The purpose of a playbook is to build scalable processes for your customer success team. A playbook helps you quality assure the basics of your customer success methodology. Playbooks help you align your teams, and help make on-boarding of new CSMs easy.
Think of Playbooks as a simple “if-this-then-that-manual”.
The playbooks that you create will be dependent upon your product; some companies have a very complex onboarding process, while others may not. You can fine tune these as you continue to refine your customer success processes, but here are some basic playbook templates to help you get started with your playbooks in Planhat.
🚀 If you want to know more about best practices for building and designing Playbooks in Planhat, check out these articles:
Basic Onboarding Playbook
These are some steps that you can consider including in your process, and that we have seen are most common.
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Send 'Welcome' Email |
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Schedule a training session with main users |
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Billing & Invoicing |
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Sales Hand-off Complete |
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Create an email template
Feature adoption to identify sticky features
Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs)
A quarterly business review is a check-in, at the end of each quarter, with the main users and the decision makers (if they are not the same person). This is the time to reinforce the value your customers are getting out of your product.
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Email key contact |
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Check to see if there are any open support tickets |
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Send re-cap email |
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Low NPS Score
In Planhat you have the option to have your NPS scores per company (the average NPS score from all of the users that answered), and per end users. With this information, you can create a playbook to reach out to those that responded with a low NPS score.
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Reach out with email campaign for users with low scores |
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Follow up |
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Create Action Plan |
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A Drop In Usage
You can create a filter in Planhat to detect a drop in usage which will be your entry criteria for the automated playbook application. This way your CSMs have an action plan ready for them to try to bring the users back.
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Day 1: Send a "Hey, we miss you!" email. |
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Day 4: Send a customized email from the CSM |
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Day 9: CSM calls the main contact |
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🚀 Quick tip: Create email templates and use merge tags in your Planhat emails
Additional Playbook 1: 120 days until renewal
In customer success we want renewal to be seen as a non-event, but to achieve that you’ll want to make sure you’re making the right moves in the background.
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Check their success to date |
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Find the contract terms, decision maker and executive sponsor/signatory |
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Prep for the QBR/EBR that will take place 90 days before renewal |
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EBR |
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Sign renewal |
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Move to Success Phase |
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Additional Playbook 2: Expansion Opportunity
Your company may get Sales back involved during commercial discussions, or you may run expansions and upsells within the CS organisation. Either way, Planhat’s unlimited seats allow you to use Playbooks to get the right people involved at the right time.
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Automatically check usage |
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Assign AE/AM a task to look at usage |
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AE & CSM to meet |
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OPTIONAL: Share a page in the customer Portal to show the customer the value they’d create by expanding their usage | |
AE & CSM to meet customer |
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Close the deal |
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Additional Playbook 3: Training/Onboarding a New Admin at a Customer [End-User Example]
Using Planhat’s End User Playbooks you can give the feeling of a white-glove welcome to new key users within an account, all while only having had to tag them with their specific role.
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Tag the new admin |
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Day 0: Send first email |
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Day 3: Send second email |
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Day 5: Send final email |
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Additional Playbook 4: Escalation at key event, Onboarding event
It’s often said that the seeds of churn are planted during onboarding, so Planhat can help you find those seeds before they take root.
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Check CSM Sentiment Score |
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Check phase of customer |
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Trigger Playbook if both of the above are true |
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Task for CSM |
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Task for AE |
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Task for CS Leader |
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Email customer to set up a call |
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Store meeting notes in Planhat |
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