrease churn and improve retention rates. Having a customer success plan can help create clear outlines of the customer lifecycle. The main KPIs that should form the core of the customer success plan include health score, NPS, etc.

• Set the right expectations
• Activate onboarding process
• Understand the product
• Take action to improve customer value
• Help reduce churn

Customer Success Plan Templates

The customer success plan template will help you offer value across the customer lifecycle. By adding your company teams like marketing, sales, and CS teams to your customer journey, you can create an effective engagement strategy that is ongoing.

The key elements of a customer success plan template include-

• Show how your product meets or exceeds customer expectations
• Help them realize the product value
• Increase product adoption
• Create advocates and prevent churning
• Align customer expectations with your actions to expand

Customer Onboarding for Free Trials Template in a Customer Success Plan

New customer calls template in a customer success plan.

This is a customer success plan template for new customers kick-off call.

Customer Onboarding Success Plan Template

So once a customer is ready to be onboard, they can use this checklist/template to make sure they are on the right track.

Template for Ongoing Engagement in Customer Success Plan

The template for customer success plan for ongoing engagement is useful in keeping customers retained and preventing churn. Since retention is the major factor which companies look to improve, this template will help.

Wrapping up

The purpose of any customer success plan is to have a clear path that you and your customer can follow to help them reach their goals.  And with this guide, you’ll have a better strategy to help you create a plan for your customers that helps create a better relationship with them and help them find value in your product.

There should be a right blend of expectations from both the parties. And only then you must set out to create a plan that would help you achieve those goals. Improvisation and further enhancement of the plan are a part of the learning curve. Sticking to the plan is important but allowing some amount of space for further corrections is also vital to ensure your customer’s success.

You might also like:

• What Is a Customer Success Planner & How to Create a Customer Success Plan Template? –  Includes steps that should be taken to develop the customer success plan template.
• To understand how SmartKarrot helps SaaS companies keep and grow loyal customers, Request a Demo .

Anshi has over 12 years of experience in demand generation, digital marketing, and managing global teams. In her prior role as head of marketing operations for a high growth US healthcare tech organization she transformed marketing from cost to revenue center.

Published September 25, 2020, Updated November 09, 2022

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• Customer Success ,
• Customer Success Plan ,
• Customer Success Plan Template ,

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8 must-haves for your customer success plan [+ templates]

What’s one of the most painful scenarios for Customer Success teams? 

How about this one: Sales hands off an exciting new customer and then 90 days later they’re ready to churn.

A solid customer success plan is the best tactic for revenue teams that want to prevent this from happening. It moves your team from being reactive to proactive, and it sets new customers on a path towards success from the moment the contract is signed. 

But creating an effective customer success plan is tough because it requires an approach that’s both consistent and flexible. 

You need to achieve certain outcomes with every customer, but you also need to tailor your plan to each customer’s unique needs.

You also need your customers to actually engage with your plan—there’s nothing worse than creating a plan that sits there and never gets acted on. 

Creating a flexible customer success plan template and sharing it in a format that your customers actually enjoy solves those challenges. 

Here’s how you do it. 

What is a customer success plan?

A customer success plan is a roadmap that helps your customer success team deliver value to your customers throughout the entire customer lifecycle. It’s the map for your customer journey. 

An effective customer success plan is a mix of actionable tasks, defined responsibilities, and clear goals:

• Actionable tasks: Your customer success plan lays out the core tasks that stakeholders (from all parties involved) need to complete to ensure your customer will be successful. Examples could include everything from Set up your account to Add additional users to Watch these training videos.
• Defined responsibilities: Along with tasks, your plan should designate the responsible person (or team). Continuing with the example above: Who is supposed to set up the new account? You? Your customer? Clearly defined responsibilities are a huge part of long-term success.  
• Clear goals: What’s your customer hoping to achieve with your product or service? Your sales team should have captured this during the sales process, but whether they have or not, customer onboarding is the perfect time to ensure everyone is clear.

Here’s a quick gut check: 

Say every single item on your customer success plan was completed in a timely fashion (assuming you’ve got some version of a plan today, whether it’s living in Google Sheets, Trello, or some other tool. If not, just keep reading!). 

If that happened, what would the result be? Would you be able to guarantee your customer’s experience with your product was successful? 

Guarantee is a strong word (and one you may not want to use with a customer), but your customer success plan should get you as close to guaranteed success as possible. The whole reason it exists is to distill your customer success strategy into a step-by-step process for achieving results. 

Best practices for creating a customer success plan

Creating a customer success plan can feel like a daunting task—especially if your current version isn’t delivering results—but we’ve got you covered. We have pre-built templates in Dock, like this customer success plan template . 

Whether you use a pre-built template or create your own custom plan from scratch, there are a few best practices you should keep in mind:

• Use real-world examples to inform your plan
• Make your customer success plan client-facing
• Think about the customer experience you’re creating
• Use a template as a starting point, then personalize as needed

Use real-world examples from current customers

When creating a new customer success plan, it’s easy to hunker down and try to come up with the best possible plan by yourself. 

This is a natural place to start, but it can result in an idealized customer success plan that doesn’t work in the real world.

Instead, consider building your plan with input from the very people who will be using it to find success with your product. 

Use feedback from both current customers and your customer success managers to create a clear roadmap for both sides. You can:

• Ask your customer success team to list out the steps they already take during customer onboarding
• Get input from your current customers on what parts of your product have been difficult to learn or find value in
• Analyze notes from when you’ve onboarded customers in the past, reminding yourself of what worked well—and what didn’t.

It’s also a good idea to partner up with your sales and customer support teams to understand their processes and challenges. The clearer you can get on your current customer journey, the more likely your customer success plan will solve real-world problems.

Make the success plan client-facing

A joint plan enables increased collaboration and gives a better sense of what the entire journey to success looks like. As you build out your customer success plan, you’ll see the best results if you make it client-facing. 

Customer success is a joint effort—it’s a team game. Even if you’re an agency delivering a very specific service, you’ll still need customer involvement at various points.

That’s why your plan should be housed on a page or portal that everyone has access to—from sales to customer success to the customer themselves. 

Even if their direct involvement in specific tasks is limited, your customers will appreciate being able to see and understand what their journey to success looks like. 

Avoid spreadsheets and project management tools

Let’s call it like it is: project management tools aren’t very client friendly (unless you’re selling to project managers). They’ve got a steep learning curve and aren’t very intuitive. 

And while everyone’s familiar with spreadsheets, sharing a link to a Google Sheet certainly doesn’t give a very premium feel. 

Spreadsheets and project management tools are built for internal collaboration. When it comes to making customer success plans, it’s better to use a dedicated onboarding platform or client portal tool like Dock.

A dedicated portal feels specially made for the client. It’s the perfect tool for your customer success team to manage the client relationship. A customer portal—accessible by both parties—enables easier alignment between CSMs and customers on business goals and strategy, because everyone is looking at the same thing.

It’s the easiest—and most effective—way to track milestones, achieve goals, and encourage product adoption.

Start from a template, then personalize as needed

Your clients have needs that are unique to their businesses. And, if you’re selling to humans, it’s vital to remember that 80% of them are more likely to do business with a company that gives them a personalized experience. 

That’s why you need a customer success plan template. 

