Customer success after the sale, in one view

The deal is won. The account manager celebrates, marks it won and moves on to the next one. The customer goes to the team that handles implementation or delivery. That team works from a spreadsheet plan, a project tool sales has never opened and a folder of emails. Three months later the account manager calls about an expansion. The customer says: "You have not even gone live yet."

That is not ill will. It is that information about the customer after the sale lives in other places than before it. The account manager does not see an open blocker, the consultant does not see a renewal coming up, and nobody sees that four high-priority tickets came in over the last weeks. Everyone sees a part, and the part that matters falls between the systems.

So customer success starts with one question: which customers need attention now? To answer it you need three things in one place. Where the project stands. What is holding it back. And how the customer is doing in service. How to measure that and which numbers matter is covered in the guide customer success metrics.

In Lumo those three sit on the same organization as the deal. A customer project has a phase, progress, a go-live date, milestones and a next step. Blockers and tickets hang off the project. And from the tickets in your helpdesk Lumo calculates a health score per organization. The customer success overview brings them together: projects that are behind, have open blockers or low health appear under needs attention, the most urgent first.

Nobody has to run a weekly status round to find out where things go wrong. It is on the screen.

This is a made-up example to show the flow, not a customer case.

Say a SaaS company selling workforce software to hospitals has an onboarding team of four and twenty customers in onboarding. Each project has four phases: Kickoff, Configuration, Training and Live. Until now the plan lived in a spreadsheet updated every Friday, and account managers asked in the weekly meeting how their customers were doing.

In Lumo each project has its phase, a go-live date and six to eight milestones. On Monday morning team lead Sophie opens the customer success overview. At the top it says 20 running projects, 3 going live within 30 days and 4 needing attention.

At the top of needs attention is a regional hospital with 2 open blockers. Sophie opens the project. One blocker is three weeks old: the customer still has to deliver its staff data. The other is from last week: the single sign-on setup on the customer's side is not finished. Under blockers and tickets she also sees two tickets about login problems, and the organization's health is at risk. The next step is empty.

Sophie fills in the next step: "Call with the hospital's IT lead about staff data and login, this week." She plans an activity for the onboarding manager and leaves a note for the account manager. He calls the customer the same day, not about an expansion but about the blockers.

Under going live soon there are three projects. On one of them the Training milestone is overdue. Sophie sees it now, three weeks before go-live, not the day before.

Customer success does not stand apart from sales. The project hangs off the same organization as the won deal in your pipeline. The health score comes from the tickets in your helpdesk, and the customer follows those tickets in the customer portal.

Working as a customer success manager? Lumo for customer success shows what a week in Lumo looks like. If you want to know whether your own team uses Lumo well, see CRM adoption and guidance. That is about your staff, not your customers.