Playbook Examples and Templates

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.

Play	Our Recommendations
Send 'Welcome' Email	Include links to your help center and any other materials that might be useful. Create an email template in Planhat and associate it with this play.
Schedule a training session with main users	Make sure that the main user(s) are trained that they are able to assist others. Ensure that the users know how to use your key & sticky features.
Billing & Invoicing	Create an internal task for your CSMs as a reminder to ensure the invoice was sent and the payment was processed.
Sales Hand-off Complete	Another internal task to ensure that all information is successfully transferred from Sales to the CSM.

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.

Play	Our Recommendations
Email key contact	Try to book a call with all of the key people involved.
Check to see if there are any open support tickets	If you have your tickets synced into Planhat, check to see if the account has any open tickets that have not yet been resolved and see if they can/should be addressed or resolved. Have a plan to address them on the call if they are still being resolved or running into issues.
Send re-cap email	After the call, send an email to the involved contacts with a summary of what was discussed and decided regarding next steps if there were any action items that need to be taken care of.

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.

Play	Our Recommendations
Reach out with email campaign for users with low scores	In Planhat, you can create a Persona based on NPS score results - do this to automatically group all of the end users who submitted a low score. Ask for additional feedback and listen.
Follow up	Follow up and thank the users that provided additional feedback Reach out one more time to the users who did not submit additional feedback
Create Action Plan	Create an internal action plan to improve NPS scores. Communicate plan with all teams - sales, product, support, etc.

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.

Play	Our Recommendations
Day 1: Send a "Hey, we miss you!" email.	Create a trigger that alerts you when there is a drop in usage (on account level), or create a person that collects users who have a drop in usage (this will be on the end user level). Send an email letting them know you would like to see them back in your application or using your service. Note: You can create an email template for this or utilize our MailChimp integration.
Day 4: Send a customized email from the CSM	Take a look at the account and see where they are dropping in usage (if there is any specific feature/module they are using less) Reach out to them with an email letting them know you'd like to see them back. Provide some helpful materials for getting them started again. Note: For low touch customers, you can create an email template or utilize our MailChimp integration for outreach.
Day 9: CSM calls the main contact	Give the main contact/user a call to see if they are running into any issues. See what you can do or what is needed to get them back into the app/ using your services.

🚀 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.

Play	Our Recommendations
Check their success to date	Look at their usage and health score and confirm it is positive Refer back to their ongoing objectives are determine how many of their goals you’ve achieved so far
Find the contract terms, decision maker and executive sponsor/signatory	Make sure there are no terms in the contract you need to be aware of that make this an irregular renewal. Check usage/log-ins to confirm that the people who bought your solution are still at the company
Prep for the QBR/EBR that will take place 90 days before renewal	Escalate the renewal internally at 120 days if you have concerns so that you have time to bring in the colleagues you need if necessary
EBR	Use dashboards to present key information and type up the notes on Planhat, tagging in all relevant colleagues so the business can prioritise this renewal if necessary.
Sign renewal	Upload the new contract to Planhat if there is one
Move to Success Phase	Now the customer has renewed you can move them back into “Success” phase and continue delivering value.

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.

Play	Our Recommendations
Automatically check usage	Use a filter to check when usage is at 80% of limit, or has increased by x% in a certain time period
Assign AE/AM a task to look at usage	Now your revenue focused role can look closer at whether there is an expansion or upsell opportunity within the account
AE & CSM to meet	Knowledge share about the account, find out what upcoming meetings there are and plan the expansion together
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	Notes are typed up in Planhat, conversations can then continue attached to the event in Planhat
Close the deal	Close the deal, update the licenses, and start a new Playbook focused on onboarding/adoption around their expanded use case

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.

Play	Our Recommendations
Tag the new admin	Identify the new Admin within the account and assign them the tag “admin”
Day 0: Send first email	Have an automated email go out, introducing yourself as the CSM, sharing the support email address, as well as any key documentation you want them to have at hand
Day 3: Send second email	Send the admin 1 or 2 key help desk articles that you know will answer any frequently asked questions they may have
Day 5: Send final email	Send a final email to confirm they have everything they need, and perhaps add a help centre article you know is relevant to the ongoing project you are working on with their company.

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.

Play	Our Recommendations
Check CSM Sentiment Score	CSMs will be regularly updating their sentiment on the account on a score from 1-5.
Check phase of customer	Confirm that they are in “Onboarding”
Trigger Playbook if both of the above are true	Automatically assigning tasks to the AE, CSM, and CS Leader
Task for CSM	Complete a checklist/list of questions to fully prep others about the risk in the account
Task for AE	Reach out to their relationship in the account and learn additional information on the customer’s thoughts
Task for CS Leader	Lead meeting with CSM and AE to determine a clear path out of risk
Email customer to set up a call	AE, CSM and CS Leader attend. Customer is made a partner in that path out of risk
Store meeting notes in Planhat	Allow them to be accessed and discussed internally through Planhat