Use a template to create your core success plan. As you discover what works for your customers, you want to take those tactics and replicate them across your entire team and customer base. 

You want every CSM working towards the same end goal and using the same playbook. A template establishes a baseline—it includes the core steps needed for any customer to find value in your product or service.

Once you’ve got that foundation in place, you can personalize each plan to meet your customers’ individual needs—like their business goals, contacts, meeting recordings, and project scope. 

This approach positions you to scale customer success across your customer base with a repeatable, templatized process that still feels highly personalized to each new customer.

8 things to include in a customer success plan

There are a bunch of things you’ll want to include in your customer success plan, and you can start with this template to hit the ground running.

The parts you’ll want to include in your customer success plan are:

• An overview/introduction
• Objectives and key challenges
• Specific measures of success
• Strategies for success
• Clear action items
• Onboarding checklists
• Supporting customer success content
• Customer journey-specific next steps

Let’s look at each one in depth. 

1. Overview and contact details

The overview and introduction portion of your customer success plan should be the first thing your customer sees. 

This section has two goals:

• It introduces your client to their customer success manager. The CSM is their main point of contact, and whenever they have a question, it should be easy for them to reach out. We’d recommend including the CSM’s picture (smile!), contact information (email and/or phone number), and a quick hello or bio. It’s also a nice touch to include a link to book a meeting.
• The overview and introduction section gives a quick summary (think 2-4 sentences) of what the workspace is for and what your client can expect. Use this space as a way to remove ambiguity from the process you’ll be walking your customers through.

This is also a good place to store any customer contact information your customer success manager may want quick access to, especially if your sales team has been working with a team of stakeholders on the customer’s end.

2. Objectives and key challenges

The objectives and key challenges section of your plan lays out the desired outcomes of using your product or service. 

It explains why the customer engaged with your business. What are your customer’s goals? What’s the job they’re trying to complete? 

This section will look very different based on your offering:

• Web design agency : “Design and launch a new custom website by June 30.”
• Email newsletter software : “Grow your email list to 20,000 users by the end of the year.”
• Sales enablement software : “Reduce sales admin time by 10% this quarter to increase the selling capacity of each AE.” 

Just keep in mind that this should reflect the real pain points and felt needs of your customer—not your opinion of what they need. If there’s any ambiguity, spelling these objectives out in a shared success plan is the perfect way to surface and work through those issues. 

This section is also where personalization enters the stage. 

Your customers may be looking to solve similar problems—if you’re a web design agency all of your customers probably want new or revamped websites—but their key challenges will be unique.

If your sales team hasn’t already clearly identified the obstacles to success, meet with your customer to determine both the outcomes and the challenges they’re currently facing. 

From budget to limited engineering resources to poor engagement or something else, the clearer you can drill down into challenges, the more robust a customer success plan you can create. 

This collaborative process ensures both your customer and your CSM have the same key objectives front and center during the entire customer lifecycle. 

3. Measures of success

Aligning on customer goals is critical, but it’s only a piece of the puzzle. Your customer success plan should also include agreed-upon measures of success.

In other words, you should answer the question: “ How will we know that we’ve achieved this goal?”

Work with all the necessary stakeholders to identify specific measures of success that will keep everyone on track. 

These may be improvements to success metric s or KPIs, or they might be specific outcomes ( e.g. launch a new add-on product by Q3 ).

Remember: different stakeholders may have different perspectives on the “right” measures of success, so creating a joint customer success plan will often involve zeroing in on a few prioritized measures.  

Setting clear measurements of success isn’t a new concept. 

What’s new—the missing piece for many customer success teams—is that it’s now easier than ever to take the guesswork out of whether you’re hitting those metrics. With a dedicated client portal for each customer, everyone involved now has one go-to place to find the latest information. 

4. Strategies for success

This section of your plan is where you move from what the desired outcomes are to how you’re going to achieve those outcomes. 

It’s where you begin to set expectations and lay out commitments from and responsibilities of both your company and the customer. 

During customer onboarding , this often includes discrete tasks: setting up integrations, attending kickoff meetings, and so on. 

Once you’ve shifted into more of an adoption stage, those commitments might shift from tasks into ongoing responsibilities: design a newsletter each week, engage with training resources, and so on. 

These strategies can be created together with your client, but odds are you have at least an idea of the things you and your customer will need to do to be successful. When in doubt, a sound approach is to:

• Give your customer a few things you’re committing to do for them
• Present a few commitments they’ll need to make in order to achieve success
• Brainstorm additional actions together based on the client’s specific needs

Here’s an example of a Strategies for Success section found in our Customer Success Plan template , including some example commitments. 

5. Clear action items

A plan is useless without action. In the next section of your customer success plan, list out the actions needed to achieve success. 

Since this is a joint venture between the client and your customer success manager, it’s best to list out both parties’ action items. 

To create clarity and accountability for these actions, don’t just put the name of the action item next to a checkbox and call it a day. 

Assign a due date to the action item, list the people working on it, and label whether it’s on track or not. 

If you’re using Dock, you can make this section interactive, making it easy for both your team and your customers to add new items and update everyone on progress.

6. Onboarding checklists

The onboarding process is where you begin to build customer loyalty, starting with the all-important handoff from sales to customer success. 

A smooth handoff and a great onboarding experience with a quick time to value are the foundations of long-term customer success. 

While you can create a separate customer onboarding plan (like this example onboarding template ), it’s a better idea to include onboarding as a section in your customer success plan. 

Your onboarding checklist should prioritize tasks that are essential to enabling customers to receive fast value from your product:

For a web design agency, that might be the key things needed to deliver initial mockups to your client—audit the existing website, complete a branding questionnaire, and schedule a call to share and collect feedback on your initial mockups.

For sales enablement software, it might be the tasks required to enable sending out the first proposal—integrate with the CRM, upload a logo, and train the sales team. 

If you’re using a tool like Dock, creating an onboarding checklist is easy. Add the required items to your template. You can even add items that are only visible to internal users, such as Make introduction to CSM or Schedule kickoff call. 

Dock also enables you to embed key documentation and how-to videos directly into your plan, making it far more likely that your customers will engage with those vital resources. 

7. Supporting customer success content

Every customer you onboard will go through similar stages and obstacles. Supplying the right resources at the right time can dramatically boost the odds they’ll achieve success with your product or service. 

While your success plan shouldn’t replace your customer help center, providing direct access to resources that have proven their value is a no-brainer. It enables your customer to self-serve and find answers fast. 

Some examples might include:

• Links to help center articles
• Relevant case studies
• Product overviews

You can also include links to previous meetings and training as easy references when they’re needed in the future.

When a customer reaches out to their CSM with a question, all you have to do is quickly add resources to the shared success plan and let them know to check their Dock workspace. 

Easy-peasy. 

Great customer success teams get strategic about using their customer success plan to overcome success gaps. These are the gaps—the obstacles—that prevent customers from achieving success, even if they’ve used your product correctly. 

If you’re an email newsletter platform, the customer may be creating and sending emails every week—but if they’re things their audience doesn’t find valuable, then your customer probably won’t see the engagement or results they’re hoping for. Your customer success plan is a great way to proactively address these potential challenges—such as adding resources on how to write effective marketing emails. 

8. Next steps 

Last, but certainly not least, include a flexible “next steps” or “current priorities” section based on what part of the customer journey your client is on. 

