The last time we checked, the number of companies claiming to be “customer-first” or “customer-centric” isn’t getting any smaller. 

Who bears most of the responsibility for actually delivering on that promise? Customer success managers (CSMs).

If you’re a CSM, you’re on the hook for making sure your product lives up to the hype. For delivering on the promises made by Marketing and Sales. For helping each of your customers hit their goals. (100% adoption and instantaneous return on investment, anyone?!) For smashing your own numbers for NPS, revenue, upsells, cross-sells, expansions, and renewals. For decreasing time to value and customer churn. For keeping up with product improvements and helping account holders take advantage of every new update.

And when you aren’t doing all of those things? You’re charged with bringing back invaluable data, feedback, and insights about customer behaviors, preferences, and challenges—and advocating for customers to build trust and rapport. 

It’s a lot. And it’s a lot easier with Guidance.

Find out how Tango helps you deepen product usage and: 

1. Teach new CSMs to become trusted advisors
2. Onboard new customers, faster
3. Drive customer success with every new product update
4. Make your quarterly business reviews worthwhile 

Let’s start with the prerequisite for them all. 👇

1. Teach new CSMs to become trusted advisors

If you’re leading a success team, getting new CSMs up and running is probably one of the things you care about most. While you can’t quite clone your top performers, you can quickly replicate the #1 thing they’ve learned. 

To be valued as a strategic business partner and excel at converting customers into advocates, CSMs need a way to master the fundamentals, fast.   

Automatically capture the knowledge needed to become a product expert

Becoming a product expert is table stakes. And not just on your own product—but on all the software you need to do your job well. 

After all, it’s tough to help customers achieve their goals if you’re not sure about 1) how your product can meet their unique needs, and 2) how to get sh*t done in tools like Gainsight, Totango, ClientSuccess, ChurnZero, and Planhat.

Tango helps on both fronts. 

All you need to do is run through a process the way you normally would on any website, SaaS app, or desktop software. 

When you’re done capturing your clicks, Tango will spin up step-by-step instructions with cropped/annotated screenshots, in seconds. So you can create a whole library of processes and best practices in one sitting, to create an onboarding guide that will scale (and won’t put CSMs to sleep).

Leverage time saved to develop industry, customer, and sales expertise

When it becomes lightning fast to learn on the job, master new software, and perform SOPs perfectly, what do you get back? 

Time. ⏳

Time to be more than just a product expert. Time to develop the industry, customer, and sales expertise you need to become a trusted advisor. 

2. Onboard new customers, faster 

The clock starts ticking the second Sales hands over the baton. Everyone wants—and expects—a seamless onboarding experience.  

Before Tango, you might have needed to:

• Create generic, one-size-fits-all documentation manually
• Schedule a dozen synchronous meetings with your account holder and primary users 
• Set up a shared Slack channel for ad hoc huddles while they’re getting up and running
• Record countless videos, individually, for each customer (to protect sensitive information)  

And despite your best efforts, your customers may have: 

• Struggled to surface the answers they needed in text-heavy documents and long videos
• Wasted hours searching hard-to-use knowledge bases and trying to get answers from chatbots
• Felt a ton of friction and frustration in their first 30, 60, and 90 days 
• Decided not to champion your product or service because the barriers to entry felt too high

What’s the solution? Getting everything new customers need to know out of your head, out of 10-minute videos, and out of stale PDFs—and into real-time walkthroughs.

Decrease time to value with on-screen guidance

If you work with high-touch customers with substantial average monthly recurring revenue, what’s a no-brainer? Using Tango externally as well as internally. 

You can set customers up for success in more ways than one with Guidance.

Extension discovery gives your customers a heads up to relevant Tangos available to use your product to the fullest, like this: 

All they’ll need to do is click their Tango extension to view all of the how-tos…

…and then select the one that’s most useful to their end goal.

