How To Leverage Education To Scale Customer Success

For new businesses, scaling customer success organizations to profitably meet the needs of a fast-growing customer base can seem daunting. But it doesn’t have to be. 

In today’s competitive landscape, customer success isn’t just about keeping your clients happy—it’s about building loyalty, increasing retention, and driving sustainable growth. With the right strategies, you can scale customer success effectively without losing the personalized touch your customers value.

In this guide, we’ll share my tips and strategies for scaling customer success.  Gerard Recio, an experienced Customer Success Professional who has lived and breathed customer success and customer education throughout hiscareer, also shares his tips and strategies for scaling customer success, drawing from years of experience in the industry. 

You’ll learn:

• What customer success really means today
• Why customer retention is the cornerstone of business growth
• The three foundational building blocks to scale customer success profitably

Let’s dive in!

Related article: Deep dive into Customer Education 101: How To Kickstart Your Program

Defining customer success in 2024 

Let’s start at the beginning – what is customer success?

Customer success has evolved significantly in the last decade. Today, it’s not just about solving customer problems or providing exceptional service—it’s about ensuring that customers achieve their desired outcomes through your product or service.

At its core, customer success is about delivering on your promises. It’s making sure customers realize the value of your solution, so they don’t just stick around—they become advocates for your brand.

I like to summarize it with a formula that I’ve seen used by others: 

CX (Customer Experience) + CO (Customer Outcomes) = CS (Customer Success)

• Customer Experience (CX): The customer experience (CX) is where it all starts. Customer experience includes a mix of both frontline teams – like customer support, customer success, etc. – and the internal product team.
• Customer Outcomes (CO): Together, those groups help achieve customer outcomes (CO). Customer outcomes are their business objectives or goals they wish to accomplish using your product or service. 

When both of these align, you create Customer Success (CS)—a scenario where your customers achieve the results they desire, building long-term loyalty and driving sustainable revenue for your business.

Importance of customer success for businesses

Customer success is the lifeblood of any subscription-based business, and it’s quickly becoming a critical function for all businesses. With markets becoming more competitive, customers have more options than ever. If they don’t see value, they’ll churn. But when you help customers achieve success, they not only stay—they thrive and spend more.

Customer success is all about delivering on what you’ve promised. It’s about making sure customers actually see the benefits you sold them when they decided to buy. 

If customers are successful, they’ll keep using your product — but if they don’t, they won’t stick around. 

That’s why customer success isn’t just about doing the right thing. It’s about keeping your customers, so you can build a sustainable, long-term revenue stream.

Customer success drives:

• Retention: Retained customers have a higher lifetime value and are more likely to become advocates.
  
• Growth: Existing customers are more likely to expand their purchases, increasing upsell and cross-sell opportunities.
  
• Efficiency: Satisfied customers rely less on support, reducing service costs and allowing your team to focus on growth-oriented activities.

Customer success is especially important in subscription-based businesses; in fact, it originated in the software-as-a-service world. But it’s a powerful concept for any company that cares about customer retention, reducing churn, and building strong, long-lasting customer relationships. 

Why customer retention matters

When it comes to your customer base, your most valuable customers aren’t the ones you win over—they’re the ones you never lose.

We’ve all heard the statistic that it’s more expensive to acquire a new customer than it is to keep an existing one. In fact, it can cost up to five times more.  

For businesses, this makes customer retention one of the most critical—and cost-effective—growth strategies. It’s not just about avoiding churn; it’s about fostering loyalty and ensuring your existing customers continue to see value in what you offer.

That’s why your most valuable asset is your existing customers. Retention doesn’t just keep customers—it builds a foundation for long-term profitability, predictable revenue, and sustainable growth.

Let’s consider a real-life example of two companies with identical new customer growth rates, but different retention strategies:

• Company A: 20% new customer growth with an 85% retention rate, resulting in 5% net growth.
• Company B: 20% new customer growth but a 95% retention rate, resulting in 15% net growth.