Depending on your customer’s needs, this section can contain:

• Post-onboarding steps. You can use this section to highlight key opportunities for customers to explore once onboarding is complete. Examples include enabling additional features, taking advantage of training resources, or contributing to your customer community. 
• Specific implementation steps. As your customer’s product suite grows, you can use this section to go through specific implementation steps necessary to successfully add new products. 
• Quarterly progress. To help with quarterly business reviews , you can provide key milestones you’ve hit for your client, list things that are going well, and areas of opportunity. 
• Project management information. Here you can house timelines, where you’re at in those timelines, current deliverables, and past deliverables all in one spot for your client to review. 

Here’s an example of items that can be used for a quarterly business review.

6 customer success plan templates you can use today

The more you can reduce the effort for your customers, the higher the likelihood they’ll collaborate well and achieve the success they’re looking for—and the less likely they are to churn. 

That’s why we’re big believers in putting onboarding and customer success materials in one jointly accessible space. 

Your customers shouldn’t have to hunt down important pieces of information from across twenty emails, four spreadsheets, and a bunch of tasks in your project management tool. 

Whether you build one master customer success plan or use specific templates at different stages of the customer journey, both you and your customers benefit when you can make success easier for them. 

Don’t make your customers jump over unnecessary hurdles on the road to success—pave the way for them with these templated success plans. 

1. The Joint Customer Success Plan Template

The joint customer success plan template is our main, most versatile template. It’s the one we use to teach Customer Success leaders how to build their own customer success plan (and the one highlighted the most in this guide). 

It’s flexible enough to work for early-stage startups and enterprise companies looking to boost product adoption and drive better customer outcomes. We’ve also seen it work well for agencies of all types and sizes. 

Our joint customer success plan template helps you to get buy-in from customers, encouraging collaboration with you throughout the customer journey. When executed smoothly, it reduces the likelihood of customer churn and—because of the positive outcomes your customers will see—increases your opportunities to upsell and cross-sell.

👉 Get the Joint Customer Success Plan Template here .

2. The Customer Onboarding Plan Template

The customer onboarding plan template puts the focus on—you guessed it—the initial onboarding phase of the customer journey. It equips you to build a seamless, repeatable process that enables your customers to make the most of your product or service. 

We built this for customer success managers and onboarding specialists who want efficient and effective onboarding processes.

Our customer onboarding template delivers the right first impression. It offers a simple yet comprehensive way for customers to get the guidance and resources they need when getting started. It’s a perfect place to share kickoff call notes, educate customers on important workflows, and highlight key metrics to help your customers find success.

👉 Get the Customer Onboarding Plan Template here .

3. The Implementation Plan Template

The implementation plan template was made for account managers, project managers, and CSMs who want to provide implementation guidance to customers quickly and easily.

This template helps you create consistent software implementation processes to get customers set up quickly. It’s perfect for software implementations and project implementation plans, especially when you need to go beyond the out-of-the-box setup and provide custom guidance to customers. 

In short, it’s an all-in-one resource that gives new customers all the information they need for the entire implementation project timeline.

👉 Get the Implementation Plan Template here  

4. The Client Portal Template

The client porta l template is designed to foster a closer, more productive relationship with clients through the sharing of information and resources. 

We created this template for CSMs and project managers who work and communicate with clients on an ongoing basis.

One of the best things about this template is the ability to customize the layout and content as needed. When your client relationship shifts, it’s easy to add and remove resources or sections from the template. 

👉 Get the Client Portal Template here .

5. The Quarterly Business Review (QBR) Template

Clients want to know when they’re getting value. That’s why so many businesses rely on quarterly business reviews (QBRs). 

But let’s be real: QBRs can be cumbersome without a template.

That’s what this QBR template is for. This template streamlines the entire business review process, helping you:

• Keep users engaged with your product
• Provide a simple, yet comprehensive, overview of how things are going
• Show how you plan to increase their value and grow your relationship over time

Dock also allows you to embed live reports from platforms like ​​Google Data Studio or Looker, enabling you to show the full scope of the value you’re bringing your customers. 

👉 Get the Quarterly Business Review Template here .

6. The Client Project Management Template

The client project management template is designed to bring together all the moving parts of a project together in one central location. It’s the perfect tool for keeping project managers, development teams, CSMs, and customer stakeholders on the same page.

With this template, you can provide your clients with an overview of the project’s purpose, a main point of contact, a project summary, and timeline, and all necessary deliverables. You can also easily update the template as milestones are reached to demonstrate progress.

👉 Get the Client Project Management Template here .

Dock’s customer success plans make it easy to collaborate

Everyone wins when you create a customer success plan. 

You’ll see higher rates of product adoption and retention. Your CSMs will be less frustrated because they’ll be spending less time on admin work and more time helping customers achieve results.

And of course, your customers will be thrilled when they reliably achieve the outcomes they were hoping for when they signed up for your product or service.

Use one of these customer success plan templates to help deliver a better experience and improve the likelihood of your customers’ success.

• The Joint Customer Success Plan Template
• The Customer Onboarding Plan Template
• The Implementation Plan Template
• The Client Portal Template
• The Quarterly Business Review Template
• The Client Project Management Template

Get started with Dock by using one of the free templates above, or create your first 5 Dock workspaces for free .

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• Create a CRM strategy in 6 steps (with ...

Create a CRM strategy in 6 steps (with examples)

A CRM strategy is a company-wide plan to increase revenue and improve customer relationships using specific actions and technology. In this piece, we teach you how to build a CRM strategy with the use of CRM software. CRM software helps teams turn strategy into action by consolidating data. It also helps teams improve existing CRM strategies to better meet customer needs.

In business-to-consumer (B2C) companies, the buyer journey is paramount. Happy customers are loyal to brands they love. So whether you’re in charge of sales, marketing, or customer service, your business processes should focus on customer needs.

This cyclical process increases customer retention while keeping potential leads front of mind. Whether you’re starting a new business or you’re an established company wanting to develop a CRM strategy for a new initiative, this piece will teach you how to build a CRM strategy from the ground up so you can set and reach your business goals . 

What is a CRM strategy?

A CRM strategy is a company-wide plan to increase revenue and improve customer relationships using specific actions and technology. CRM software helps your team turn strategy into action by consolidating data and by giving you insight into your customer’s online behavior.

An effective CRM strategy has various touchpoints that each target customers in their own unique way. The touchpoints you create should lead your potential prospects down the sales pipeline . Touchpoints may include:

Online shopping

Email sign-up form

Social media platforms

Customer service chat portal

These predetermined touchpoints lead potential customers through your website and direct them toward a product to purchase. Combined with CRM software and data from your website, you can use this information to analyze customer behavior and create additional touchpoints that better serve buyer needs.

6 steps to build a CRM strategy

When you build a CRM strategy from the ground up, your CRM software won’t have data from past funnels to report. However, you can use market research and some old-fashioned critical thinking to help build your customer base.

1. Define your business goals

When you have clear business goals , you’ll have an easier time building your CRM strategy. Without goals in place, any CRM strategy you create will likely struggle to point your customers in the right direction. 

For example, if one of your business goals is to double sales next quarter, you can use your CRM strategy to answer the following questions:

What will doubling our sales require?

