A 5-step framework to create a customer success strategy that drives growth

The days of treating customer success like an extension of customer support or a siloed function are over. Modern businesses know that proactive, data-driven customer success is a critical lever for business growth. Not only does it increase customer lifetime value (CLV), loyalty, and satisfaction, it’s also a rich source of user insights that can be used to improve every part of your business, from product to marketing to sales—but only if you do it right.

That’s where your strategy comes in. An effective customer success strategy uses in-depth behavioral analysis to provide targeted, actionable advice for your customers based on real usage data, then shares those learnings with other teams to drive business-wide results. 

In this article, we show you how to create an impactful, measurable customer success strategy in 5 easy steps—and how to leverage it to enhance the customer experience (CX) at every touchpoint.

Key insights

• Customer success is evolving fast—and reactive approaches aren’t good enough anymore. Today’s customer success programs use data to discover issues, identify opportunities, and measure outcomes, so teams can proactively deliver value for customers.

• Limited tech stacks limit your ability to understand customer needs at scale. Incorporate tools like AI-powered session replays, journey analysis, surveys, and AI copilots to accelerate time to insight so your customer success (CS) team can quickly take action where they’ll have the most impact.

• Customer success’s deep knowledge of users and their pain points is a goldmine for other teams. Schedule regular cross-functional meetings with product, marketing, customer support, and sales to share your findings, align on business goals, and prioritize user-centric improvements at every touchpoint, from UX to ads. 

1. Set your customer success metrics

Identify the desired outcomes of your customer success strategy and turn them into measurable KPIs linked to business outcomes. For example, some goals may include

• Improving product and feature adoption to speed up value realization (and stickiness)

• Increasing customer retention by ensuring renewals at the end of each subscription cycle

• Boosting recurring revenue by identifying upsell and cross-sell opportunities for existing customers

• Increasing customer satisfaction metrics like Net Promoter Score® (NPS®) or customer satisfaction score (CSAT)

• Collecting customer feedback and data to improve functionality and inform your product roadmap

• Enhance brand awareness and reputation through referrals and positive word of mouth mentions on social media or review websites like G2

🤓 Not sure which ones to choose or how to translate strategic goals into KPIs? Check out our dedicated chapter on customer success metrics. 

Alongside these business metrics, you should also create an internal customer health score. This is a metric that combines multiple factors—like customer satisfaction, product usage, and engagement—to determine whether customers are happy and getting value from your product or whether they’re at risk of churning, so you can prioritize your outreach efforts in a proactive manner.

Use Contentsquare Surveys to measure key metrics like NPS® 

2. Create a flexible customer onboarding plan

Next, create a repeatable, customizable user onboarding plan that you can use with new and existing customers. 

While a successful customer success strategy will vary for each client as you adapt to their goals, challenges, and pain points, your onboarding process should cover a few key steps:

Connect with your customers to understand their needs

Start by syncing with your customers to understand their goals, challenges, and pain points. Launch surveys or run user interviews to ask questions like

• Why are you using our product?

• What problems are you trying to solve?

• What does success look like to your team?

Focusing on what your customers are trying to achieve—and not just the actions you want them to take—is crucial to helping them unlock lasting value.

Introduce your customer success team

Relationship building is one of the most important aspects of customer success, so start from day one by introducing your CS team and their dedicated customer success manager (CSM). A great CSM isn’t just a point of contact: they are extensions of your customer’s team, a proactive partner who’s genuinely invested in their success rather than simply trying to reduce churn rates.

Implement the right tools and processes

As part of your customer onboarding process, set up any additional customer success software that will help your team measure, analyze, and optimize performance for your customers. This may include customer success platforms like Gainsight, project management tools like Trello, and an experience intelligence platform like Contentsquare, which enables you to understand the customer journey, pinpoint moments of friction, and improve user experience (UX).

💡 Pro tip: Contentsquare’s Smart Capture automatically captures all data from day one, no complex tagging setup necessary—so even if (or when) your goals change, you still have all the information you need.

3.  Use customer data to drive your strategy

Once you have the right tools and systems in place, start leveraging customer data to elevate your customer success plans and tailor them for specific customers and use cases. For example:

Increase product adoption

Use Contentsquare’s Journey Analysis capability to see how customers navigate your product from the moment they land on your website or product to the moment they leave. Identify blockers, drop-offs, and looping behaviors impacting their progress, then suggest process improvements or relevant training materials to help them reach their goals faster and more efficiently.

Understand what customers care about

Use heatmaps to spot engagement patterns and drill down by user segments to discover which elements of your product capture (or lose) their attention. Tweak your success plans to home in on the areas you know matter to your customers or highlight useful features they’ve overlooked.

Uncover patterns and opportunities in user behavior

Use session replays to spot trends and key issues across specific customer segments. Session replays are recordings that show you exactly how users behaved on your site from entry to exit, including where they clicked, scrolled, hovered, and got frustrated.

Use filters to drill down by location, industry, NPS® segment, or customer type (like new customers vs. returning customers), then review sessions from specific cohorts to find common patterns and opportunities. 

Want to speed things up? Use Contentsquare’s AI-powered Session Replay Summaries to get instant, actionable insights from hours of session replays (without needing to spend hours manually analyzing each one) and quickly jump to the relevant time-stamp to watch the most essential moments. 

