Traditional CS focuses on building personal relationships with customers, while scaled CS manages large volumes of customers with less personalization.
Businesses around the globe are now trying to figure out the quickest and best way to increase their revenue stream through a strong customer base. That’s where scaled CS comes in, which is likely one of the most talkative topics for CCMs and CCOs now. Companies also prioritize traditional processes when they need to approach onboard high-value clients.
Read on to get clear details on the difference between traditional and scaled CS and which should you choose for the best investment returns.
What is Traditional CS?
Traditional CS mainly refers to strategic business approaches to ensure customers get their desired outcome by using the product or services. Each of the customer success models is designed to guide customers through their journey to achieve both initial and long-term success.
In the traditional CS system, business owners hire a dedicated customer success manager or team as a whole to take all the responsibilities to help customers shine with the company’s services. Starting from the initial setup and implementation process, they find any underlying issues, solve these problems, and apply data-driven approaches right away. All in one, they work to maximize the value businesses get from the product.
How Does Traditional CS Work?
The complete customer success management system is built on a foundation that works to create a positive and valuable experience for customers and results in an improved experience. The assigned team as a trusted advisor works closely with each customer and understands the specific needs, potential roadblocks, and expectations for using the products. Then they develop an onboarding plan combining the key aspects.
That includes specialized training sessions, regular check-ins, personalized customer support, proactive engagement, value delivery, or educational resources. The team actively gathers customer feedback and applies accordingly to improve the product and customer experience.
What is Scaled CS?
Scaled CS is all about scaling the complete CS organization to serve a larger customer base efficiently. It is designed with more proactive actions, personalized customer journeys, automated playbooks, and data-driven insights.
The main purpose of doing such a scaling process is to get high-touch CS, reduce manual efforts, and ensure long-term success through automation. The standardized process used in this quick-growing CS ensures that all customers receive a consistent and high-quality experience. Automation and efficiency improvements even help the business to reduce the high cost associated with customer support.
How Does Scaled CS Work?
Scaled customer success works on the mass distribution of insights and resources to a large customer base to provide more efficient and consistent support. The larger-scale customer success system standardizes processes as much as possible. For this, customers are first divided into a few segments based on various factors such as size, industry, or needs.
To automate more repetitive and small routine tasks, such as onboarding, training, and support., various CSM tools are then applied in the approaches. These tools help to track interactions, identify potential issues, as well as streamline workflows and automate communication with chatbots and in-app messages. This is for ensuring a scalable customer success experience.
Key Differences Between Traditional CS and Scaled CS
The main difference between traditional CS and scaled CS is outreach and the overall approaching process. Scaled CS is designed on advanced technology and automation for a 1-to-many approach, whereas traditional CS relies on personalized 1-to-1 interactions. Instead of individual attention, scaled CS handles a much larger customer base, whereas traditional CS provides dedicated support and is designed to build a deep interaction with the customer.
Let’s go deeper and find out more about how these two approaches differ.
1. Instead of ad-hoc onboarding processes, scaled CS uses structured programs with automated tools and online resources to guide the customers from the initial stages. In contrast, traditional CS offers a highly personalized experience with the motive to reach each client, understand their unique needs, and adjust the approaches.
2. Traditional CS is more likely to be a reactive approach where CS managers develop strong strategies, with the main focus on addressing the underlying issues rather than proactively preventing them. Conversely, scaled CS is proactive, not just reactive. It targets the customer’s needs and offers support before the problems grow bigger.
3. Traditional CS includes less automation and relies more on manual processes for communication and support. However, scaled CS uses technology and automation to streamline the process and improve efficiency.
4. Scaled CS is mostly known as the ongoing process of refinement. CS teams continually work on analyzing data, collecting feedback, and adjusting their strategies accordingly. In contrast, traditional CS relies on established processes and best practices that often measure slowly over time.
5. Scaled CS generally offers faster onboarding due to advanced automated approaches in the process. The automated health screening and process service recognition can quickly identify at-risk customers, pinpoint issues, and even ensure faster responses to customer queries, increasing the efficiency of CS. The personalization in the overall process of traditional CS is its core strength, but it’s not a fast process. Starting from finding data to implementing action across the entire customer base takes enough time.
Traditional CS vs. Scaled CS: Which One Should You Choose?
The fact highly depends on the specific business goals, customer base, and resources. You can go with the traditional CS system if you have high-value customers where it is needed to ensure high-touch and personalized approaches to build long-lasting relationships. Coming to scaled CS- it is quite efficient for a large number of customers.
Traditional CS is even more helpful if you have a small customer base and your team can easily give them attention. Plus, it’s an effective CS system if you are at an initial stage and figuring out your product-market fit and customer journey.
Scaled CS is quite efficient for a large number of customers. Your process is well-defined and relatively easy to use, and your focus is all about growing your customer base rapidly. Standardization and automation in the scaled CS are key to success.
However, many companies go for a hybrid approach with the strategic combination of both traditional and scaled CS. For example, a SaaS company can use the scaled approach to onboard its new customers with automated email sequences and in-app tutorials. This way, they can efficiently approach larger customers. However, when you need to segment your customer base and identify high-value clients, you can go for traditional CS with dedicated account managers, onboarding sessions, and proactive check-ins.
In Closing
So overall, traditional CS and scaled CS in business have unique strengths. With the one-on-one interactions between customers and service representatives, you can provide higher value in traditional CS. However, scaled CS offers advantages in terms of speed, cost-effectiveness, and scalability.
Though it often lacks the personal touch, it is still highly effective to reach more users in the shortest possible time. You can introduce advanced services here, such as chatbots and automated phone systems that increase the customer satisfaction level.
The fact is, you need to understand your customer base, your product complexity, and your business objectives to ensure higher efficiency of your business.