What must we do to increase our customer base?

What must we do to keep current customers coming back?

Can we get current customers to refer their friends?

Tip: You may have sales goals that don’t involve customers. For example, you may be able to double your sales next quarter by improving your product or revamping the backend of your website. But remember that CRM strategy is a customer-centric methodology.

2. Outline the customer journey

The best way to ensure customer satisfaction is to understand who your target market is. This is called a buyer persona, and there is typically more than one of them. Each different type of customer should have their own persona. Then, you can use this information to further customize your sales funnel.

To identify your ideal persona(s), use market research to analyze who has bought your products—and your competitors’ products—in the past. Collect metrics like age, gender, race, location, level of technology use, preferred social media platform, and socioeconomic status to map specific touchpoints for every customer. All of this information, together, makes up the ideal customer(s) you’re selling to.

Once you identify who your ideal buyer is, you can use their demographic information to figure out where they spend their time online. For example, which social media apps do they use most frequently? How do they relate to brands online? Understanding their online habits can help you identify where and how to connect with them.

Tip: With buyer persona charts, you’ll create an in-depth profile of a potential customer. It’s important to get detailed with each customer profile so you can put yourself in their shoes and find ways to guide them through their sales journey. But keep in mind that each persona represents an entire group of people you intend to target. 

3. Map the sales pipeline

Once you know who your target market is, you can create your initial touchpoints—or the first moments of customer engagement. Align your sales pipeline with your CRM strategy so you can visualize where to take action when things go awry. 

Common sales pipeline stages include:

Lead generation

Lead qualification

Initial contact

Making an offer

Negotiation

Closing the deal

For example, if metrics from your CRM software show that you have both a high number of website visitors and a high bounce rate, this means prospects are coming to your website, but they’re leaving before making a purchase. By comparing that to your sales pipeline, you can see that you have a problem somewhere between initial contact and closing the deal. 

Tip: Your CRM strategy is a more refined version of a traditional sales funnel. Both the traditional sales funnel and your CRM strategy aim to attract and convert prospects, but your CRM strategy improves upon the traditional sales funnel by considering your customer’s specific interests and needs. 

4. Organize your internal processes

To execute your CRM strategy, your team members must understand and know how to manage CRM technology. CRM software can help team members in customer service, sales, and marketing reach departmental goals such as:

Increasing lead generation

Reducing bounce rate

Improving customer retention

Revamping marketing plans

CRM software can also streamline data across departments, which provides a comprehensive view of your customer base and promotes cross-functional collaboration.

Tip: Have your team members set SMART goals that align with your CRM strategy. By setting measurable and time-bound goals, you can track the progress of each goal against the metrics in your CRM software. For example, if a sales team member’s goal is to generate 20 leads per month in the next quarter, the CRM tool will show how close they are to achieving this goal. 

5. Define CRM components

Defining and organizing your CRM components means getting specific with who you plan to target and when.  By using a CRM software, you can organize potential customers into categories like contacts, leads, prospects, and opportunities.

Contact: Someone you’ve previously done business with.

Lead: Someone you haven’t worked with but could have business potential.

Prospect: Someone who fits your target market and has the power to initiate a purchase. 

Opportunity: A prospect who has shown interest in your product and is ready to make a purchase.

Once you’ve grown a list of contacts through social media, an email list, or an e-commerce platform, your CRM software will pull those contacts in and identify which category to place them in. 

Tip: Depending on the CRM tool you use, your team may also benefit from more specific contact categories. Nurtured leads are people that fit your target market but haven’t yet shown intent to purchase. Marketing qualified leads (MQL) are people that have shown some level of intent to purchase. Sales qualified leads (SQL) are people that the sales team are actively trying to convert to customers.  

6. Invest in CRM software

CRM software keeps your sales pipeline flowing as current customers cycle through it and new customers flow in. Your CRM tool should integrate across various platforms so you can intake analytics information—from your website or email management tools—and export next steps to create the best customer journey possible. 

In particular, the right CRM software should integrate with your project management software . That way, team members from all silos can use updated customer information in daily project decision-making.

Tip: The customer journey doesn’t stop with the sales team, and your technology shouldn’t, either. That’s why Asana’s work management tool offers robust, cross-platform integrations with the best CRM softwares like Salesforce , Zendesk , and Hubspot . When you combine Asana for work management with your favorite CRM tool, team members across all teams have a clear idea of what they need to do to close deals and keep customers satisfied beyond their purchase. 

CRM strategy examples

CRM software provides you with insights on how to better serve your customers. Depending on your product offerings and target audience, you may notice that the people you want to reach get most of their information from blog posts. Or maybe they spend a lot of their time on social media. 

You can improve your marketing tactics for both new and existing customers by using these insights to your advantage. Consider these examples of different CRM strategies 

Value-added content

People use Google as a first resort to answer questions and search for product offerings. If your site ranks at the top of Google for a specific keyword or question, then users are more likely to visit your website. The best way to rank on Google is to create valuable, SEO optimized content that’s relevant to your product. Consider writing content for people in various stages of their sales journey to move them through the sales pipeline. 

For example, some people may not be ready to buy your product, but they’ll have relevant questions you can answer. Others may want to know more about the differences between products, which means they’re further along in their sales journey and are closer to making a purchase.

Loyalty and rewards programs

Customer loyalty and rewards programs keep first-time buyers coming back. You can customize one of these programs to your product by offering discounts, gifts, or other bonuses as incentives for them to make purchases and refer their friends. 

Consider airline companies with complex loyalty programs that offer miles on credit card purchases, discounted flights, and priority boarding. These perks keep passengers dedicated to one airline even if other airlines will occasionally offer them better rates.

Level up your customer experience with CRM software

When you make customer satisfaction a top priority, you can increase your chances of profit growth and secure a long-term spot in the market. Customer relationships are more important than individual purchases because building trust leads to invaluable name recognition and lead generation.

CRM software levels up your customer experience by helping you keep track of different customers and their needs. It’s difficult to make customer support feel personal, but when you use sales management software, your team members gain perspective and can make every customer feel supported.

Related resources

How Asana uses work management for organizational planning

How Asana uses work management to optimize resource planning

Solve your tech overload with an intelligent transformation

9 steps to craft a successful go-to-market (GTM) strategy

Customer Service Business Plan Template

Finding the right customer service business plan template is the first step to creating a customer service plan. 3 min read updated on February 01, 2023

Finding the right customer service business plan template is the first step to creating a customer service plan. A customer service plan is the policy or contract that is included with the purchase of an item, typically for an additional fee. Using a template to develop the plan can help ensure all important factors have been included in the plan.

How to Create a Customer Service Plan

The first step in creating a customer service plan is to understand the needs and expectations of the customer. A proper service plan should address the client's immediate needs, as well as long-term needs. Considering both will help avoid any future issues for the customer. The next step is to utilize the feedback to create clearly defined steps for executing the service plan.

Advantages of a Customer Service Plan

There are numerous advantages to creating a customer service plan. Several of the advantages include:

• Increased employee efficiency
• Higher morale and employee satisfaction
• Reduced confusion of expectations
• Minimized stress from misunderstood expectations
• Maintaining customer satisfaction
• Competition with other businesses
• Assessing customer opinions effectively
• Creating a successful customer strategy

What is Customer Care Plan and Its Importance

A customer care plan outlines a company's approach to supporting and valuing its customers. It details how the business will listen to, assist with issues, and prioritize the satisfaction of its customers.