Find (and fix) frustration, faster

Use an AI-based frustration score to pinpoint friction and uncover where customers get blocked. Contentsquare’s Frustration Score combines multiple factors—like rage clicks, JavaScript and API errors, and performance issues like slow loading times—to assign a numerical score to each page or session. 

Then, use session replays to see exactly what happened so you can empathize with your customer, and assign frustrating customer issues that negatively impact customer loyalty to the appropriate teams for swift resolution.

Hear directly from your customers

Launch surveys to get voice-of-customer feedback from your clients and track KPIs like CSAT and NPS® scores over time. Use Contentsquare to generate surveys based on your research goals in just a few clicks, then streamline analysis with AI-powered summary reports outlining key findings, customer quotes, sentiment analysis, and an action plan for next steps. Need more information? Contextualize responses by watching associated session replays to see exactly what happened, or follow up on feedback by inviting customers to a user interview.

Get more context for user feedback by watching session replays or inviting respondents to a user interview

Create dashboards to monitor relevant KPIs or customer segments

Use custom dashboards to track key metrics—like frustration score, NPS®, or bounce rates—for at-a-glance updates. Filter by specific segments to spot trends in real time, proactively take action, and accelerate analytics reporting to tie your CS strategy to measurable business results.

💡 Pro tip: not sure where to start? Ask Sense, Contentsquare’s AI copilot, questions about your customer data in natural language, like

• What behaviors are associated with customer loyalty?

• Which pages have the highest engagement?

• Which segment is most at risk of churn? 

Sense translates your questions into the right events and analyses, giving you informed answers, visualizations, suggested follow-up questions, and an option to ‘Explain my approach’ so you can see how it reached its conclusion. It transforms reams of data into insights in seconds, empowering you to quickly take action to improve the customer experience and your CS strategy based on real user needs.

4. Align internal teams around your findings

Share customer feedback and data with cross-functional teams like product, marketing, sales, and support to turn your findings into real improvements. 

Here are some ways other teams can leverage customer success data to support your entire business:

• Marketing teams: ideate new content marketing materials based on user engagement and areas of interest (as revealed by heatmaps, session replays, and voice-of-customer feedback like survey responses)

• Support teams: create knowledge base articles based on common blockers (as revealed by frustration score and customer feedback)

• Product teams: prioritize UX improvements based on user frustrations, errors, or looping user journeys that affect high-value user segments (as revealed by frustration score, session replays, error analysis, and journey analysis)

• Sales teams: hone your pitch deck based on use cases and insights from real customers (as revealed by heatmaps, session replays, voice-of-customer feedback, and journey analysis)

Supplement your findings with customer evidence—such as direct quotes from survey summary reports or time-stamped moments from session replays—to get buy-in for improvements or cross-functional projects.

Communicate wins in business terms by showing how customer health improvements translate to revenue protection and growth. Use a tool like Contentsquare’s Impact Quantification to measure the impact of customer success initiatives, like reactivation campaigns or cross-sell and upsell programs, and translate customer experience improvements from CS into easy-to-understand outcomes like increased revenue.

💡 Pro tip: streamline cross-functional alignment even further by integrating Contentsquare with the other tools your business uses every day. For example:

• Create a Jira ticket from an error or session replay to give developers all the context they need to jump in and fix the problem before it disrupts more customers

• Bring alerts into Slack to get instant notifications about performance issues and empower the right team members to take action

• Export Contentsquare data into your data warehouse with Data Connect to fuel predictive algorithms that predict and prevent churn

5. Scale your success

As you grow, it can be difficult to provide one-to-one support due to limited resources—but that doesn’t mean you can’t still enable personalized customer success.

Scale and expand your customer success strategy with self-serve resources and materials like webinars, user-led communities, academies, or training certifications. Encourage freemium customers and those on lower pricing tiers to self-serve, freeing up your customer success team to focus on providing VIP treatment for premium customers, like high-priority or enterprise accounts.

Use Contentsquare capabilities—like Heatmaps, Session Replays, Journey Analysis, and Surveys—to measure customer engagement with these materials, quantify their impact and success, and identify opportunities for new resources to further lighten the load on your CS team and drive long-term loyalty and engagement at every tier.

Customer success strategy in action: turning churn risks into increased ARR

“I had a customer whose usage had dropped over two months,” says Inês Esteves, Senior Customer Success Manager at Contentsquare. “The primary champion left the company and new stakeholders were questioning the ROI.”

To address the dwindling engagement and rising uncertainty, Inês worked quickly. “I immediately scheduled discovery calls with the new decision-makers to understand their current challenges and business priorities.”

“We discovered they were struggling with a new use case our platform could address, but they didn’t know that our platform could help achieve their goal.”

Once Inês understood the problem, she took action. “I coordinated with our technical team to provide any services needed, built a strategic plan with the client that included key objectives, and provided intensive training for their new team members.”

The result? Within just a few months, their usage exceeded previous levels—and they later expanded their contract.

Deliver proactive, data-driven customer success

For any business, your success is intertwined with your customer’s success. Helping users reach their ‘aha!’ moments and unlock more value from your product or service is the key to creating loyal customers, boosting retention, and increasing revenue.

But without the right data, you won’t know what customers really need—and might not see they’re at risk of churn until it’s too late.

Incorporate user behavior and experience insights into your customer success strategy to transform your approach and proactively provide value where your team can have the greatest impact.

FAQs about customer success strategy