Customer success has the unique distinction of being both the #1 driver of revenue retention in SaaS companies and SaaS companies’ best kept secret. According to Jason Lemkin, founder of SaaStr, customer success is where 90% of revenue is. For such an important topic, though, the dialogue around customer success is terrible.

Most conversations about customer success tend to be very high-level, with little in the way of concrete, actionable advice. Too many think pieces, not enough case studies. With this in mind, we thought we’d take a different approach to the topic.

We talked to 5 SaaS companies whose customer success processes have lead to sustained growth, reduced churn, and improved customer relationships, and we asked them a simple question: What is the one tool your customer success strategy could not do without?
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When you’re planning blog posts, it can be hard to keep coming up with good ideas, let alone a good title.

Sure, you have a couple in the pipeline, and some other topics you’re itching to write about. But looking at the calendar a couple months down the line, you’re coming up blank. How is it that some places churn out insightful and well-written content every Wednesday at noon?

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In 2013, Zenefits co-founder and CEO Parker Conrad made a bold statement at TechCrunch Disrupt: “If you’re an insurance broker, we’re going to drink your milkshake.”

For a while, it seemed he would make good on this promise. Zenefits, the YC-backed free 2-in-1 HR platform and insurance broker, is championed as one of the fastest-growing SaaS companies in history. Last May, the company raised $500 million in yet another funding round, bringing its total valuation up to an eye-boggling $4 billion.

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On November 18, 2014, Microsoft Azure went dark. Thousands of the cloud computing service’s customers experienced downtime on their sites for over 9 hours. When they flooded Microsoft customer support to ask what the hell had gone wrong, customers learned that it wasn’t some glitch, natural disaster, or devious hacking scheme.

It was pure human error.

Microsoft deployed an update without running through the standard operating guidelines specifically laid out for this scenario. Instead of rigorously checking that the update was good to go, engineers shipped it on the assumption it was bug-free. This wasn’t just this one-time incident—engineers at Azure regularly violated standard operating procedure because 99.9% of the time, it was a total waste of their resources.

And it’s not just Azure that does this—habitual violation of process leads to a ton of mistakes in all kinds of IT arenas.

When I was 16, I landed my first “real” job which so happened to be in IT. I had just passed my CCNA with the help of my dad (apparently the youngest person in Australia at the time) and was hungry to get my hands on some real technology.

But once I started, I found there was rigid process everywhere, and configuring a live Windows 2000 server was a totally different experience to tinkering with my fathers machines at home, with serious consequences for not following the process.
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The following post is a guest contribution from Steve Klein the co-founder of StatusPage.io.

How long does engineer onboarding last at your company? 1 week? 2 weeks? A couple months? Regardless, it’s a process you think about in the short term, right when a new employee starts. Once it’s done, it’s done, and you can go on to thinking about the million other things that are going on in your company. Right?

Wrong.

The effects of employee onboarding last way beyond when a new person starts working and impact your whole company. If your onboarding isn’t effective, in just 1 or 2 generations of hiring you’re dealing with a team that’s shockingly less productive than it could be — and costing you a lot of money.

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When Captain Picard of the USS Enterprise wants something done, he points his finger and orders someone to “make it so.” This catchphrase is what the retail giant Amazon almost called itself: “MakeItSo.com.”

Doesn’t have the same ring to it, right?

While there’s no finger-pointing involved, this is basically how home delivery services work these days. We browse through a catalog of options, we pick one, we press a button, and poof—it becomes a reality. Whether it’s a box of paper towels, a new book, or a hoverboard, you can get it delivered pretty quickly.

And though this technology seems really like something straight out of Star Trek, the processes underlying it actually go back hundreds of years, for as long as humans have been trying to make home delivery services work.

But the systems and processes that Amazon has become synonymous with really rely on an appetite created by a name that was once a retail giant that cast a shadow as large as Amazon’s: Sears, Roebuck & Co. In fact, Amazon’s success can largely be credited to their ability to perfect processes that Sears innovated and honed throughout the 20th century.

And where Sears failed, Amazon is still succeeding…

…for now.

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At Process Street, we’re fascinated by the inner mechanics of all kinds of operations especially when it has to do with writing. Today, we’re taking a deep dive into a notoriously tricky process: journalism. It’s a hard field, one that demands quality, accuracy, and succinctness, all under a huge time crunch.

We recently interviewed ten reporters to peel back the lid on their processes, get some writing tips, and understand how they deliver quality under pressure. From news outlets like Bustle and National Geographic, we found that reporters are most successful when they adhere to a nuanced process—one they’ve tailored over the years to suit them.

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It’s one of the most painful moments in basketball. Your favorite player is fouled—they have an easy opportunity to make 2 points—but they miss the free throws.

In fact, it’s kind of astonishing that even professional players who make millions of dollars a year to perfect this craft still only make 75% of free throws. But a lot are actually much worse. Shaquille O’Neal’s was around 50%, a percentage so abysmal it resulted in the now infamous Hack-a-Shaq play.

And it’s not just Shaq. Some of the most dominant centers of this generation have the same problem. Both Andre Drummond and DeAndre Jordan are hovering around the 40% mark this season. Last year, Jordan made only 39 of the 84 free throws he took during the playoffs.

It’s gotten to the point where fans suggest that they shoot free throws underhand, granny-style—which no one has done for fear of getting mocked in the locker rooms post-game.

It’s clear that you can be a good basketball player and be terrible at free throws. But as it turns out, you can be a totally normal guy and be great at free throws. A lot of people are surprised to find out that the reigning champion for consecutive free throws is not an NBA player, in fact—it’s a dairy farmer. Free throw ability just all boils down to process.

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A content marketing process turns research, creation, review, publishing, and promotion into repeatable work with clear owners and approvals. A look inside Bolton Remote’s experience shows why that matters: the remote staffing company replaced Word documents that people read once and then executed from memory with a visible, trackable content workflow.

Process Street spoke with Edsel Mendoza about the marketing team’s approach in 2015. The story captures Bolton Remote at that point in its history; SupportNinja acquired Bolton Remote in 2022. The lesson still holds: a documented process helps a distributed team complete every step without a manager checking each action.

Hooray! We’re pleased to announce a major integration for Process Street. This time, it’s Zapier. At launch, it connected Process Street with more than 400 services, including Salesforce, Mailchimp, Wufoo, and the Google Apps suite. With over 1,000 apps, announcing our Zapier integration opened far more ways to connect recurring work.

If Zapier were a physical object, it would look a bit like a universal remote connected to an unmanageable tangle of wires, with ends that slot into every kind of machine. Thankfully, it’s a clean-cut, user-friendly SaaS app with huge potential for creativity and workflow streamlining. It makes it easy for non-developers to connect web services together, saving time and improving productivity.

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