This plan typically involves a dedicated team to address customer inquiries, streamline the support process, and ensure customer satisfaction with the company's products or services.

The reason companies develop customer care plans is to foster strong relationships with their customers.

A customer care plan is also important because it:

• Sets clear goals for customer support.
• Ensures a company-wide commitment to customer satisfaction.
• Communicates with customers clearly and provides timely, accurate information.
• Trains employees in effective customer service and promotes ongoing learning.
• Gathers and acts on customer feedback to improve services.
• Empowers employees to resolve customer issues with confidence.
• Maintains consistent quality in customer experiences across all contact points.
• Resolves customer issues swiftly to ensure satisfaction.
• Leverages technology for efficient and organized communication.
• Proactively addresses potential problems before they escalate.
• Enables customers to find solutions independently.
• Regularly reviews and adjusts the plan based on its effectiveness in achieving customer happiness.

Implementing a comprehensive customer care plan might seem daunting, but it's achievable. By considering all aspects, you can develop a plan that meets the needs of your customers, employees, and business, paving the way for success.

How to Create a Customer Service Plan Step by Step?

To develop an effective customer service plan, start by evaluating how much your company values customer satisfaction. Begin with a thorough self-assessment to gauge your organization's dedication to making customers happy.

STEP 1: Take a Self-Assessment Customer Service Test

In the book, The Customer-Driven Company by Richard C. Whiteley, the author talks about a self-assessment customer service test that helps businesses understand how well they are serving their customers.

Richard’s test is a good way to understand your customers’ needs, preferences, and pain points. It is like a set of questions or evaluations to check how good a company is at taking care of its customers. The goal is to figure out where the company is excelling and where it can make improvements.

There are five ratings to determine the quality of service your business provides to customers. These are:

• Are you kidding? (Lowest rating)
• Hardly ever
• It’s our way of life! (highest rating)

Strive for a score of 4 or 5, indicating your business prioritizes and excels in customer service.

The Self-Assessment Customer Service Test

This test includes various questions designed to give you a clearer insight into your customer service strategy.

It covers key areas such as commitment to service culture, alignment with customer needs, problem-solving skills, effective management of customer data, outreach efforts, the competence and empowerment of your team, and ongoing enhancement of your offerings and procedures.

Here is a table to help you take Richard's test hassle-free. After each statement, give a rating from 1-5 (the ones provided above). Then, divide the total score with the total number of questions to find the exact rating.

After you complete the test, review your score to see if it's high or low.

A low score indicates that there's room for improvement in your customer service. Focus on the areas with lower scores and consider ways to enhance them, such as additional training or modifying your procedures.

If your score is high, that's excellent! It means you're excelling at prioritizing your customers. Now, you're ready to proceed to the second step of developing your customer service strategy.

STEP 2: Establish Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

To gauge the effectiveness of your customer service strategy, it's essential to monitor specific Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). These indicators provide insights into customer satisfaction and the performance of your support team.

Important KPIs to track include customer satisfaction scores (CSAT) , net promoter scores (NPS) , resolution times, and rates of first-contact resolution.

However, we recommend you establish all the following KPIs to plan better:

• CSAT : Measures how happy customers are with the support they received.
• NPS : Indicates whether customers are likely to recommend your service to others.
• Resolution Times : Tracks how quickly your team resolves issues, which is crucial for customer satisfaction.
• First-Contact Resolution Rate : Determines how often problems are solved on the first interaction with a customer.
• Abandon Rate : The frequency at which customers abandon their support requests. A high rate suggests issues with the support process.
• Cost per Resolution : Evaluates the efficiency of your resources in resolving customer issues.
• Customer Lifetime Value : Estimates the total profit a customer will bring over their relationship with your company, indicating long-term satisfaction and value.
• Conversion Rate : Measures the effectiveness of turning visitors into paying customers, indicating the success of your customer acquisition and retention strategies.
• Escalation Rate : Identifies the proportion of service requests that require advanced support beyond the initial level.
• Repurchase Rate : The likelihood of customers making repeat purchases, signaling their loyalty and satisfaction with your products or services.

STEP 3: Invest in Training and Development

Once you've established standards and set KPIs for your business, the next crucial step is to invest in ongoing training for your team. This ensures that your customers always receive top-notch support.

Here are some simple strategies to enhance your team's performance:

• Teach your team essential skills such as effective problem-solving, clear communication, and in-depth product knowledge.
• Tailor the training to meet their needs, including how to manage difficult situations.
• Encourage continuous learning through online courses or workshops.
• Use technology to make learning engaging and accessible, and seek feedback to improve training sessions.
• Ensure your team has comprehensive knowledge of your products, enabling them to assist customers more effectively.
• Recognize and appreciate your employees' efforts. Praise those who excel in training and keep sessions concise and engaging.
• Stay informed about the latest industry trends so your team can provide the best possible support to customers.

By focusing on these areas, you can enhance your team's performance and ensure they are well-equipped to meet your customers' needs.

At Simply Contact , we place a strong emphasis on continuous training and development, ensuring that each agent is thoroughly prepared before they start working on a project. Our approach includes specialized training sessions tailored to the specific needs of each project, equipping our agents with the necessary skills and knowledge to provide exceptional customer service.

This commitment to ongoing education and improvement is a cornerstone of our approach , enabling us to deliver high-quality support and maintain our reputation as a trusted partner in customer service solutions.

STEP 4: Implement an Omnichannel Approach

An omnichannel strategy ensures customers enjoy a seamless experience, whether they interact with a company online, over the phone, or in person. To achieve this, identify various channels through which customers can reach you, such as phone, email, live chat, and social media.

Develop plans to ensure a consistent experience across all these channels. This means customers should expect the same quality of service, no matter how they contact you.

Take Simply Contact as an example. We aim to provide a smooth and effortless experience for customers, regardless of their preferred method of contact. We recognize the value of omnichannel support and offer various ways for customers to get in touch, including online, by phone, or through other means like email, live chat , and social media .

STEP 5: Embrace Technology and Tools

In today's fast-paced world, staying updated with the latest technology is crucial. For a customer service business, it's essential to implement a robust customer relationship management (CRM) system, ticketing software, and chatbots.

These tools streamline your team's work. A CRM system organizes customer information efficiently, ticketing software keeps track of customer inquiries, and chatbots provide instant responses to frequently asked questions.

At Simply Contact , we're ahead of the curve, utilizing advanced software and chatbots to make your team's job simpler. Moreover, our usage of automation means routine tasks are managed automatically, freeing up your team to tackle more complex issues.

STEP 6: Analyze Feedback & Adjust Accordingly

Analyzing feedback helps you identify areas for improvement and highlights what your business is doing well.

Make it a habit to gather feedback from your customers. Use surveys, reviews, and keep an eye on social media to get a sense of their experiences. Also, frequently check your customer service plan and key performance indicators (KPIs) to see if you're meeting your goals, and adjust your approach if necessary.

