Increase Adoption, Upsell, Expansion, and Retention – Chili Piper

When you hear the word revenue, your first thought is probably sales or marketing.

But the most successful companies understand that revenue is actually the responsibility of so many more departments than just marketing and sales.

Account managers, customers success managers, implementation specialists, trainers, support reps, and more, all play an important role in the customer lifecycle. They impact revenue to the tune of expansion, upsell, and retention.

That’s known by most of the business world as customer success! 

Sales operations, marketing operations, revenue operations – these are the functions within your business that look to perfect the processes around how you make money.

But don’t forget success operations (ie. Success Ops). It’s often overlooked, but hugely important!

Having sound processes around the way you drive value for your customer base is extremely important. It’s your blueprint for living up to the promises your marketing and sales teams made.

And what do customers care about?

• Crushing their goals using your product/service
• Fast response times
• Access to help when they need it
• Less friction when looking to connect with their AM, CSM, or support rep
• Fast-tracked access to an AM or AE with they want to buy more of your product – not the same experience someone off the street would have
• They want VIP treatment!

In order to offer this type of experience, you need workflows in place to help you remove friction and fast track customers to the resources they need.

SUCCEED and you’ll create a delightful experience resulting in more adoption, upsell conversations, conversions, and renewals.

FAIL and you’ll create a poor experience, resulting in slow response times, low adoption and expansion, and through-the-roof churn rates.

In this article, we’re sharing how teams are using Chili Piper to streamline their success operations and connect with customers faster.

CSM or implementation handoff

One of the often overlooked, but crucial steps in the customer journey is the transition from prospect to customer.

24% of customers who have a positive first impression remain loyal for up to 2 years, and 87% of customers will tell others about good experiences that they had.

When someone finally signs on the dotted line, what happens next has a huge impact on the rest of their relationship with your company.

This transition (what we call “handoff”) from AE to customer success, needs to happen smoothly. It usually comes in the form of a handoff meeting to someone like an account manager, CSM, implementation specialist, etc.

Unfortunately, many orgs have complex assignment rules for new accounts. AEs often have to wait until a manager assigns them, or they need to chase down some internal spreadsheet to determine who gets what.

In some cases accounts don’t get transferred or contacted until weeks after they sign a contract.

Instead, make it easy for your AEs to book handoff meetings right away. With Instant Booker, the minute a deal closes they can automatically assign it and book a meeting in the correct CS rep’s calendar.

After a quick scan of their availability they can book a handoff meeting in one click with a templated meeting and calendar invite. The new customers get a calendar invite with a warm introduction to their new CS rep and your AE can rest easy knowing their new customer is well taken care of.

What does this mean for you? Faster time-to-value for your customers, resulting in less churn and higher lifetime value.

The team at PatientPop uses Chili Meetings for this exact use case, click here to learn how they’re launching 90% of their new customers using Chili Piper.

“Any individual in a CS organization that is trying to automate the process for assigning accounts, I would highly recommend Chili Piper. It’s really improved our productivity and allowed us to automate that whole process.”
Chloe Jillings
Manager of Customer Success at PatientPop

Make it easy for customers to book upsell meetings

There’s nothing better than a customer who raises her hand looking for more of your product. Don’t shoot yourself in the foot by making them jump through hoops.

With our Concierge tool embedded inside your application, you let customers book upsell and expansion meetings in seconds.

This could be interest in a new product or feature, additional units of X, Y, and Z, or even just inquiries into how to use additional new features in your product.

Concierge taps into your product’s API to detect the user and automatically route them to the correct account manager.

What does this mean for you? Upsell and expansion meetings get booked on the calendar immediately, resulting in less drop-off and more conversions.

Take it a step further by implementing Concierge Live, our instant call solution that lets customers start a live phone or video call with their account manager in real time. When response times matter most, there is no faster way to connect with customers.

The team at Apollo uses Concierge in their application to let freemium users book meetings with their AE team to inquire about upgrading to premium. Click here to learn how they increased revenue by 300%.

“We now see 5x as many meetings as we did before starting with Chili Piper and our revenue is around 300% – even with half the size of the sales team.”
Krishan Patel
Director of Growth @ Apollo

Offer instant live support to your customers

Support response times are critical to retaining happy customers and increasing customer value. When you fail to respond quickly to customers you risk losing them to your competition.

An annual customer service study found that the average vendor response time is 12 hours – with the slowest response taking longer than 8 days.

A second study found that 88% of customers expect a response from your business within 60 minutes, with 30% expecting a response in 15 minutes or less.

These clearly don’t match up.

With Concierge and Concierge Live you can offer your customers white-glove access to your support team, either with the ability to book a call in seconds or the option to start a live call instantly.

ALSO, with the ability to create customized routing rules in Chili Meetings, you can offer instant live calling to only some customers. You can tailor your Concierge Router to work with your various support packages. Some customers can get live calling, while others only get the option to book a meeting.

What does this mean for you? Customers will have ready access to your support resources when problems arise, so they don’t fester too long and turn into churn. You also have a great premium support option to offer customers – instant live support calls!

Easily book meetings via customer marketing campaigns

Promoting a new product, premium feature release, or even new use cases to drive deeper adoption? Instead of prompting customers to “contact your CSM”, let them book immediately on their account manager’s calendar.

Increase conversions in your next customer emails by making your CTA a smart booking link that automatically prompts your customer to book in their account manager’s calendar.

What does this mean for you? Instead of waiting and hoping that that customers reach out, you can make the call to action instant and totally trackable.

Make it easier for your customer facing reps to book meetings

Customer success teams probably have the widest range of external meetings they need to book – implementation, training, customer check-ins, technical support calls, upsell and expansion calls, case study calls, quarterly business reviews, renewal calls, advisory board meetings, the list goes on.

With Chili Meetings and our suite of booking tools, your customer facing teams can automate everything to do with scheduling customer meetings.

This includes:

• Suggested Times to make booking a one-click process over email
• Instant Booker to book automated meetings in seconds while on the phone
• Smart Email Signatures to give customers an easy way to book in every email
• Reminders and One-click Rescheduling to reduce no shows
• Dynamic Meetings Templates to save time booking meetings
• CRM workflows to automatically track meetings and eliminate busywork

What does this mean for you? Instead of having your team waste hours every week on manually scheduling meetings and updating your CRM, they can focus their attention on servicing customers, delivering value, and growing your business.

Light a fire under your CS operations 

If you take anything away from reading this article, I hope it’s this – efficient customer success teams generate revenue.

The single most important metric to your business is customer retention, but we also know that truly successful companies are amazing at upselling and expanding existing customers. Every use case we explored in this article can make you better at each of these.

I encourage you to look at your success operations today and try to uncover some of the processes you can optimize. I bet you’ll find some low hanging fruit that can help you reduce churn and increase revenue in a big way.

And if you’re interested in learning more about how Chili Piper can help, click here to request a demo!