At that point, Guidance will walk them through exactly what to do and where to click, without ever leaving their screen.* 

*Note: To experience Guidance, your customers will need Tango’s free Chrome extension, a Tango account, and an invitation to your Workspace. We recommend explaining the value to your high-touch customers, and creating individual folders to invite customers to.

Increase ROI by enabling customers to build business processes around your product

80+% of operationalizing your product isn’t actually about your product at all. 🌶️ It’s about internal processes, rituals, culture, and politics. While we haven’t found a cure-all for that last one, we can give you a leg up on the first few.  

Since your product doesn’t operate in a vacuum, helping your customers think through, set up, and streamline their cross-app workflows is key. For example, if you sell an Enterprise resource planning software (ERP), your users’ real-life workflows might start in a spreadsheet, then switch to their CRM, then use your product, and then finish up in an analytics tool. 

If you can show your customers how to build business processes with your product, and quickly and easily integrate it when other tools they use, everyone wins. 

Customized Tangos with curated insights make it possible to show power users how to make a habit of using your product to perform their most essential tasks. (Across every website, SaaS product, and cross-platform process, with no code!)

Curious about curated insights? With Callouts, you can add tips and tricks to individual steps in your interactive walkthroughs. So not only does procedural knowledge pop up when and where your customers need it—but hyper-relevant context does, too. 

Here’s what it looks like to share your expertise without setting up another meeting, sharing your screen, or answering another email:

If you zoom back out, here’s a visual summarizing the three things that make Guidance—and by extension, your product—stickier and more engaging:

Minimize repetitive questions and decrease customer churn

Given that more than a third of companies don’t have a clearly defined customer success strategy, it’s no surprise that CSMs are often mistaken for support agents and spend more time reacting to incoming requests vs. developing long-term relationships. 

New customers are going to have questions, especially while they’re ramping up. 

Helping your new accounts get unstuck is essential to keeping customer satisfaction high and churn rates low—but you can’t focus on understanding what success means for everyone and creating action plans accordingly if you’re constantly fighting fires in the weeds. Especially if 70% of them are the same. 🫠

Instead of dealing with countless interruptions and trying to delicately direct high value customers to your mostly organized but questionably up-to-date help center, there’s Tango.

Extension discovery (to surface relevant step-by-step instructions for your product) is your first line of defense. Answers in the flow of work are your second. Callouts with curated insights are your third. And automagic FAQs—which anticipate common questions users may have while following a Tango and automatically generates FAQs to help troubleshoot—are your fourth. 

What’s equally magical? Spending less time serving as tech support, and more time leading strategic conversations and building relationships. ✨

3. Drive customer success with every new product update

If you asked your customers what they love about your product, “x-ing out of 1,000 new tooltips from Appcues every time I log in” probably wouldn’t make the cut.

The fact is—you need a (better) way to communicate all the major product updates and new feature launches on your product roadmap. 

In-app messaging, explainer videos, social media campaigns, launch notes, email blasts, knowledge base articles, webinars, and community events all have their place. But if you want to show customers what to do and where to do it—in their exact moment of need—you need Guidance. 

Explain new features in context and at scale

Everything your product and engineering teams have been working tirelessly on is important. But what’s more important? Explaining exactly how those new improvements will benefit your customers and identifying new opportunities to deepen their product engagement. 

In many (most?) cases, showing is better than telling. But it wouldn’t be scalable for you to hop on a call with each customer every time your team pushes a new update. 

What’s more sustainable, effective, and immediately interesting? Sharing a few Tangos that demonstrate exactly how your customers’ current processes can suddenly be streamlined, with Callouts to flag pro tips and make understanding what to do next even easier. 

Increase your CSAT and NPS scores with personalized, proactive, and interactive support experiences

According to the 2022 State of the Connected Customer survey, 88% of customers say the experience a company provides is as important as its product or services. 