7 Tips to Create an Efficient Customer Service Plan

Keep these tips in mind to develop an effective customer service plan and build strong relationships with your customers:

• Understand your customers' needs to tailor your plan effectively to their concerns.
• Train your team to be approachable and quick in responding to customer inquiries; this fosters positive interactions.
• Ensure your customers can easily access information about your products or services for a seamless experience.
• Empower your team with the authority and tools they need to resolve issues promptly, reducing the need for escalation.
• Feedback is crucial! Set up a system for customers to share their thoughts, helping you recognize your strengths and areas for improvement.
• Aim for consistent service quality in all customer interactions to establish a dependable and trustworthy reputation.
• Personalize your interactions by considering each customer's preferences and history, demonstrating that you value their business and fostering a positive relationship.

Customer Service Plan Template

This template is designed to help you quickly set up your customer service.

Note: For step 1 (the self-assessment test), you can print out the test as it is mentioned earlier in this guide.

Customer Service Plan Example

Here's a simple example of a customer service plan:

Self-Assessment Customer Service Quotient

• Cultural Commitments Rating: 4.5/5
• Customer Alignment Rating: 3.8/5
• Problem Solving Rating: 4.2/5
• Using Customer Information Rating: 4.6/5
• Customer Outreach Rating: 3.9/5
• Qualified and Empowered Staff Rating: 4.4/5
• Improving Products/Services and Processes Rating: 4.1/5

Final Rating: 4.2/5

This rating states that the following areas need improvement:

• Customer Alignment
• Customer Outreach

Action steps to enhance these areas:

• Conduct targeted training sessions for the sales and marketing teams to ensure a better alignment with customer expectations in product/service delivery.
• Implement a customer feedback system to gather insights on their preferences and expectations.
• Do collaboration between customer service and product development teams to streamline processes based on customer feedback.
• Establish regular forums for direct interaction between customers and the company, providing insights into their experiences and expectations.
• Provide additional training to staff, focusing on the importance of customer-centric approaches in their daily interactions and decision-making processes.

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

• Customer Satisfaction Scores (CSAT): 90%
• Net Promoter Scores (NPS): 75
• Resolution Times: 4 hours
• First-Contact Resolution Rate: 92%
• Abandon Rate: 5%
• Cost per Resolution: $20
• Customer Lifetime Value: $500
• Conversion Rate: 15%
• Escalation Rate: 3%
• Repurchase Rate: 80%

Training and Development – Action Ste ps

• Assess current employee skills in problem-solving, communication, and product knowledge.
• Design training programs to address identified skill gaps.
• Introduce an online learning platform with diverse courses.
• Employ interactive tools and simulations for real-life learning experiences.
• Set up a system for giving constructive feedback and recognizing outstanding performers.

Implement an Omnichannel Approach – Action Steps

• Identify key communication channels preferred by the target audience, such as phone, email, live chat, and social media.
• Ensure a consistent brand message and customer service strategy across all channels.
• Train staff to manage interactions seamlessly across various platforms.
• Implement a unified customer database to keep information synchronized across channels.
• Create a customer feedback loop to monitor and improve customer experiences, adjusting the omnichannel strategy as needed.

Embrace Technology and Tools – Action Steps

• Integrate a robust Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system to centralize customer data, track interactions, and improve management.
• Utilize a ticketing system for efficient issue tracking, prioritization, and resolution.
• Integrate chatbots to handle routine queries and provide instant responses.

Analyze Feedback & Adjust Accordingly – Action Steps

• Consistently gather customer feedback using surveys, reviews, and by monitoring social media to gauge their experiences.
• Regularly review the company's customer service strategy and key performance indicators (KPIs) to verify they align with set goals.
• Identify areas for improvement and acknowledge what the company is doing well based on customer feedback.
• Adjust the company's approach as needed to better meet customer expectations and improve their overall experience.

In conclusion, creating a comprehensive customer care plan is essential for any business aiming to deliver exceptional service and build lasting relationships with its customers. By evaluating current practices, embracing an omnichannel strategy, utilizing technology, and refining your approach based on feedback, your business can consistently meet and surpass customer expectations.

Remember, the key to successful customer care lies in understanding your customers' needs, being responsive to their feedback, and being willing to adapt your strategies to serve them better.

Looking to upgrade your customer care but unsure where to begin? Simply Contact offers the expertise and support needed to elevate your service.

Reach out to us for comprehensive customer support services that will set your brand apart.

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8 Excellent Examples of Customer Relationship Management

• Updated Mar 14, 2024
• Estimated Reading Time: 0

92% of businesses say CRM software plays an important role in achieving their revenue goals.

Are you looking to establish your presence or a seasoned enterprise aiming to optimize your CRM processes? In this blog, let’s explore the customer relationship management examples, types, and top tools to elevate your customer relationship management efforts.

What is Customer Relationship Management?

Customer relationship management refers to the art of managing good customer relationships and prospective customers. It is all about understanding who your customers and potential customers are, and nurturing the relationships you have with them. It is about identifying client expectations and how you meet or go beyond their expectations.

A customer relationship model seeks to improve the relationship between a business and the customer. For this, they drive new trends and provide profits for current and future operations and investments.

The below model is one approach to implementing CRM.

The customer relationship management model can be further categorized into below stages

• Awareness – It is the first touchpoint where prospects try to know more about your brand as a whole.
• Discovery – Then you learn and identify the needs of the prospects and share information to fulfill their requirements.
• Evaluation – Moving ahead the prospects compare and evaluate your products/services with your competitors.
• Intent – Finally your prospect is convinced and made a decision to buy from you.
• Purchase – After making the payment the deal is done and the prospect converts into your customer.
• Loyalty –  Make a follow-up after purchase to determine customer success with your product and ask for referrals. 

Types of CRM Systems

CRM systems can be broadly categorized into several types based on their functionality and deployment model. Here are some common types of CRM systems:

• Operational CRM: It mainly focuses on automating and improving customer-facing processes such as sales, marketing, and customer service. The operational CRM typically includes features like contact management, sales force automation, lead management, campaign management, and customer service/support. 
• Analytical CRM: This type involves analyzing customer data to gain insights into customer behavior, preferences, and trends. It utilizes data mining, predictive analytics, and business intelligence tools to identify patterns and make data-driven decisions. Analytical CRM helps businesses understand their customers better, segment their customer base, and personalize marketing campaigns and offerings to improve customer satisfaction and retention.
• Collaborative CRM: It focuses on facilitating communication and collaboration between different departments within an organization to better serve customers. It integrates various communication channels such as email, phone, chat, and social media to ensure consistent and coordinated interactions with customers across departments. This type of CRM system helps break down silos and improve cross-functional collaboration.
• Strategic CRM: It involves long-term planning and relationship-building strategies aimed at maximizing customer lifetime value and profitability. It focuses on developing and nurturing profitable customer relationships through personalized engagement, loyalty programs, and customer retention initiatives. Strategic CRM aligns organizational goals with customer needs and objectives to create sustainable competitive advantages.
• Cloud-Based CRM: They are hosted on remote servers and accessed via the internet, offering scalability, flexibility, and accessibility from any device with an internet connection. They eliminate the need for on-premises hardware and software installation and maintenance, making them cost-effective and easy to deploy. 
• On-Premises CRM: These are installed and maintained on the company’s own servers and infrastructure. They provide complete control over data security and customization. They require upfront investment in hardware, software licenses, and IT infrastructure but offer greater customization and integration capabilities.
• Industry-Specific CRM: Some CRM systems are designed to meet the unique needs and requirements of specific industries such as healthcare, finance, real estate, or retail. These industry-specific CRM solutions offer tailored features, workflows, and integrations to address industry-specific challenges and compliance regulations effectively. They help businesses in specialized sectors streamline operations, improve customer relationships, and achieve industry-specific objectives.