That 10% difference in retention leads to a significant impact on growth. Even a modest 5% increase in retention can grow profit by 75%. Over a 3-5 year period, that increase translates into substantial revenue—potentially hundreds of millions of dollars for large-scale businesses.

Retention isn’t just a metric; it’s a powerful driver of long-term profitability. But how do you capture that extra retention percentage?

The formula is simple:

Delivering an amazing customer experience

Retention starts by delivering a remarkable customer experience at every touchpoint of the customer journey. It’s not just about providing excellent support—it’s about helping customers achieve their desired outcomes consistently.

That’s where customer education comes in. By empowering your customers with the right knowledge and resources through online education platforms, your team can equip them to succeed using your product. 

When your customers can easily navigate your product and understand its full potential, retention follows naturally.

Retention is the key to unlocking long-term growth and profitability. By focusing on enhancing the customer experience and driving successful outcomes, you build deeper relationships and lay the groundwork for sustained success.

Related article: Learn how to optimize customer success through a customer education strategy

How to scale customer success

In an ideal world, scaling customer success would be seamless. As your customers move through the evaluation, onboarding, and renewal phases, their outcomes would improve steadily, and your team would simply guide them along.

It might look a little like this:

But in reality, scaling customer success often looks more like this:

Why? Because new and fast-growing companies face a number of challenges that create what I call the “perfect storm” for customer success, which include:

• Hypergrowth: As your business expands quickly, managing a growing number of customers becomes a logistical nightmare.
• Stretched CSM capacity: Customer Success Managers (CSMs) can become overwhelmed, leading to inconsistent service.
• Disconnected product strategy: Without clear product usage guidance, customers may not realize the full value of your offerings.
• No checklists or playbooks: Without documented processes, it becomes impossible to deliver consistent customer experiences.
• No education strategy: Companies that lack a scalable customer education strategy struggle to train customers effectively, resulting in higher churn rates.

If you company is suffering from the perfect storm scenario, your customer success teams likely feel as if they’re” mowing the lawn one blade of grass at a time”. It’s a sign you’re caught in this storm. But don’t worry—there’s a way to scale efficiently while continuing to deliver value.

Now’s the time to course correct and scale your customer success organization to achieve meaningful value for the business and customers. How? By using these three building blocks for scale: 

1. Build your foundation
2. Operationalize your systems (Pro tip: online education plays a crucial role here)
3. Drive a customer-first mindset

Let’s dig into each.

Building Block #1: Build your foundation

The first step to scaling customer success is to build a strong foundation that allows your team to operate efficiently while delivering meaningful value to customers. This foundation is built on three key elements: segmentation, people, and processes.

Segmentation: Tailor engagement to customer needs.

Segmentation is crucial because it helps you determine how to allocate resources and where online education can have the greatest impact. Not every customer requires the same level of engagement, and segmenting your customer base allows you to provide the right level of support to the right customers.

Customer success organizations typically have a three-tiered engagement model: 

1. Low-touch engagements are usually targeted toward the lowest paying customers. With this model, CSMs are managing 200+ accounts. 
2. Medium-touch engagements can be managed by CSMs that are overseeing 40-100 accounts, requiring a mix of automation and direct engagement.
3. High-touch engagements are your strategic customers, making up roughly 20% of your customer base but contributing 80% of revenue. These customers expect personalized service and white-glove treatment. CSMs handling these accounts typically oversee a smaller volume.

Now let me ask: Can you imagine managing over 200 accounts without any online education tools or resources? I can’t either.

Digital engagement is an essential ingredient for the success of any low-touch customer success team. When managing hundreds of accounts, it’s critical to leverage tools that allow customers to access support and education on their own terms, without needing constant hands-on assistance from your team.

This is where online education becomes a game-changer, giving your customers the resources they need to succeed, while enabling your team to scale efficiently.