And the expectations don’t stop there:

• 73% expect companies to understand their unique needs and expectations
• 62% expect companies to anticipate their needs
• 56% expect outreach to always be tailored to them 

No matter how large or hardworking your success team, until now it’s been nearly impossible to offer personalized, proactive support on both a 1:1 and 1:many basis.

With Tango, you can spin up how-to guides people actually want to use in seconds, in context, for every account—and increase your CSAT and NPS scores while you’re at it. 🤗

Make it convenient for customers to provide feedback

If customers spot an opportunity for improvement in your documentation, submitting a comment directly within the relevant Tango can help them (and you!) stay in the flow of work.

Customer feedback is the gift that keeps on giving (especially when it’s done async!). 

It makes it possible for:

• CSMs to better understand customer needs and preferences
• Cross-functional teams to refine products, services, and overall customer experience 
• Businesses to prioritize the needs and preferences of their customers (and improve customer satisfaction)
• Satisfied customers to become repeat customers and brand advocates (who are more likely to remain loyal and therefore less likely to switch to competitors)

Crowdsource insights to help customers replicate formulas for success

When it’s easier to provide feedback and improve processes from the bottom up, it’s also easier to crowdsource insights across accounts and help your customers borrow brilliance.

Reactions and suggestions from customers can help you understand which of your processes are helpful and why—and quickly adjust any that aren’t hitting the mark. 😐

4. Make your quarterly business reviews worthwhile 

While we’re talking about feedback loops—let’s talk about quarterly business reviews.

Raise your hand if:

• They’re a lot of work
• Beyond surface-level product usage stats, you don’t really have anything meaningful to say
• Your customers show up, but don’t really want to be there or get much out of them
• You’d like to trade “obligatory and generic” for “essential and insightful” 

With Guidance Analytics, you can turn a recurring, dreaded responsibility into a routine delight—for you *and* your customers.

Go beyond product usage to process usage 

Are there other tools on the market that track product usage? Sure.

But tools like ChurnZero and Gainsight *only* look at product usage. Tools like Tango give you product usage in the context of an overall process, and how your customers are using your product in real life.

Develop a deeper understanding of customer use cases—and cut your prep work in half

More than half (62%) of customers feel that companies don’t understand their needs. 

CSMs may be more directly responsible for improving that statistic than any other team. But it’s tough to make headway without visibility into how your product is (and isn’t!) being used in day-to-day operations.

Instead of making your best guess at usage patterns and regurgitating recent feedback you’ve received, use Guidance Analytics to gather all the signals you need to run a useful meeting in a glance. 

With Views in Overview, you can track how many views your how-to guides have gotten during a trial period. 

You can filter by viewing channel (e.g. workflow page, Embed, Guidance Panel, Guidance Live) and date—and take it a step further by surfacing how many people have attempted to engage with specific parts of your product.

With Guidance Completion in Overview, you can track completion rate (how many users complete all the steps in your Tango) as well as a detailed drop-off rate. 

To address the latter, you can revisit your existing Tango and add callouts to specific steps to ensure successful execution, every time. 

With Viewers in Viewer Activity, you can see who’s using your Tangos and how often—and who your power users are. 

Being able to point to a high percentage of product evangelists may be particularly useful around renewal time. 🤞

With Guidance Progress in Viewer Activity, you can see where customers are finding success with your product—as well as where they’re getting stuck and which parts of your product aren’t being used as much as they could be. 

Which feels more valuable: reaching out to specific users to offer help tailored to their needs, or asking “how’s it going?” 

Identify upsell, cross-sell, and expansion opportunities 

As a CSM who has been relentless about accelerating customer success and measuring value along the way, you’re uniquely positioned to identify upsell, cross-sell, and expansion opportunities and work them into personalized success plans. 

With a bird’s eye view into all the ways your product is embedded in your customers’ core processes and a real sense of how you can help them achieve their business goals over the long haul, you can: 

• Understand customers’ evolving needs and offer tailored solutions
• Deliver an exceptional customer experience 
• Drive revenue growth in a multitude of (more cost effective) ways