Impact of Customer Relationship Management on Your Business

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) has a profound impact on businesses across various industries. Here are some key ways in which CRM can influence your business:

• Improved Customer Satisfaction: CRM systems enable businesses to understand their customers better, track interactions, and personalize communication. Businesses can enhance customer satisfaction by providing better service and addressing customer needs more effectively.
• Increased Customer Retention: Businesses can tailor their offerings and communication to individual customers by maintaining a comprehensive database of customer information and preferences. This personalized approach fosters loyalty and increases the likelihood of repeat purchases. Thereby, improving customer retention rates.
• Enhanced Sales Performance: It streamlines the sales process by providing insights into customer behavior, identifying potential leads, and tracking sales opportunities. Sales teams can prioritize their efforts more effectively and focus on high-value prospects.
• Efficient Marketing Campaigns: CRM software enables businesses to segment their customer base and target specific demographics with personalized marketing campaigns. Businesses can refine their marketing strategies and improve the ROI of their marketing efforts by analyzing customer data and tracking campaign performance.
• Scalability and Growth: As businesses grow, managing customer relationships becomes increasingly complex. CRM systems provide scalable solutions that can accommodate growing customer bases and evolving business needs. It facilitates business growth and expansion by standardizing processes and automating routine tasks.
• Competitive Advantage: These days, providing exceptional customer service and building strong relationships with customers is essential for maintaining a competitive edge. CRM enables businesses to differentiate themselves by delivering personalized experiences and exceeding customer expectations.

How Does Creating Good Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Foundation Matter?

Customers are the heartbeat of all businesses. Therefore, creating good customer engagement examples by strengthening relationships with clients is crucial for business success. Through good and bad times, maintaining a healthy customer relationship with all your customers will help in sustaining the performance of your business. 

Whether it is online event companies or trade events, this reason is making/forcing businesses to develop excellent customer relationships for maintaining good performance. Developing good CRM and marketing helps your business to set better customer relationship management examples. 

Let’s talk about the key areas of  developing good customer relationship management 

• Results in good customer experience – CRM is about creating relationships with your customers so that, they enjoy positive experiences when interacting with your brand.
• Growth in customer retention rates – Positive experiences fuel customer retention. Your customers are loyal to your brand and turn into brand advocates.
• High level of customer satisfaction – When you meet your customer expectations with your exceptional service it boosts satisfaction level and they are likely to return to your business again.

So, now let us find out how businesses have used innovative customer relationship management and marketing models/strategies.

8 Examples of Innovative Marketing & Customer Relationship Management

To improve customer relationships, you need to focus on each and every interaction made by customers with your brand. Here are some of the best customer relationship management examples that delve into important customer interactions.

1. Deliver Live Assistance to Boost Customer Engagement

Aberdeen Group’s study found that businesses using visual engagement tools marked an  83% year-on-year increase in annual revenue and achieved 2.7x greater annual improvement (decrease) in customer effort score .

Live assistance is gaining ground as a prominent communication channel for banks as it makes interaction easier. It helps to wrap up a large part of the customer journey context and boost customer satisfaction.

Instead of waiting for bank visits to carry out key transactions like applying for a loan, via using visual tools like video chat and co-browsing, customers gain faster as well as in-person engagement.  Live engagement platforms offer face-to-face video chat assistance that assures security to customers for handling their finances via direct conversation remotely.

The co-browsing solution greatly impacts online customer support by empowering your agents to converse over the customer’s browser and assist to the right page or fill up forms.

Benefits of virtual banking with live assistance tools 

• Combining video chat and co-browsing allows the agents to deliver a personalized banking experience.
• Agents can serve customers for the first time reducing the number of contacts required for assistance.
• Using live collaboration tools for banking support boosts customer trust and satisfaction.

Commercial Bank of Kuwait (CBK), the leading bank has implemented REVE Chat’s video and co-browsing solution to deliver live assistance to its customers. With live tools, the bank has witnessed a significant increase in customer engagement. 

Sign Up with REVE Chat and offer personalized customer service by directly interacting with them and learning the root of the issue.

• If your customer touchpoints require live support, engage them with one video chat or co-browsing solution.
• You should identify your customer journey and provide live assistance for better resolution and customer service experience.

2. Have an Omnichannel Presence

As technology has evolved, the number of communication channels has also grown exponentially. Businesses now have multiple marketing and customer service  channels to communicate with their customers, including both offline and online methods.

Having more communication channels is a good thing for a business as it gives the ability to interact with customers, and serve them. With omnichannel support, you can integrate text, instant messaging, and social to deliver a unified brand experience so that customers can switch between multiple channels and still experience consistent service. 

Oasis , one of the leading women’s clothing brands, focuses on delivering the best omni-channel experience to its customers.

It focused on three main areas to give a better experience to its customers

• Identified the most preferred channels for customer touchpoints 
• Developed a strategy to engage and support them across all those touchpoints
• Delivered a consistent experience throughout the customer journey

As it identified that maximum touchpoints were made via social platforms, it thought of doing something different to impress its Instagram followers.

It created a special gallery of user-generated Instagram content, substantially encouraging customers to model the clothes they have bought from the Oasis store.

• Know your customer’s preferred channels to reach your business and be available for real-time support.
• Improve your customer relationships by delivering a consistent multi-channel support experience. 

3. Automate Customer Support

Delayed response is one of the top reasons why customers decline and leave you at risk of your competitors. Nothing makes a customer happy and satisfied than a faster response. 

Ubisend study says, 21% of consumers believe chatbots are the easiest way to contact a business.

Automating customer support with the best chatbots can redefine your customer satisfaction rates by improving your response times, engagement, and your customers’ interests. Real-time service is invaluable in retaining your current relationships and prospects as well.

Chatbots also help businesses to 

• Direct customers to genuine answers that reduce the number of support tickets raised by customers.
• Feed your bot with general FAQs and train it with relevant answers so that it follows the same pattern to serve customers in the future. 

Hipmunk is a famous travel platform used to search for travel deals. It attempted to use AI technology to engage customers at a closer level and created Hello chatbot  

How does the Hello chatbot help customers?

• To search and reserve the travel activity of their choice.
• The chatbot determines the location of the customer, and then aggregates and promotes discounts/deals on travel packages.
• It can be integrated with various chat applications like Facebook, and Skype.

Some takeaways for you:

• You can place chatbots for initiating chat and collect basic information from website visitors & customers and engage them.
• You can engage your customers 24×7 when the support team is not available. It reduces the number of support requests and boosts customer satisfaction.

4. Continuous Marketing Engagement 

Lack of engagement is one of the big red flags for customer churn in your business. The trick to avoiding this problem is to keep them happy and engaged in post-sales. Because loyal customers are far more profitable than new customers.

How do you do that?

It can be a daunting task to maintain continuous engagement with your customers to offer support to foster this crucial business relationship.