Digital engagement includes a variety of scalable tools, such as:

• Automated emails: Timely, automated emails that guide customers through onboarding milestones or encourage them to explore key product features.
• Webinars: On-demand or live webinars allow customers to receive expert training on specific topics, helping them engage more deeply with your product.
• Videos: Short, focused videos that teach customers how to use specific product features or solve common problems on their own.
• Online education landing pages: Centralized portals that provide access to all relevant resources, such as tutorials, guides, and documentation.
• Online courses: Comprehensive, self-paced courses that offer step-by-step learning pathways, enabling customers to dive deeper into your product at their convenience. With platforms like Thinkific Plus, you can create courses that cater to different customer segments, offering both basic and advanced training.

As you scale, this digital engagement content also serves as a valuable resource for medium- and high-touch customers. For medium-touch accounts, a blend of online courses and periodic CSM interactions ensures that customers receive the support they need without overloading your team. 

For high-touch customers, online courses can supplement personalized CSM interactions, offering certifications or advanced training programs that enhance their overall experience. 

However, it’s important to keep in mind that higher-paying customers will naturally expect a more personal experience. While online education can still play a valuable role, dedicated support is always extremely valuable to  complement these resources and ensure top-tier clients feel valued.

People

The second part of building your foundation is people.

It’s no surprise that Customer Success Managers are busy. In the course of a normal day, they are doing:

• Customer training
• Business reviews and strategic planning 
• Renewals and managing retention strategies
• Sales operations, upselling and cross-selling
• Liaising with the support team 
• Communicating with other internal teams

And more! 

To scale effectively, it’s crucial for companies to identify which tasks are repeatable—like onboarding, training, and basic support—and develop an online education program to handle these areas systematically. 

By leveraging online education to manage the repeatable, routine processes, CSMs can shift their focus to high-value activities that drive growth, such as upselling, renewals, and strategic relationship management. That’s how SaaS company PayShepherd reduced onboarding time by 75% .

Process

The final element of building your foundation is creating standardized processes that allow you to scale without sacrificing quality.

Successful customer success organizations have processes in place for every step of the customer journey. These processes ensure that customers have a consistent, positive experience at every touchpoint, while freeing up your team to focus on higher-value interactions.

To achieve this, your company can create a high-level checklist that outlines: 

• Key actions to take at each stage of the customer journey
• Resources to use (e.g., templates, scripts, tools)
• Online education resources to provide, such as specific courses, webinars, or tutorials that guide customers through your product

By doing this, you turn repeatable processes into a scalable playbook. Documenting these processes allows your team to deliver a uniform experience, whether they’re onboarding new customers, responding to support requests, or driving product adoption.

For example, during the onboarding phase, your playbook might include:

• An automated series of online courses that guide new users through the product’s basic functionality
• A checklist for the CSM to follow up on key milestones (e.g., “Schedule a check-in after 30 days to review progress”)
• A built-in feedback loop to gather customer insights and adjust the training as needed

Pro Tip: Collaborate with your data team to identify the actions customers need to take within your product to experience success. Once you understand these critical actions, you can tailor your online education content and processes to guide customers toward those specific outcomes. This not only improves the customer experience but also ensures that your educational content remains aligned with your product’s value.

Building Block #2: Operationalize your systems

Once you’ve laid a solid foundation with your segmentation, people, and processes, the next step is to operationalize your systems. 

This means putting tools, metrics, and automation in place that allow your team to scale customer success efficiently while maintaining a high level of service, which includes: 

• Setting KPIs beyond renewal rate
• Implementing CS systems  
• Monitoring those systems 

Setting KPIs Beyond Renewal Rate

Most companies measure customer success by tracking renewals, but to truly optimize, you need to set KPIs that go beyond the renewal rate and give a full picture of customer health.

A customer’s health score can consist of multiple measures, including:

• • Adoption
  • Activities 
  • Basic usage
  • Number of active days 
  • Open upsell opportunities 
  • Upsell wins 

But we can do more. We can create next-level health scorecards that support customer outcomes and give companies a full picture of the customer. 

How do we do this? By operationalizing under one customer success tool.

Implement CS Systems

To operationalize these KPIs and your entire customer success process, you need to integrate your efforts under one Customer Success (CS) tool. 

