Silicon Canals
TRENDING
  • Mobility
  • AI
  • FinTech
  • Software & SaaS
No Result
View All Result
  • Home
  • News
    • COVID-19
    • Startups
    • Scaleups
    • FinTech
    • AI and chatbots
    • Travel & Mobility
    • Software & SaaS
    • Health & Medtech
    • (Crowd)funding
    • Blockchain
    • Internet of things
    • Hardware
    • Accelerators
    • E-commerce
    • Cybersecurity
    • Gaming & Virtual Reality
    • Drones
  • Features
    • Promoted content
    • How-to
    • Knowledge & Insights
    • Guest Contributions
    • Scaling-up in Europe
  • Amsterdampartner
  • Events
  • Newsletter
  • Jobs
  • About
    • Partner with Silicon Canals
    • Team
    • Contact
  • Home
  • News
    • COVID-19
    • Startups
    • Scaleups
    • FinTech
    • AI and chatbots
    • Travel & Mobility
    • Software & SaaS
    • Health & Medtech
    • (Crowd)funding
    • Blockchain
    • Internet of things
    • Hardware
    • Accelerators
    • E-commerce
    • Cybersecurity
    • Gaming & Virtual Reality
    • Drones
  • Features
    • Promoted content
    • How-to
    • Knowledge & Insights
    • Guest Contributions
    • Scaling-up in Europe
  • Amsterdampartner
  • Events
  • Newsletter
  • Jobs
  • About
    • Partner with Silicon Canals
    • Team
    • Contact
No Result
View All Result
Silicon Canals
No Result
View All Result

How to manage thousands of clients for your startup with only a teeny-tiny team

Editorial team by Editorial team
April 18, 2017
in Knowledge & Insights, Guest Contributions, guestblog, Startups
0
How to manage thousands of clients for your startup with only a teeny-tiny team
24
SHARES
LinkedInTwitterWhatsAppFacebook

At the 2017 edition of the Customer Success Summit, our startup, Teamleader received two awards: one individual award and one for the entire customer service team. Our team successfully managed an exponential growth: from 1,500 to 5,000 customers in one year. Let me share the  three most insightful learnings from our customer success approach on how to manage such tremendous growth at our startup.

This is a guest post by Rob Klijsen, Country Manager at Teamleader Nederland

 - Partner content -
Cost of software - The Software house
The cost of building software
Marek Gajda, CTO of The Software House, shares his insights on building high-quality...Show More
Marek Gajda, CTO of The Software House, shares his insights on building high-quality software. Show Less
Read more

1) Ditch classic account management  

In big enterprise deals, you might need a dedicated account manager to take care of the needs of the clients. With 5,000 customers and only 15 agents, we realized quite early that we wouldn’t be able to scale our customer success team if we used the classical approach and make every agent responsible for a part of the customer base. That isn’t feasible, especially since we onboard about 500 new customers every month.

Thinking about this problem, we realized that we solved a similar problem in the sales department. In here we “divide and conquer”: split up sales tasks over different people. The idea is to let people focus on their strengths. A sales guy getting a rush from closing a deal will not be getting the same rush from onboarding a client. And if that works for the sales team, why wouldn’t it apply to customer success?

2) Mapping the customer success journey

When we mapped out the customer success lifecycle, it was apparent that the needs of a customer change significantly throughout the relationship. The clearest distinction is between getting a client to use the software (onboarding) and keeping the client (retention).

In onboarding, our main goal is to get our customer operational as fast as possible. After this first phase the retention phase commences, where we focus on helping customers get the most out of our platform.

So a happy customer relationship looks like this:

  1. Customer gets onboarded

  2. Customer is up and running

  3. Customer is using the tool more and more

  4. The software becomes a crucial tool for the customer

An onboarder should be more process oriented, thinking along with the customer while setting up their account. Retention managers, on the other hand, need to be able to see where, why and how a customer can improve the usage. The further clients go into the lifecycle, the more needs or expectations a customer will have. It’s the job of the retention agent to fulfill these needs. For every phase in our model, we find people with the perfect skill set who can help our clients.

This model offers two big advantages: it caters to the needs of all our clients as they go through the customer lifecycle, and it allows us to compartmentalize internally.

3) Don’t take your customer by the hand

This doesn’t mean we set our customers free and never look back: if they have any specific questions, our Customer Success Team is there to help. We also like to keep our customers alert: we continue to feed them information, share useful tips, and keep them informed on updates and changes.

Our model doesn’t allow us to take them by the hand every step of the way, so we let them do a bit of homework as well. This way, they will emotionally invest in the product and in the success of the tool. This results in a high engagement and involvement as well as self-sufficient, confident and independent clients.

This is a guest post by Rob Klijsen, Country Manager at Teamleader Nederland.

Image top: Smiling customer service representative talking with client by Shutterstock. Image center: Customer Service Call Center Agent Care Concept by Shutterstock

close

Want to stay on top of the latest rounds, coolest tech and hottest startups?

Subscribe to our free, daily news blast and stay up-to-date!

Check your inbox or spam folder to confirm your subscription.

 - Partner content -
Nebula CTO Andre Witte
Cloud spend management 😱
Tracking cloud spend can be tricky. Learn from Nebula's CTO Andre Witte how to keep the...Show More
Tracking cloud spend can be tricky. Learn from Nebula's CTO Andre Witte how to keep the costs at bay in 2021. Show Less
Read more
Tags: onboarding
Share1Tweet3SendShare18

Featured events

07apr10:0012:30FeaturedWorkshop: pr for startupsHow to grow your startup with the help of public relations

Partner content | Work with us

Blue Tulip Awards announce 5 finalists in the Food & Water and Education & Employment theme

Impact media foundation 5 Media offers grants up to €100,000 per year to drive a sustainable future

Here’s how cryptocurrency will take over the world

Blue Tulip Awards is driven by purpose: why innovation and equality go hand in hand

Future of coding: CTOs discuss low-code versus custom code software development for their business

Breaking news from Amsterdam | Partner

Here’s why Just Eat Takeaway is expanding its offices in Amsterdam

Amsterdam-based Veylinx uses Nobel Prize-winning approach to solve the problem of unreliable survey data; raises €1.6M

Amsterdam-based fintech unicorn Mollie enters UK market to helps merchants there grow into Europe post-Brexit

Amsterdam-based HR tech Recruitee takes a “shortcut” to a future unicorn status

  • About Silicon Canals
  • Partner with Silicon Canals
  • Contact us
  • Newsletter
  • Disclaimer
  • Privacy policy
  • Terms & Conditions Silicon Canals

Silicon Canals 2014-2020 | Website: Bright Idiots

No Result
View All Result
  • Home
  • News
    • COVID-19
    • Startups
    • Scaleups
    • FinTech
    • AI and chatbots
    • Travel & Mobility
    • Software & SaaS
    • Health & Medtech
    • (Crowd)funding
    • Blockchain
    • Internet of things
    • Hardware
    • Accelerators
    • E-commerce
    • Cybersecurity
    • Gaming & Virtual Reality
    • Drones
  • Features
    • Promoted content
    • How-to
    • Knowledge & Insights
    • Guest Contributions
    • Scaling-up in Europe
  • Amsterdam
  • Events
  • Newsletter
  • Jobs
  • About
    • Partner with Silicon Canals
    • Team
    • Contact

Silicon Canals 2014-2020 | Website: Bright Idiots

X

This website uses cookies to ensure the best possible experience. We may share this information with our advertising and analytics partners. By clicking 'Accept', you agree to our use of cookies and similar technologies. More info