But the thumb rule is: the better the engagement, the happier your customers are. When customers are engaged correctly they are more likely to retain, recommend, and buy more. If your customer engagement strategies are effective, they will positively impact your KPIs.

Here are some strategies to improve continuous marketing engagement:

• Send a thank you email as a token of appreciation and connect you with them with a positive impression. And the basis of creating customer relationships is connecting with people.
• Ask for reviews to measure your customer success with your products and services. You can encourage customers to provide reviews, and you can entice them with a discount or special deal, like free shipping on their next order. 
• Cross-sell or upsell your products through post-purchase emails. Notify your customers of your new products and also offer product recommendations based on their previous purchases.
• Reward systems can be one of the most effective customer loyalty program ideas   to engage customers after they have made their purchase.
• Request for referrals is an effective form of marketing. People tend to make a purchase for sure when it is recommended by a friend or family. The best time to request a referral is after the sale is closed.

Sephora’s Beauty Insider rewards program is globally popular. 

• The program records more than 17 million loyal members , and members make up as much as 80% of Sephora’s annual sales. 
• Customers earn rewards for each purchase based on a traditional point system. 
• The best part is that members can choose how to use their reward points.
• You are supposed to keep your customers engaged after the sales. It should not be only part of the customer journey. 
• When you engage your customers post-sales they feel valued and this improves customer retention

5. Use Social Media for Customer Service

Social media has emerged as a crucial touchpoint in structuring  customer relationships . Customers share their positive as well as negative reviews and experiences over social and expect an immediate response.

According to Gartner , churn increases by up to 15% for businesses that fail to respond to messages on social media .

Popular social channels like Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter are not just for business promotion. They can be used to connect with your customers. Almost 78% of customers want brands to help people connect through social media .

Framing good customer relationships on social media helps businesses to improve relationships with customers by making them feel connected to your brand.

Make your customers feel happy after interacting with you. It helps in creating strong connections with customers over social media. For instance, Nike engages its customers and makes them feel they are available to fix their issues even though customers can find the solution themselves. 

• You should respond faster to social reviews and posts and develop customer trust.
• It is recommended to personalize your conversations while talking directly with customers.
• Offer rewards to your customers with campaigns and contests to set good customer relationship management examples.

6. Improve Your Conversion Rates

Your customers are your greatest assets as they are the ones who will vouch for the quality of your products and services. If you play your cards right when it comes to customer experience, your customers can turn into your marketing representatives.

And how having customers as marketing professionals is effective?

If customers are satisfied with your service they turn to their friends and family for recommendations. They share their success stories with your brand with positive word of mouth.

Referrals convert at 3-5 times a higher rate than other marketing methods. The referred customers are more loyal and have higher lifetime values. 

Casper Mattress company came with an irresistible offer.  It offered to take a mattress home and sleep on it for 100 days before deciding whether to return it. Such an amazing offer along with quick online ordering and home delivery – nobody wanted to miss it.

• Giving a long trial period eliminated the greatest fears about buying a high-end mattress. Customers had plenty of time to test the mattress for comfort and durability. 
• Customers had mattresses in their homes that they could use and show to others. Casper at the same time circulated detailed ads and reviews on social media.
• You should focus on your customer service strategies. When your customers are satisfied they retain your business and advocate your brand with positive word of mouth.

7. Increase Customer Satisfaction

Forrester’s research indicates that expectations toward customer service are related to three main factors: the success of the solving process, ease of the solving process, and emotions during the solving process.

The journey of providing your customers with a positive experience starts from the moment they visit on your website and extends beyond the moment they become your customers.

Keeping your customer’s expectations a top priority and going the extra mile to meet those expectations will boost their satisfaction and set great customer delight examples . 

A customer’s experience and feedback should be the factors that validate important decisions within your business. Seeking customers’ feedback and implementing it makes the customers feel better.

Airbnb surveys take customer’s opinions after their stay, giving them the space to decide whether they want to share their feedback or not. Airbnb has increased the number of bookings by 25% , just with their referral program.

• You should learn about your customer experiences and try to fulfill them to deliver a positive experience. Positive experiences boost customer satisfaction.

8. Develop a Strong Brand Image

Every business puts its best efforts into developing a strong brand image as it sets the foundation for building relationships with customers .  A strong brand image impacts increasing the trust level in customers and helps in customer retention. 

Successful branding leads to increased customer loyalty, an improved image, and a relatable identity. TSL Marketing

The brand image can be strengthened by making use of brand communication through word of mouth.

Colgate, for example, is a popular brand name. It has built an image in customers that it is the best product for maintaining their dental health. Usually, customers go for Colgate as a brand as they are strongly connected with it.

• Brand image is of great importance. Put your best efforts to develop your brand image and maintain the trust of your customers.

Top 5 Tools for Better Customer Relationship Management

There are numerous tools available for customer relationship management (CRM), each offering various features to help businesses effectively manage their interactions with customers. Here are some of the top tools commonly used for better CRM:

• Salesforce: Salesforce is one of the leading CRM platforms, offering a comprehensive suite of tools for sales, marketing, and customer service. It provides features such as contact management, opportunity tracking, lead scoring, email automation, and customizable dashboards. It also offers extensive integration capabilities with third-party apps and a vibrant ecosystem of add-ons and extensions.
• HubSpot CRM: It is a popular choice for small to mid-sized businesses. It offers a user-friendly interface and a range of features for sales, marketing, and customer service. HubSpot includes contact management, email tracking, deal tracking, lead scoring, and reporting tools.
• Zoho CRM: It is a robust CRM solution suitable for businesses of all sizes, offering features like lead management, pipeline management, email marketing, workflow automation, and reporting/analytics. It provides integration with other Zoho products as well as third-party applications.
• Microsoft Dynamics 365: It is a cloud-based CRM and ERP platform that integrates seamlessly with other Microsoft products such as Office 365 and Outlook. It offers features for sales, marketing, customer service, and field service, along with AI-driven insights and predictive analytics. It helps businesses make informed decisions and personalize customer interactions.
• Pipedrive: This CRM platform is designed to help sales teams manage leads, track deals, and improve sales performance. It offers customizable pipelines, activity tracking, email integration, and reporting tools.

Customer relationship management is an integral part of every section of the business. It is not limited to customer support only rather it applies to the whole customer life cycle across their journey.

Developing long-lasting customer relationships is crucial for businesses as it helps your brand stand out and gives customers reasons to emotionally connect with you. However, having a strong foundation of customer relationships is the base of every business.

Businesses are different but the core essence of success will always remain the same. REVE Chat’s live chat platform allows you to understand and address customer concerns in real time which strengthens customer relationships. Sign up today to set an excellent customer relationship management example.

Start a 14-day free trial, no credit card required!

Snigdha Patel

Snigdha Patel is a customer experience researcher, author, and blogger. As part of REVE Chat, she focuses on helping organizations maximize customer experience using omnichannel messaging and conversational AI.

She creates contextual, insightful, and conversational content for business audiences across a broad range of industries and categories like Customer Service, Customer Experience (CX), Chatbots, and more.

Serving as the lead content strategist, Snigdha helps the customer service teams to leverage the right technology along with AI to deliver exceptional and memorable customer experiences.

Being a customer service adherent, her goal is to show that organizations can use customer experience as a competitive advantage and win customer loyalty.

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