At Hootsuite University (now Hootsuite Academy), we used multiple tools to build our online education system that trained customers on our product. But we knew that if we wanted to scale our customer success programs, we needed to get everything under one house. So, we moved everything onto a learning management system (LMS) as our Customer Success (CS) Tool.

CS tools integrate various software that your customer success team is already working with, and it allows you to monitor various aspects of a customer health score. 

Where online education comes into play

Automation is key to making your customer success systems scalable. Online education is an essential part of this strategy, especially for low- and medium-touch customer segments. 

For example: 

• Monitor engagement: Your company can monitor usage data directly within your CS tool. When a customer’s engagement drops below a certain level, a learning management system like Thinkific Plus can activate an automated email that sends the customer a link to a tailored online course or educational resource designed to re-engage them.
• Automate training workflows: Instead of manually onboarding each customer, automate the onboarding process by sending customers a series of self-serve courses that walk them through product setup and initial training. Platforms like Thinkific Plus make this easy by offering course sequencing and progress tracking.
  

For high-touch customers, engagement may remain more manual, but even here, online education plays a crucial role by supplementing one-on-one interactions with on-demand learning. 

This ensures that customers always have access to resources that can enhance their experience, even when CSMs are not directly involved.

Monitor those systems

Once you’ve set more in-depth KPIs and implemented a Customer Success tool, you’re ready to start monitoring your programs and systems. 

Let’s return to the perfect storm scenario, where your CSMs are typically the first line of defense, responding to issues and contacting the support team when necessary.

With the right systems in place, we can reverse this reactive process.

We need to lead with online education to scale a low-touch customer success organization and reduce customer loss.

By making education the first touchpoint, you can empower customers to resolve common issues on their own before they ever need to reach out for support. Monitoring your online education platform is key to this proactive approach. 

An LMS with advanced analytics will allow you to track:

• Course enrollments: How many customers are taking courses.
• Course progress: Whether customers are actively completing their enrolled courses.
• Completion rates: Customers who haven’t completed critical courses so you can prompt them to do so.
• Learning outcomes: How effectively your courses are driving product adoption and customer success.

By monitoring these metrics closely, you can identify gaps in education and engagement early, reducing the number of support tickets and reactive engagements and enabling CSMs to focus on strategic, proactive engagements that drive customer interactions and outcomes. 

Leverage automation to scale

Ultimately, the goal of operationalizing your systems is to take CSMs out of repeatable processes while still delivering high-value experiences for your customers. By combining a customer success platform with a robust online education system, you can automate routine processes—such as onboarding and training—and ensure that customers always have access to the resources they need to succeed.

As a result, your team can shift its focus to building strategic relationships, driving customer outcomes, and scaling your business efficiently.

Building Block #3: Drive a customer-first mindset

Finally, once you’ve built your foundation and operationalized your systems, the next step is to drive a customer-first mindset across the entire organization.

A customer-first mindset driven by cross-functional accountability throughout internal departments. That means promoting a customer-first mindset doesn’t stop at the frontlines. Instead, it is weaved into all areas of the business.

It also includes establishing a great internal feedback strategy to help customers, especially those in the red or at risk for churning, achieve their business outcomes. Using feedback data gathered from monitoring your systems and customer success tools can drive meaningful changes within your customer success program to deliver even more value to customers. 

For example, internal customer-facing teams often want to help their customers best – but they need a way to prioritize their time. This means they need to understand which customers do not have a healthy status or need help the most. Those teams can pull that information directly from the CS tool to know what customers they need to be engaging with to help them realize the value of the product.

At the end of the day, every business is hungry for data. At this stage, you’ve done the work to build your foundation and operationalize internal systems to produce important customer data. So, use it. And by doing so, you’ll turn your business into a customer-first organization.

A customer-first mindset is not confined to just the frontlines; it needs to be woven into the fabric of your business. Every interaction, from sales and marketing to product and support, should center around the question: “How can we help our customers achieve their outcomes?”

• Promote cross-functional accountability
  Driving a customer-first mission requires cross-functional collaboration. It’s not just the job of the Customer Success (CS) team to ensure customers succeed—every department has a role to play in enhancing the customer experience. Whether it’s ensuring the product team designs features that solve real customer pain points, or that the sales team sets accurate expectations during onboarding, each function must contribute to a unified goal: customer outcomes.Cross-functional accountability means breaking down silos and making sure every department is equipped with customer insights and feedback data.For instance:
  • The product team can access data on which features are driving success (or confusion) and prioritize feature improvements accordingly.
  • The marketing team can leverage success stories and key metrics from the CS tool to create case studies and educational content that resonate with potential customers.
  • The sales team can use customer health data to tailor upsell opportunities based on product usage patterns.

  By integrating customer success data and benchmarks into decision-making at every level, you create a feedback loop that continually enhances the customer experience, helping your company grow in alignment with your customers’ evolving needs.

• Establish a strong feedback loop
  A robust internal feedback strategy is an essential part of fostering a customer-first culture. Collecting and analyzing customer feedback enables your teams to course-correct before issues lead to churn. The data collected from your Customer Success Platform and/or Learning Management System provides actionable insights that can drive continuous improvement in your customer success initiatives.
  • Customers in the red or at risk of churning often exhibit certain behaviors (e.g., low engagement or incomplete onboarding). With a platform like Thinkific Plus, you can work with your data team so that your CS tool can highlight these red flags and automatically trigger alerts for CSMs to intervene with personalized follow-ups or additional educational resources.
  • Customers who provide negative feedback about product complexity could be targeted with tailored online courses that help them navigate difficult features and feel more confident using your product.

By using this data effectively, you can ensure that every customer—especially those at risk—receives the support they need to reach their goals and stay engaged with your product.

• Prioritize time and resources strategically
  In many organizations, customer-facing teams genuinely want to help their customers succeed but often struggle with prioritizing their time. With a data-driven approach, you can provide your teams with the clarity they need to focus on high-impact activities.
  By leveraging insights from your CS platform, your team can:
  • Identify high-priority customers who are either at risk of churning or are prime candidates for upsell opportunities.
  • Use customer health scores to determine where proactive engagements—such as check-ins or strategic business reviews—are most needed.
  • Pinpoint which customers could benefit from further education, using automated learning paths or advanced product courses through your online education platform.
    
    With the right feedback and prioritization systems in place, your team is no longer spending valuable time on low-impact tasks. Instead, they can focus on delivering value-driven interactions that align with customer needs.
• Use data to fuel a customer-first culture
  At this stage, you’ve already done the work to build a strong foundation and operationalize your systems to generate important customer data. Now, it’s time to use that data to its fullest potential.Data empowers your teams to become more proactive rather than reactive. With access to real-time insights on customer health, course completion rates, and engagement metrics, your team can anticipate issues before they arise and provide value where it matters most.
  • Customers who show low engagement with your online courses may need additional nudges, like personalized emails or a CSM check-in to guide them back on track.
  • Course completion data can be used to predict which customers are ready for upsell opportunities or advanced training, helping your sales team target the right customers at the right time.

Ultimately, by weaving customer insights into the fabric of your operations, you turn your business into a truly customer-first organization, where every decision is informed by what’s best for the customer.

Transforming your company into a customer-first organization

Like we mentioned earlier, scaling a customer success organization can feel like cutting one blade of grass at a time. But there are steps your organization can take to better support your customer success teams. 

It comes down to putting the three building blocks into action by:

1. Building your foundation by identifying repeatable processes that can be serviced with online education.
2. Operationalizing your systems, so you create an automated feedback loop, and your customers can begin to self-serve.
3. Driving a customer-first mindset by leverage newly available data to create a feedback system inside your company. 

With the right building blocks and technology to help along the way, you’ve now got yourself a well-oiled machine that can profitably serve as many customers as possible.

Is your team looking to improve customer satisfaction and engagement to drive business results?

Our latest eBook “Customer Education 101: Concepts, Trends & Applications” provides comprehensive insights and practical strategies to help you engage, train, and retain your customers effectively through education.

Download now 

This was originally written in May 2020. Expanded on October 2024.